Sublime film noir,sublime Widmark!
Author: dbdumonteil
5 November 2002
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
How sublime!This is without a doubt,Jules Dassin's towering achievement.Had he only made this work,his name would deserve to be remembered forever.
Richard Widmark will leave you on the edge of your seat!How can an actor be so good?Just compare him to Today's stars.Widmark's performance is one of these you never forget.A washout trying to make it big in the London underworld,he's some kind of mythomaniac,sometimes verging on madness,with an almost Shakespearian grandeur.His fate seems sealed when the story begins.We do know he won't work it out.A nightmarish bunch surrounds him and are like spiders watching a fly:the obese Francis L. Sullivan,a grotesque and fatty caricature who hates Widmark because his wife (Withers) has a crush on Widmark and provides him with funds;this two-bit femme fatale,who thinks she can escape her wealthy fatso.the two wrestlers ,fighting on the ring like animals ;there's nothing human in this fighting :you've never seen a thing like that.
Almost every sequence should be studied in detail but I will only mention three of them: -After a bestial -an euphemism-fight,the old wrestler asks his son to close the window because he's cold,so cold..But the window is closed and the son only pretends to obey.He dies in his arms.Widmark's final run is the most beautiful ever filmed.Close shots ,apocalyptic landscapes,impressive framings.It's the whole underworld against a single man,who cannot rely on anyone.Widmark's despair,hope against hope ,his final fit of anger when he wants his girlfriend to get the reward,are among the best fil m noir scenes.
-When Googie returns home and finds her hubby dead ,she thinks she 's free at last.But the horrible shrew is here ,like a spider on her web,she's the sole legatee,and now she's got the prodigal woman under her thumb.There's another world ,but we are only allowed to catch transient glimpses of it.People complain about Gene Tierney's rather small part on the site.She does not enter the underworld,the subcity,she stays away from it.She's Widmark's last chance,but as the movie begins,it's already too late.Only at the end ,Tierney tries to walk across the mirror,only to discover it's a blind alley.Her character is not romantic enough,all she dreamed about was a cosy life in a sweet cottage in the heart of the country.She falls in her neighbor's arms-a neighbor who's got a money-box in the shape of a bank!-
After such a peak ,the only way for Jules Dassin was down.And alas that was what happened:"du rififi chez les hommes" has still got a good reputation.The Melina Mercouri era brought at best entertaining works (celui qui doit mourir;Topkapi) at best,dumb and vulgar comedies (la loi;never on Sunday)at worst."Dream of passion" his last one,was pretentious to a fault :trying to link Greek mythology (Medea)with the story of a woman who killed her children.He had not realized that "night and the city" with his monsters and his lonesome hero whose fate is sealed was already a Greek tragedy ,and so much so much more.
