As Dark City opens, Charlton Heston swaggers out of a store decorated for Easter and into a harsher reality—tenement streets overhung with fire escapes and hard surfaces covered with a thin coat of grime. Dark City (1950), a classic of B film noir, is out on DVD and Blu-ray.
Heston, in his screen debut, plays a slick character, a bad-good man whose cynicism and disappointment have led him into the underworld. His companions include Ed Begley, a gambler whose luck has run out; a sadistic yet cowardly Jack Webb (shocking in light of his future as grimly efficient cop in “Dragnet”); and Harry Morgan (Webb’s “Dragnet” sidekick) as a bumbling, handicapped flunky. Light and shadow, romance and hard knocks harmonize in this emotionally sophisticated screenplay. Lizabeth Scott plays a singer in love with Heston; like Doris Day fallen into bad company, she’s just a tad too nice for the slightly sordid nightclubs where she performs.
Heston, the protagonist, is haunted by the past and hunted by a psychopath, the unforgiving brother of a man he inadvertently helped push toward suicide. Much of the action unfolds in dark rooms, in tenements with poorly lit stairwells, in a land where the American Dream is nothing but a series of dead ends. Dark City was directed by William Dieterle, a German émigré in danger of being blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Franz Waxman’s score brings a touch of jazz into the dramatic orchestrations. The emotional undertone is maintained by the torch songs Scott sings in the nightclub.
One scene in Dark City occurs outside Los Angeles’ Union Station, whose cavernous interior is the setting for a namesake movie from the same year, Union Station (1950). Director Rudolph Mate had already worked in film noir as cinematographer for Gilda (1946) and director of DOA (1950). Union Station concerns a kidnapping and a tough-talking railroad detective (William Holden); it climaxes in a dramatic chase through a labyrinth of chambers and tunnels below the Los Angeles train station. The pursuit of Orson Welles through the Viennese sewers in The Third Man is more memorable, yet Union Station is great fun for noir fans.
