Dark City (1950)

(On Cable TV, July 2022) As far as film noir goes, it’s hard to find a more iconic title as “Dark City,” which seems to encapsulate the mood that the entire subgenre was going for. But Dark City is less impressive as a movie—it eventually negotiates itself a place in the middle-tier noir filmography but can’t do much with a diffuse script that doesn’t know how to focus. The one big attraction of the film is probably Charlton Heston in one of his first big film roles, playing a hustler whose greed puts terrible things in motion. Probably the biggest structural issue with Dark City is that it scatters itself across too long a period and (ironically) over several cities in skipping from Los Angeles to Las Vegas—much of the same material (with an unseen vigilante taking out hoodlums who swindled his brother) would have been far more powerful if compressed over a much smaller period of time and space. Absent that, however, viewers can find some comfort in Heston’s performance, in the film’s gloomy dark atmosphere and moody cinematography—while Dark City doesn’t become anything special, it does nail the basics and that’s almost good enough.