Night and the City, adapted from Gerald Kersh's novel, is the supreme example of London noir
It's the title that gets you first – so elemental and sinewy. In four short words it yokes together two key 20th-century fetishes: the black swamp of the night (with the moral terrors it summons up) and the concretised urban jungle that has taken on a brutal life of its own. As a pairing, it is definitively modern and anti-pastoral. And with the careful positioning of a definite article, it becomes a phrase of pure, hard poetry of authentically modernist intent. Would The Night and the City have worked so well? Or The Night and City? Or even City and the Night? No chance.
The writer who came up with it, Gerald Kersh, attached it to his third novel. Published in 1938, Night and the City is a high-minded pulp thriller containing a fantastically vivid...
It's the title that gets you first – so elemental and sinewy. In four short words it yokes together two key 20th-century fetishes: the black swamp of the night (with the moral terrors it summons up) and the concretised urban jungle that has taken on a brutal life of its own. As a pairing, it is definitively modern and anti-pastoral. And with the careful positioning of a definite article, it becomes a phrase of pure, hard poetry of authentically modernist intent. Would The Night and the City have worked so well? Or The Night and City? Or even City and the Night? No chance.
The writer who came up with it, Gerald Kersh, attached it to his third novel. Published in 1938, Night and the City is a high-minded pulp thriller containing a fantastically vivid...
- 12/11/2010
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
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