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The title is a distillation of film noir, moved to London to elucidate the hunt. Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark), "an artist without an art," the hustling Yank in Soho, "always running, always in a sweat." Sports promoting is his latest fancy, thus the noble, lost art of Greco-Roman wrestling. Partnership with the veteran gladiator (Stanislaus Zbyszko) to keep the dapper kingpin (Herbert Lom) at bay, a grudge match with The Strangler (Mike Mazurki) turns out to be the last scheme. Elsewhere, the Silver Fox Club with the spherical owner in the glass office (Francis L. Sullivan) and the tough wife with plans of her own (Googie Withers). (The cleaning slattern has the caustic final word on their relationship.) Finally, the weary girlfriend (Gene Tierney) to whom he promises "a life of ease and plenty" while raiding her purse. "You've got it all, but you're a dead man." Jules Dassin overseas ahead of Losey and Endfield, a vivid study of arenas within and without. East End locations gone baroque (a certain Dickensian air is adduced from Odd Man Out), paced to the frenetic bluff of a desperate protagonist. Crime and business (cf. Force of Evil) and the go-getting weasel, the lumpenproletariat in trunks and the dutiful son who gets away with murder. Kubrick in The Killing remembers the sweaty embrace of grotesques on the ropes, the camera is in the back of a speeding car as news of the bounty on the American's head spread from street corner to street corner. "Just brains and guts" can only go so far, a bit of exhausted clarity comes at last at an old woman's boat shop on the margins of the Thames. "Always the wrong things..." The expatriate dead end, on to France and Rififi for Dassin. With Hugh Marlowe, Charles Farrell, Ada Reeve, and Ken Richmond. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |