Review of Film Noir Night & the City

Well this comes hot on the heels of just having watched Night and the City  again, a classic film noir if ever there was one; yet if you watch the interview with Jules Dassin (made many years later) he claims that he didn't know what film noir was at the time.  Which is reasonable, actually.  He was an American producer; he'd been blacklisted, which led to his exodus to Europe and let's face it, Night and the City was only made in 1950; film noir had only been around as a pretty experimental form for a couple of years.  And it's rather like a verb that takes a mood rather than a specific tense; film noir isn't ever actually classified as a genre.  But I think when we see it, we know what it is.

It's amazing though that Dassin didn't know what he was doing whilst he was actually doing it, and making one of the best films of all time.  There are RW films such as Kiss of Death (obviously), Street with no Name and Roadhouse but also others, often featuring old friends, such as Boomerang and Where the Sidewalk Ends.

It really doesn't matter that these films are in black and white.  It really doesn't matter that they were made a whole generation ago.  (Or even more.  For me - 1950 - my grandparents might have gone to see this).  Let's face it, we all have our favourite era.  I think this is mine.  Paul Merton, the famous stand-up comedian,  goes back even further; he prefers films from the silent era and even favours  Laurel & Hardy (who I've never been able to like).  Horses for courses, as they say.

It's interesting, that Dassin in his interview, says he'd liked to have made Hamlet with RW.  That's probably my favourite Shakespeare play, but absolutely not one I'd see Richard Widmark in.   No, for my preference, I would cast him as Iago (a part he played in radio) in Othello, and I would have loved to have seen him play the eponymous part in  Richard III.  But this is a digression, because Night and the City is a really great film and I'm really not surprised that Widmark lost so much weight doing it.  Just look at the amount of running going on.  What a seriously physical and very much underrated actor he was. 

Blond male actors

Have you ever stopped to think; What is it about Richard Widmark that makes him such a stand-out actor for me? ... Perhaps you never have, either because you think it's so blindingly obvious, or it's just never occurred to you (I assume that I'm talking to fellow fans, of course) or he isn't, in which case you're in the wrong blog :-)

I've tried - struggled - to identify what makes him so special.  That voice.  Those cheekbones.  That attitude.  That smile.  But perhaps a major part of it is something that ought to get a special mention all of its own.  That hair.

You have to admit that in 1950s Hollywood. Widmark's was an unusual look, especially for a lead man.  In an age where leading male actors were - generally - required to be, in no particular order, tall, dark and handsome, he didn't bother ticking any of those boxes but just barged his way in, straight to the top.

Tall?  At 5'10" he wasn't exactly short.  Modern actors can get away with being far shorter than that.  Danny Devito is just 5' tall.   Tom Cruise - who played Jack Reacher, an ex-Marine built like the proverbial outhouse (described as being well over 6' tall and nearly as wide) - is 5'7".   So  5'10" in the scheme of things is not short.  Being exactly that height myself (tall for a girl) I happen to think it's pretty perfect.  But for Widmark in the 50s, leading men were generally over 6' tall. Just look at two of his co-stars -  Gregory Peck (Stretch, Yellow Sky) and Gary Cooper (Hooker, Garden of Evil), both 6'3".  Victor Mature (Kiss of Death) was 6'2"; Cornel Wilde (Roadhouse) 6'1".  Dana Andrews, Widmark's subordinate officer in Frogmen, topped him by an inch as did Lee J Cobb (The Trap).  His co-star in Warlock and Swarm Henry Fonda's height is given as 6'1.5".  I guess that extra half-inch makes all the difference.

The actors of the day were dark too; at least dark of hair.  If you watch the later colour films closely, you'll quite often see the classic Celtic colouring of very dark hair and blue eyes.  The combination of dark eyes and hair is usually reserved for natives or baddies; Mexicans, Indians or Italians (usually Mafia).  As for dark skin ... well let's just say that's an area that Hollywood struggled with.  Sidney Poitier broke into the movies with his debut in No Way Out in 1950 but Widmark still had to argue with the execs to get Poitier on board for The Long Ships in 1964, and Widmark's Frank Patch couldn't have a really romantic clinch with  lover Clare Quintana (Lena Horne) in Death of a Gunfi.ghter even though they actually got married during the course of the film... because he was white and she wasn't.

This picture (left) is the point at which he's proposing to her.  Even in 1969 when that film was made, the first TV interracial kiss on US TV had only taken place in 1966.  The land of the free, eh?  But I digress.

Handsome?  Again, Hollywood actors had A Look.  The square jaw, the resolute set to the mouth, the straight nose, the slicked-down hair.  Oh they were handsome, alright.  But Widmark wasn't in that class.  His was a face that could go either way, from goofy to desperate, from sneering and distorted to something that Kent Jones described in his must-read 'Hidden Star' article* as 'extraordinarily beautiful'.

Yep, that brought me up short when I first read it, too.  Beautiful?  Not an adjective you often find describing a man.  But yes, just look at some of those gorgeous close-up shots in Street with no Name.  Like this one...

Michelangelo would have wept.  But moving on.  Never mind the most famous cheekbones in Hollywood, the wonderfully moulded mouth that could curl into a sneer, the eyes that could be hooded, and as cold as a March wind or wide open and guileless as a child's.  The hair is the thing.

Having watched quite a few old movies now, you begin to see a bit of a pattern as regards hair colour.  Let's discount the b/w films, because they can be misleading; even Widmark sometimes looks dark of hair in those.  It's the lighting ... or something.   Actually he even sometimes looks dark in later colour films - when he was going grey.  But there are those where he looks very very blond, and you realise how unusual that is.  Not for the women, obviously.  Brunettes looked gorgeous and then came the battalion of bottle-blondes.  There were even some redheads too.  Not so many red-headed leading men, but that's a whole other story.

Most men had dark hair, and they wore it short.  It stayed put.  The look you saw at the start of the film, you saw at the end; it didn't change substantially.  Not so Widmark.  He had quite long hair and although it was usually cut to length where it met his collar (no shoulder-length hippy-ness going on here, thank you!) his hair was long enough to be a dramatis personae in its own right.   They showed The Alamo on TV today.  You know exactly when Jim Bowie is wounded, because his hair starts flying all over the place.  Every fight Widmark's character is in, its his hair that gives the evidence of violence and motion.  Roadhouse, Warlock, The Trap, Backlash, Secret Ways... too many to mention.  Most of the time his hair is perfectly styled, kept firmly in place with whatever gunk men put on their hair in those days.  But get him into a fight and the hair will tell you that this is a man of action, a real tough-guy, despite his lack of height and physicality.  And it's so blond ... and that shining head usually stands out in all movies** - at least after he's lost his hat. ***

To sum up:

You don't need height when you've got great presence.
You don't need big muscle when a cold, hard stare from grey eyes can give such a sense of menace.
And why settle for handsome, when you could be beautiful?

And he was.

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* http://www.filmcomment.com/article/hidden-star-richard-widmark
Well worth a read; highly recommended.

** Except for The Long Ships of course - they're Vikings; they're nearly all blond.

*** You can tell how a movie is progressing by how much clothing he's ditched along the way; hat, coat, waistcoat, tie and sometimes shirt as well.
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