Dark City is a 1950 American film noir crime film starring Charlton Heston in his Hollywood debut, and featuring Lizabeth Scott, Viveca Lindfors, Dean Jagger, Don DeFore, Ed Begley, Jack Webb and Harry Morgan.

This was Heston's first appearance in a professional film production, following his participation in David Bradley's amateur Peer Gynt (1941) and semi-professional Julius Caesar (1950).

Later that evening at the café, Danny meets businessman and Air Force veteran Arthur Winant, who is in town to buy some equipment for a sports club.

Fearing police attention, Danny tells his friends to wait a few days before cashing Winant’s check.

The police arrest Danny after the hotel manager tells them that he heard both men arguing loudly the day before.

[2] Upon the film's release, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther applauded the work of newcomer Heston but panned the film, writing: A new star named Charlton Heston — a tall, tweedy, rough-hewn sort of chap who looks like a triple-threat halfback on a midwestern college football team—is given an unfortunate send-off on the low and lurid level of crime in Hal Wallis' thriller, Dark City, which came to the Paramount yesterday.

He has a quiet but assertive magnetism, a youthful dignity and a plainly potential sense of timing that is the good actor's sine qua non.

[3]In 2004, film critic Dennis Schwartz gave the film a mixed review, writing: Veteran director William Dieterle (The Devil and Daniel Webster) has been dealt a bad hand by the weak script, but the talented cast play out the hand as best they could ...

Heston's finely tuned nuanced performance, as a guy gone bad but who can be saved by love, gives the melodrama enough film noir qualities to get over but not enough to relieve it of its tedium.