Movie Letter: Three Myths

I. The Myth of Technique

The very first moments of Night and the City (an American film made in London with a London background) shows its scapegrace hero, Harry Fabian, chased by a man who wants to take a five-pound debt out of his hide. After seeing the movie, I turned to the novel by Gerald Kersh on which it is based and learned that the film makers have retained almost nothing of it beyond the atmosphere and some rudimentary character-outlines, and that the transfer to the film medium has meant an artistic and imaginative gain. Despite its positive melodramatic level, Night and the City is one of the most genuine and interesting films to have come from the commercial industry in a long time. The reasons for this may not be immediately apparent to those wearily inured to the bromides of treatment and material of which this example is chock full. What is extraordinary in it is the conscious facility of execution joined to an involuntary harmony of pattern; a not unknown result of the studios’ frenzied efforts to entertain.