NIGHT AND THE CITY
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1992 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: DeNiro plays an incorrigible, sleazy
promoter trying to arrange a night of boxing in this remake
of the British 1951 film by Jules Dassin. The main character
is not likable but the story is told with energy and style.
Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4).
About the best thing you can say about Harry Fabian (as played by Robert DeNiro) is that he has a lot of energy and ambition. Harry is a high-powered promoter of sleazy schemes. In spite of Harry's surface likability and ever-endearing demeanor, even Harry's closest friends cannot or should not trust Harry anywhere near money. Harry is a lawyer who has become so well known for his ambulance -chasing that he has to supplement his income by any other scheme he can put together. His latest scheme is to promote a night of local boxers fighting each other, but the scheme is elaborate and the financing shady. And Fabian will use whomever he has to in order to make himself a big fight promoter for one night and at the same time gall "Boom Boom" Grossman (played by Alan King), a well known local fight promoter.
Jessica Lange stars as Helen, who owns a bar with her husband Phil(played by Cliff Gorman), but who is also fooling around with Fabian. The supporting cast includes Jack Warden and Eli Wallach. But the main show is the frenetic Harry Fabian, who is almost never off-camera and seems to live at 10% greater speed than the rest of us. He has to so that in the middle of one scheme he can get involved with another one, like selling probably-stolen VCRs. "Sell these for $400, keep $200," his friend Gupta tells him, and Harry is off on a second scheme.
The dialogue in Richard Price's screenplay is fast and often funny in a bitter, ironic way. Harry's various inter-connected schemes build a sort of "Mission Impossible" house-of-cards plan where the impossible mission is to make this cheap hustler into a success. Irwin Winkler's direction and Tak Fujimoto's photography pick up the grunginess and oppressiveness of the New York City streets with the immediacy of hand-held Steadicam. Popular songs from the 1950s and 1960s run a commentary on the action of the film, as when Fabian runs a scam to the tune of "The Great Pretender."
In spite of a lack of likable characters, NIGHT AND THE CITY shows us the life of the underbelly and a few interesting machinations. I gave it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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