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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 3.5 KB | 82 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 86

CINEMA

Songs of a Street Hustler


By RICHARD SCHICKEL

    TITLE: NIGHT AND THE CITY
    DIRECTOR: Irwin Winkler
    WRITER: Richard Price


    THE BOTTOM LINE: A remake of a 1950 film noir provides
Robert De Niro with a star turn around a muddy track.


    He wheedles and he whines. He schemes and he scams. He is
full of false confidence and authentic desperation. He is Harry
Fabian, a small-time New York City lawyer possessed by what he
thinks are big-time dreams -- though the rest of us may not
quite see them that way. He is played at full throttle by Robert
De Niro in Night and the City, a movie that is, in its essence,
a series of verbal arias for the star, occasions to demonstrate
bravura technique.

    At first these street hustler's songs are impressive, but
finally they become tiresome. In part that's because the
torrents of words, flung out as Harry scuttles frantically
through his meaningless rounds, are a kind of screen, preventing
us from making any real connection with Harry. In part it's
because Harry's context is neither a realistic portrait of
modern New York nor a persuasive movie metaphor -- as classic
film noir often was -- for urban scuzziness.

    Harry's practice, if so dignified a term may be applied to
his professional scramblings, consists largely of filing false
injury claims on behalf of not very bright clients. He yearns
for something more dignified, and it is a measure of the man's
limited imagination that insinuating himself into New York's
moribund boxing game looks like a step up to him. His half-baked
idea is to revive club fighting, which once kept half a dozen
small arenas in the city busy. To help promote the plan he
recruits a retired boxer named Al Grossman (Jack Warden, in a
canny, counterpunching performance). This brings him into
conflict with Al's brother Boom Boom (Alan King), a man of
deadly self-importance, who also happens to be kingpin of what's
left of the fight racket.

    Talk about self-destruction! Harry is simultaneously
muscling in on a mean and powerful man's family and his
business. He's also conducting an affair with Helen (Jessica
Lange), a waitress in the bar where he (and half of low-life New
York) spends far too much time. This is not too smart either,
for she is married to its manager, Phil (Cliff Gorman) --
short-tempered, mean-minded and, like Boom Boom, a man not to
be trifled with.

    Helen too has an overreaching plan, to leave Phil and open
an upscale restaurant of her own. As she and Harry head toward
failure, they also approach, but never attain, something like
tragic status. As characters they are not complicated or
resonant enough to sustain that kind of grandeur.

    Indeed, as they lurch toward a conclusion that is merely
melodramatic -- and rather lamely so -- you begin to wonder why,
setting aside the opportunities for superficial flash offered
to De Niro, anyone bothered with this enterprise, which is, in
fact, a remake of a middling 1950 noir drama. It probably would
have required the dark glamour of period conventions and
convictions to sustain it. Director Irwin Winkler succeeds
mainly in conveying his own edginess, and screenwriter Richard
Price cannot seem to get his people grounded either in reality
or in a metaphorically persuasive fictional realm. The result
is a nervous and very distancing movie.