Made in the tradition of Budd Schulberg’s novel What Makes Sammy Run?, Jules Dassin’s 1950 black-and-white film Night and the City stars Richard Widmark as Harry Fabian, an American expatriate, a hustler who is trying too hard to make his name famous in the (under)world of wrestling, but is always on the con. Harry is a user and is always running through metropolitan London, mostly by night (to Franz Waxman’s marvelously tense score), from unknown men (and women) he has double-crossed in the recent past. The very first critical book (1955) to identify the film noir style, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumenton’s Panorama du film noir américain, has a close-up photo on its cover of a very frightened Harry Fabian, his face lit by a spotlight as he runs through the London streets.

After World War II, Harry stays in London and persuades his American girlfriend, Mary Bristol (played by a woefully miscast Gene Tierney), to stay with him so he can live a life of pleasure and ease once he succeeds in the “ultimate scam”: promoting Greco-Roman wrestling. He meets Gregorious (wonderfully played by Stanislaus Zbyszko) and signs him to a partnership after watching him wrestle. But Harry needs money to promote Gregorious and set up a bout at a London arena controlled by Gregorious’s son, Kristo (played menacingly by Herbert Lom). So he goes to sleazy Phil Nosseros (Francis L. Sullivan), a very fat nightclub owner who sits in a metal cage (or office) suspended above his club,

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