From the Rental Vault: Double Feature

Harry Fabian is a guy who figures he's just one score away from the big life he's dreamed of, when he can tell everyone who's ever looked down on him what they can do with their downward looks. But his belief that life has somehow cheated him out of that score leaves him desperate, and desperate men aren't always smart. Especially when they're small-time to begin with.

Tough-guy Richard Widmark might not have been the first thought to play a loser like Harry, but he replaces his usual swagger and bravado with a believable and brittle front of aggrieved conviction that he's been cheated out of his rightful fame and fortune in 1950's Night and the City. When the chance to break into the wrestling promotion business comes his way, Harry grabs at it, in spite of the risk of confrontation with Kristo (Herbert Lom), the promoter who's currently cornered that business. Also in spite of the fact that he has to cheat and swindle most of the people he knows to get the stake to get started. When pressure on the scheme builds, Harry finds his inherent weakness may keep him from closing out the deal and gaining the success he feels he deserves.

Night is set in London, which helps give the American Harry a sense of displacement -- he's an outsider to start with. And director Jules Dassin keeps to the seedier and still war-ravaged sections of London that emphasize the low-rent character of the people we're watching: No one here is looking for England's finest hour nor would they know it if they saw it. Like many a noir classic, Night is filled with people who keep cutting corners until they're left with no place to stand, and whose yearning for the big score blinds them to the small treasures they'll eventually lose in its pursuit. Widmark makes as believable a weasel as he did psycho in Kiss of Death, and Gene Tierney shines as his long-suffering fiancée, whose own attachment to Harry is her weakness.

Hollywood, afraid of what association with Communists and former Communists would do with its box office, created the self-censoring "blacklist" during Night's filming, which would mean that Dassin never made another movie in the United States. It's a fine send-off, even if it only had to be that because the industry that always congratulates itself on its courage can never find that quality when its bottom line is under fire.

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Whether Dassin would have consented or been acceptable to star Marlon Brando in 1961, the fact is that when filming for Brando's company's One Eyed Jacks began, he had no director. Originally given to Stanley Kubrick and developed by Sam Peckinpah, Jacks' pre-production process wound up with a multi-vocal script and a fired Kubrick (who officially left in order to work on Lolita). So Brando volunteered to take the reins himself, although he pointed out in his own biography that he didn't know what he was doing.

Production for the straightforward revenge story at the heart of Jacks went about as well as could be expected with an...odd duck...like Brando at the helm. Sometimes he was too drunk to direct or to act his role as Rio, a gunslinger looking to even the score with former partner Dad Longworth (Karl Malden), who abandoned him and left him to be arrested by Mexican authorities. Once he kept the entire cast and crew waiting for the "perfect wave" to be filmed off the Monterey coast. A movie production budgeted at $1.8 million came in at $6 million, and Brando never directed again.

There's an interesting movie buried somewhere inside Jacks, even if it's not particularly visible to the naked eye. The amoral Rio may be betrayed early in the story, but he's already demonstrated a lack of character that makes that seem like much less a tragedy for the audience than for him. As he moves into his quest for vengeance, that same lack of character brings collateral damage right and left to those with him until a kind of epiphany strikes, showing him the emptiness of his quest and the life he lived before that. Brando, who said he wanted a movie full of grays rather than black and white, seems not to believe in that change enough to flesh it out as either director or actor, so it passes by without much reflection. Malden's Longworth is a curious mixture of rectitude and license, and his story leads towards the kind of resolution that might make him confront his own failure to live up to the standards he seems to demand, but that doesn't really happen. Katy Jurado, Pina Pellicer, Slim Pickens and Ben Johnson all turn in top work on their roles, but they labor in heavy seas and their efforts can't turn Jacks onto a more coherent course.

In the end, Jacks stands up as a good model of a movie that could have done some fascinating exploration of humanity and the human condition within the boundaries of the traditional Western if the people making the movie had allowed themselves to work within the genre. But their choice to try to deconstruct the genre and reconstruct it as they wanted it to be means they have neither center to hold their work together nor boundaries to give it definition, and thus it dissipates as you might expect.