Dark City

A talky Paramount crime drama in the vein of 'The Asphalt Jungle', set in New York but shot in Hollywood, as dour as the youthful Charlton Heston in his first Hollywood vehicle. Surrounded by producer Hal Wallis with a first rate cast (including the two future stars of 'Dragnet') and delivered with routine excellence by the seasoned William Dieterle, with a glamorous but soulful female opposite number in the shapely form of sequin-gowned torch singer Lizabeth Scott (and stalked through much of the film by Mike Mazurki the way Mike Hammer was by Dr. Soberin in 'Kiss Me Deadly').

... as this film that starts out rather slow becomes a Hitchcock-like game of cat and mouse across the country involving a psychopath bent on vengeance against a group of crooked gamblers that drove his brother to suicide after he lost money that belonged to his company in a card game. The psychopathic brother is hunting the gamblers down one by one and hanging them - which is the way his brother killed himself. Up to the end all you see of this guy is a big beefy hand with a large black ring on one finger. The gamblers that know they're targets don't even know that much about the appearance of the man out to get them. And this is their one hope - to find out what the guy looks like so they can at least have a chance.

At first Charlton Heston may seem out of place here as a gray character at the center of a film noir, but he carries the role admirably. Dean Jagger is the police captain that introduces himself as head of vice but for some reason gets involved in first the suicide of the guy the gamblers took, and then in the murder cases of the gamblers. It's very strange though that he keeps dragging Heston's character downtown just to tell him he's doomed to die at the violent hands of the rampaging murderer - and then seems to do nothing about it other than to taunt him. You'll see several actors playing against their normal type here including Jack Webb as one of the gamblers that is at first a bully full of bravado turned to quivering coward as the killer closes in, and Harry Morgan as an ex-soldier turned simple by something that happened in WWII that is never explained.

Only one thing is a bit annoying in this film - for some reason the makers of this film seem to think Lizabeth Scott's nightclub singing is some kind of treat for the audience. I found it distracting and found myself groaning every time she'd show up for another number.

Another thing that's very interesting - five years after WWII ends much of the problems of the characters is laid at the feet of the destruction and upheaval of that war citing problems that must have been common in American society at that time - hastily made wartime marriages that went lukewarm after the war, men who went soft in the head as a result of being soldiers, men who went hard as a result of being soldiers. If you want to watch a highly effective little thriller I highly recommend this film.

Dark City (1950)

A surprise, really great. It's not quite a B-movie, though it has some of the honesty and simplicity of a lower budget film. And it has a whole host of terrific actors, including Charlton Heston in his first Hollywood film.

Did I just say Heston was terrific? Yes, here he is, a strong, stubborn, Heston-like character, well cast and well directed and beautifully filmed. And he's at the center of a plot that has several large twists that all make sense, and some great tension throughout. Except for two or three key moments where Heston (or some other actor) does something not quite plausible, the timing and direction by William Dieterle is superb.

The leading woman is a common type in post-war movies, a woman trying to make a living singing in a night club, and she is played with restrained simplicity by Lizabeth Scott. This gives the movie a chance to feature several songs, which she performs herself (Scott even recorded an album in 1957).

Beyond the truly engrossing story, where an unseen killer is on the loose thanks to the greed of a group of backroom poker players, the movie is held together but a half dozen terrific performances. The poker players themselves, including Heston and Ed Begley, are petty and greedy and eventually scared. The man they dupe, a visiting nice guy, is Don DeFore, who pulls it off brilliantly. There are even two guys who later became steadies in "Dragnet." And then there's the detective played by Dean Jaggar, and this talkative, philosophizing, good-guy investigator actually manages to see what's going on right away. Then the cat and mouse game begins.

Heston does a marvelous job is in his first star turn. Jack Webb, Harry Morgan, and Ed Begley lend impeccable supporting work. Don De Fore is re-teamed with Lizabeth Scott for the first time since You Came Along. Scott (Dead Reckoning, Strange Love of Martha Ivers, I Walk Alone, Stolen Face) is one of my all-time favorite femme fatales. Dieterle's direction is fast-paced and interesting throughout. Unfortunately, the whole turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.

The problem is in the inconsistent and unimaginative script. It's really a pedestrian tale of revenge with a miscast Mike Mazurki -- not a true film noir as it is normally billed. The parade of musical interludes is annoying. The chemistry between Scott and Heston doesn't work. And, the ending is a real letdown.

Chalk this one up as a well-acted and well-directed misfire.

From 1950, Dark City is a noir starring Charlton Heston, Lizabeth Scott, Viveca Lindfors, Harry Morgan, Dean Jagger, Jack Webb, and Ed Begley. This was Heston's first major starring role; previously he had appeared in Julius Caesar, an independent film done in Chicago and starring Northwestern University students and graduates.

Heston is powerful as Danny Haley, a not very likable gambler who hangs out with a low crowd. One night he and his friends play poker with an out-of-towner (Dom Defore) and cheat him out of a check for $5000 that wasn't his money. Later, he hangs himself, and the group is questioned by a police detective (Dean Jagger) who feels that Danny is above the group in intelligence and potential, but is going to be murdered if he keeps going the way he is.

The dead man's brother, a psycho, is committed to tracking down every single person at the game and killing him. They start dying, too. No one knows what this man looks like, so Danny goes to see the widow (Lindfors) to see if she has any photos. That's when he realizes how scary this guy really is.

This is an effective film that for some reason has several long numbers performed by Lizabeth Scott, who plays a nightclub singer and Danny's girlfriend. It was almost as if she was being showcased, and her voice was dubbed! She looks beautiful, but one wonders what the director, William Dieterle, had in mind.

Heston is surrounded by first-class character actors and easily holds his own opposite them. His character is tough, and it isn't until a little later in the script that we see there's a heart there. It's a powerful performance. Scott pines for him with her breathless voice, and she's good as well.

Fine film, interesting to see Heston at 27.