The New Pictures, Jul. 3, 1950

Night and the City (20th Century-Fox) is a gaudy melodrama showing the misadventures of a double-dealing nightclub tout (Richard Widmark) in London's lower depths. Based on a Gerald Kersh novel and filmed on location, it gets some lurid effects out of a sordid story, murky backgrounds and a gallery of grotesque characters. Unfortunately, the excitement runs down well before the picture does.

A shiftless cheat with toplofty schemes, Widmark sets out to get control of London wrestling. He crosses up several minor characters and every major one, including his girl (Gene Tierney). Then he crosses himself up. Duped by Widmark, his partner (Wrestler Stanislaus Zbyszko) dies after an agonizingly filmed grudge fight with Wrestler Mike Mazurki. The dead man's avenging son sets the whale city's underworld on Widmark's heels in an overlong, anticlimactic chase.

Director Jules (The Naked City) Dassin's staging and Franz Waxman's overwrought musical score try to outdo each other in stridency. Aging (seventyish) Wrestler Zbyszko is natural and dignified in his acting debut, and Actor Widmark turns the neat trick of working up some sympathy for an unsavory character.

The Lawless (Paramount) is not only a good movie but, considering its makers, it is also as unexpected as a slum documentary by Cecil B. DeMille. Produced by William H. Pine and William C. Thomas (the "Dollar Bills"), longtime Hollywood specialists in low-budgeted blood & thunder hokum (Captain China, El Paso), it is an honest, unpretentious picture about racial prejudice and mob violence.

No film of towering significance, it attempts little more than a skin-deep approach to its grim subjects, holds itself well within the limits of melodramatic action. In a California fruit-growing town, a Mexican-American youth (Lalo Rios) innocently gets into trouble with the police. While he flees in fear, more serious charges pile up against him, inflaming the town's prejudice against its underprivileged Latin colony.

The local newspaper editor (Macdonald Carey), a newcomer seeking an ivory tower after a stormy career as a foreign correspondent, is reluctant to mix in political controversy. But as his conscience is needled by a reporter (Gail Russell) for a Mexican-American weekly, he saves the youth's life during a manhunt, begins to crusade for him, and narrowly averts a lynching at the town jail.

Though the movie is oversimplified, occasionally awkward, given to coincidence and saddled with a hand-me-down musical score, its imperfections seem trivial alongside its rough-hewn virtues. Using unvarnished photography on the streets, interiors and people of real California towns, Director Joseph Losey has given the picture a startling look of reality. For the setting of his manhunt's climax, he takes imaginative advantage of the stony, rolling wastes of a vast gold-dredging field. His mob scenes crackle with a spontaneous movement and raw vitality usually found only in bang-up newsreel footage.