MovieChat Forums > Dark City (1951) Discussion > One Drab Crawl

One Drab Crawl

posted 13 years ago by The_Dying_Flutchman
8 replies | jump to latest

through a dark city. Certainly not the worst noir, but it could have used more life. The songs we were forced to sit through were some of the dullest in nightclub history and poor Lizbeth Scott had nothing to do but mouth the dried out lyrics. How could they ruin such a sizzling tune as "That Old Black Magic"?
Begley, Webb and Harry Morgan added a bit of umph, but Heston in his first just seemed too empty, he even sounded like he redubbed all his dialog in another studio from the rest of them. He did so much better a few years down the road in Orson Welles noir masterwork. A dry ditch in the desert, indeed.

Nothing is more beautiful than...

[–] escalera-2 13 years ago

You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Slim

Yeah, big Jim got his hat
Find out where it's at
And not hustling people strange to you
Even if you do got a two piece custom made pool cue

[–] The_Dying_Flutchman 13 years ago

Floats?

Nothing is more beautiful than...

[–] 13 years ago

[deleted]

[–] DorianGray502 8 years ago

___I agree, the ending stunk! The plot was a mess, and Lizabeth Scott looked bad because of the lighting, though she was dressed well, she is only that, window dressing. I kept thinking she wouldn't have been remembered as a noir goddess if this is all she'd done. And, as I watched I compared her to Marilyn Monroe, and then she really started looking downright ugly. Heston is brutish, but then falls for the widow, gambles his way into a small fortune for her, then turns on a dime, and takes on Scott, the singer who he continues to remind to stop crowding him. Like I said, a mess.

[–] donwallo 12 years ago

I thought the first 20 minutes or so were very good. The trio of gamblers worked well together. But once the revenge plot gets underway the movie gets rambling and weird. And that final 15 seconds of romantic pap is bad even by the standards of 50s slapped-on-for-the-Hayes-Code movie endings.

Maybe it's a little presumptuous to make such a counterfactual criticism, but the whole revenge plot could have been cut out and instead it could have been about Heston's character having a crisis of conscience and turning on his merciless buddies in support of the widow. Like a Western. A more straightforward story but it would have kept the best elements of the movie in the foreground instead of using them as the setup for a collapsed love triangle and a grindhouse revenge story.

[–] franzkabuki 11 years ago

Well, for one thing, I certainly liked it better than this other movie called Dark City.

"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

[–] OswaldshotKennedy 11 years ago

"Dark City" is great. Heston and Liz worked well together - you noir freakos are only bitching because DC had a happy ending - breaking the rules to your beloved noirs!

"The internet is for lonely people. People should live." Charlton Heston

[–] [deleted] 3 years ago

agreed