The most memorable moment of the film and perhaps of all Dassin’s work, is the wrestling match in the ring. It is better than all of Tarantino’s Hong Kong style imitations put together. A combination of cinema and pure violence, solid and interminable, pushed to the limit by the editing, which places an astonished yet fascinated observer at the centre of an explosion of muscular tension and anatomical spasms. It could have been made by Aldrich (or maybe even Kubrick) with its blend of apparent coldness and mute terror. The performance of Stanislaus Zbyszko, a genuine wrestling champion who Dassin rescued from poverty and obscurity, as Gregorius stands out throughout the scene. It is an impressive depiction of physical combat as a metaphor for contemporary social Darwinism; a sort of over the top exposition of the theme of humanity characterised by the cruelty of solitude and the fight for survival. The rest of the film presents us with an extremely unsettled urban universe, populated by moving individuals, with infinite views, locations, roads, bridges and rivers that teem with shadows and life. The slums revealed by sudden lightening, the throbbing crowds, the social underground of a great metropolis unearthed in its most remote corners seem, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been influenced by that breath of fresh air, which Italian Neorealism had quickly spread throughout the world. But the construction of the shots, in which a richly detailed depth of space contrasts with the shortened perspectives of the close ups and in which light plunges violently from the sides or the top of the frame, deliberately maintains the visual style of film noir. In short, it reveals an ethereal Dassin, in which the cynicism of the crime movie is delicately applied to a vibrant Dickensian shadow world, modifying the film’s atmosphere in a highly original way. This could be why critical opinion is so split by the Atlantic divide: Americans view it almost with embarrassment, whilst Europeans consider it, for the most part, the director’s best film.

Mario Sesti