Night and the City is a 1950 British film noir directed by Jules Dassin and starring Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney and Googie Withers.

Shot on location in London and at Shepperton Studios, the plot revolves around an ambitious hustler who meets continual failures.

In an interview appearing on The Criterion Collection DVD release, Dassin recalls that the casting of Tierney was in response to a request by Darryl Zanuck, who was concerned that personal problems had rendered the actress "suicidal" and hoped that work would improve her state of mind.

After denouncing Kristo's event as tasteless exhibitionism that shames the sport's Graeco-Roman traditions, Gregorius leaves with Nikolas, a fellow wrestler.

Desperate, Fabian asks for money from Figler, a panhandler and unofficial head of an informal society of beggars, Googin, a forger, and Anna, a Thameside smuggler, but none will help him.

Fabian is eventually approached by Helen Nosseross, who offers the £200 in exchange for getting a licence to continue running her own nightclub, having obtained the money by selling an expensive fur coat her husband recently bought for her.

Gregorius eventually defeats The Strangler in the ring as Kristo arrives but dies minutes later in his son's arms from exhaustion.

The film has been described as innovative in its lack of sympathetic characters, the deadly punishment of its protagonist (in the American version), and especially its realistic portrayal of triumph by racketeers who are neither slowed nor at all worried by the machinations of law.

[citation needed] Critics of the time did not react well; typical were Bosley Crowther's comments in The New York Times:[Dassin's] evident talent has been spent upon a pointless, trashy yarn, and the best that he has accomplished is a turgid pictorial grotesque...he tried to bluff it with a very poor script—and failed...[the screenplay] is without any real dramatic virtue, reason or valid story-line...little more than a melange of maggoty episodes having to do with the devious endeavors of a cheap London night-club tout to corner the wrestling racket—an ambition in which he fails.

Writing for Slant Magazine, Nick Schager said,Jules Dassin's 1950 masterpiece was his first movie after being exiled from America for alleged communist politics, and the unpleasant ordeal seems to have infused his work with a newfound resentment and pessimism, as the film—about foolhardy scam-artist Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) and his ill-advised attempts to become a big shot—brims with anger, anxiousness, and a shocking dose of unadulterated hatred.

[6]In The Village Voice, film critic Michael Atkinson wrote, "... the movie's a moody piece of Wellesian chiaroscuro (shot by Max Greene, né Mutz Greenbaum) and an occasionally discomfiting underworld plunge, particularly when the mob-controlled wrestling milieu explodes into a kidney-punching donnybrook.