Set in London's Soho district, Jules Dassin's Night and the City provides Richard Widmark with one of his best roles as Harry Fabian, "the artist without an art," a creative small-time crook who gets involved with the big boys (literally) when he concocts a scheme to corner London's vicious wrestling racket. The muzzled violence threatening to explode at any moment that characterized Dassin's The Naked City (see March 24) and Rififi is here intensified by the Widmark specialty--a tendency toward hysteria. Colin McArthur writes in "Underworld U.S.A.": "The Naked City and Thieves Highway might be mistaken for social realist documents, but not so Night and the City.... the meaning of which is metaphysical. The London of Night and the City has no temporal or geographical location; it is Thompson's 'city of dreadful night,' Warshow's 'dark, sad city of the imagination.' Its underworld is reminiscent of Villon's Paris or Lang's Dusseldorf: forgers, fences and gangs of organized beggars... The principal recurring image of Night and the City is of Harry Fabian...as he runs through dark streets in a futile attempt to evade his pursuers. He is a pariah in his own society, the underworld, a man with a price on his head which makes even former friends betray him. 'You're a dead man, Harry Fabian, a dead man,' says the grotesquely obese Noseros (Frances L. Sullivan)... It is easy to see Fabian as the archetypal modern man...." Exiled from Hollywood during the McCarthy era, Dassin made some of his best films in Great Britain (Night and the City), France (Rififi) and Greece (Never on Sunday).