"You’re a dead man, Harry Fabian, a dead man."
The words are spoken by his boss, a portly nightclub owner played by Francis L. Sullivan, and throughout the film, Fabian seems to be desperately eluding his damnation rather than pursuing his fortune.
If there is a definitive
film noir, Night and the City might just be it due primarily to Widmark. His Harry Fabian is the ultimate noir anti-hero, something Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton seemed to acknowledge when they put his gaunt, frightened face on the cover of Panorama du film American, the landmark study that was the first to treat the genre seriously.
Later in 1950, audiences had the opportunity to closely compare Widmark as hero and villain when Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out premiered simultaneously.
In Kazan’s film, Widmark was Dr. Clinton Reed of the Public Health Service who joins detective Paul Douglas in the perilous hunt for a killer Jack Palance and his cronies who unknowingly become infected with bubonic plague after they murder a suspected card cheat.
Beautifully shot on location in New Orleans, Panic in the Streets is often cited by both star and director as a favorite. For Kazan, it was “the first film I purely enjoyed making.”
As the good doctor who trades coarse but affectionate barbs with his wife (Barbara Bel Geddes), sneaks a quarter to his son so the boy can go to the movies, and is more often than not at odds with gruff copper Douglas, Widmark is fine, but it is Palance whose creepy killer commands the screen in a role that Widmark could have played just as effectively.
A powerful film even today, No Way Out was years ahead of its time in its depiction of racism, and it’s doubtful it would have been made if Mankiewicz had not had the clout that came with winning two Oscars (for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives) a year earlier.
The title itself almost defines the genre, and Widmark as Harry Fabian is one of its most memorable characters. A small time hustler with ambitions to become a big time fight promoter in London, Fabian is a loser destined to brush greatness, but never claim it for his own.
There’s no better proof of that than No Way Out. Even though he’s romantically involved with his brother's wife, played by the luscious Linda Darnell, his character is as creepy as they come: a vile bigot who holds a black intern (Sidney Poitier) responsible for the death of his brother and instigates a race riot as revenge.
