Night and the City

Harry Fabian (De Niro) is a New York City character -- part fool, part hustler. He's an ambulance-chasing shyster with a weasly legal practice that thrives on preemptive litigious blows and quick cash settlements. Whether it's a below-the-board cabbie license or a trumped-up whiplash suit, Harry's your guy for a quick, just-barely-legal fix. Harry's a desensitized burn-out case wandering around lower Manhattan with a smoldering fuse. He has abundant energy and intelligence but lacks the drive to channel it into anything but keeping up with his bar tab at his regular watering hole (and office away from the office) Boxers. The tavern is run by Harry's pal Phil (Gorman) and his wife Helen (Lange), with whom Harry is having an affair. Despite his pragmatic resignation, Harry is still a cockeyed optimist, another New York bum who thinks he could have been a contender. So, when presented with the notion of bringing back old-time boxing matches to the city, Harry grabs onto the idea like it's his ticket out of Palookaville. But his run as a boxing promoter is doomed to failure because Harry, as one character puts it, is the type of guy Murphy's Law was written for. Night and the City was inspired by the 1950 film noir starring Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney and directed by Jules Dassin. This time, novelist/screenwriter Richard Price charted the course with some handsomely scripted dialogue but it frequently gets obscured by the overriding demands of plot advancement. The movie is populated with an assortment of vivid characters from Gorman's stony barkeep to King's delicious turn as the disreputable boxing promoter Boom Boom Grossman, Warden's credible performance as Boom Boom's fragile brother Al, Wallach's positively reptilian appearance as the loan shark who genuinely cares about Harry's welfare and Philbin's endearing cameo as himself. De Niro is in excellent form and only Lange is less than spectacular in her portrayal of the hard-bitten Helen. Award-winning producer-turned-director Winkler keeps his camera moving as frenetically as Harry's imagination and while often titillating to watch, more frequently it is confounding with its wild connect-the-dots motion that leads only to abstractions. Also, while the characters are certainly engaging, they often lack motivational coherency. Primary in this regard is Harry's dual passions for self-abnegation and conventional success. His switch from one to the other is abrupt and insufficiently examined and the film's ending is impossibly optimistic. Still, while not always successful or even unusual, Night and the City is a tart Manhattan cocktail worth savoring until the cup runs dry.