Set in London's Soho district, Night and the City provided Richard Widmark with one of his best roles as Harry Fabian, "the artist without an art," a creative small-time crook who becomes involved with the big boys when he concocts a scheme to corner London's vicious wrestling racket. The muzzled violence threatening to explode at any moment that characterizes Dassin's The Naked City and Rififi is here intensified by Widmark's own special 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'.... The principal recurring image...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 (Francis L. Sullivan).... It is easy to see Fabian as the archetypal modern man...." In 1950 Dassin was beginning his own flight from the McCarthyites; after this he worked in exile in Europe.