Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Motompa Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

Josephina Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

seymourblack-1 Charlton Heston plays an amoral hustler in this moody thriller which has a good plot, a talented cast and plenty of suspense. It's based on the story "No Escape" by Larry Marcus (who is also one of the screenwriters) and, as the title suggests, features a group of characters who find themselves in a life threatening situation, with no obvious way out. It's also a story of revenge in which a growing sense of tension is generated by the presence of an unhinged avenger who, as well as remaining unseen by his victims, very effectively, starts picking them off one by one.Danny Haley (Charlton Heston) is out of the building when his illegal bookmaking business gets raided by the cops and almost everyone present gets arrested. Due to a lack of hard evidence, however, no charges are brought against either, Danny or his associates, Barney (Ed Begley), Augie (Jack Webb) and Soldier (Henry Morgan). As the business has been raided repeatedly in recent months, despite the money that Danny had spent in pay-offs, it becomes impossible to carry on and everyone involved is left without any income. Unexpectedly, an opportunity to minimize their losses arises when Danny meets an out-of-town businessman in the local nightclub where his girlfriend Fran Garland (Lizabeth Scott) is the resident singer and notices that the friendly Arthur Winant (Don DeFore) has a $5,000 cashiers check in his possession.After Winant is lured into a rigged poker game, he gets ripped off so badly by Danny, Barney and Augie, that he loses all his money including the $5,000 which belonged to his employers and unable to come to terms with what he'd done, commits suicide in his hotel room by hanging himself. Danny and his gang immediately fear the possible repercussions and things quickly get worse when Barney is murdered and they learn that Winant's psychopathic and very over-protective brother, Sidney (Mike Mazurki) is out for revenge.Soldier, who was not involved in the card game decides to leave Chicago and goes to work in a Las Vegas casino that's run by one of his old friends and Danny and Augie go to Los Angeles where Danny poses as an insurance investigator and romances Winant's wife Victoria (Viveca Lindfors), in an effort to acquire a photograph of the maniac who's out to kill him. When it becomes clear that Victoria doesn't posses a photo of Sidney, Danny owns up to having deceived her and decides to head for Las Vegas where he's subsequently joined by Fran before some further surprising developments lead to his eventual confrontation with the fearsome Sidney.This movie provided a very young-looking Charlton Heston with his first Hollywood starring role and the character he plays is rather complex because he's a man who, after having been betrayed by his wife and his best friend whilst on military service in England, had become very disillusioned, cynical and embittered. This led to the kind of detachment and lack of empathy he shows when he fleeces Winant and cruelly deceives the recently bereaved Victoria. It's also the reason for the hardboiled attitude that he habitually displays and his inability to commit properly to his loyal girlfriend, Fran. Heston's portrayal of this rather unsympathetic character is incredibly assured and surprisingly subtle, especially considering his relative inexperience at the time when the film was made.Although the pace of the action is inconsistent and the level of suspense isn't fully exploited, "Dark City" is wonderfully atmospheric, well-acted and very enjoyable to watch throughout its entire 98 minutes.

jarrodmcdonald-1 As most people already know, this was Charlton Heston's very first Hollywood film at Paramount. He's very thin, very young, and very good in it. I think the story has an excellent premise-- it's a noir version of Agatha Christie's AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, where a killer is picking off a group of cons one by one. But the script is a bit padded in the middle. It did not need 97 minutes running time...it could have been told adequately in 75 minutes. And one has to wonder which city is darker-- Chicago, Los Angeles, or Las Vegas (since the action occurs in all three places).Lizabeth Scott is good in all her dramatic scenes but sorry to say her lip syncing is pretty phony when she is trying to get over the illusion she's a singer. Don DeFore does a great job as a doomed gambler, and so does Ed Begley Sr. In his memoirs, Heston called this a good B film. I'm not sure producer Hal Wallis would have labeled it such. It's an A film that doesn't quite live up to its potential, but the moments of greatness in it (and there are some) do outshine the parts that don't work.

Robert J. Maxwell Those accustomed to seeing Charlton Heston stride across a big screen flowing robes and saying things like, "Bring on the Hebrew dancing girls," are liable to be disappointed. Chuck Heston may be taller than Michael Jordan but he's a small-time gambler here, and not a very pleasant one.Chuck is a member of a group that runs a small bookie joint in Los Angeles, the others being Ed Begley, Jack Webb, and Henry (Harry) Morgan Or maybe it's Harry (Henry) Morgan. It always mixes me up. There was another actor with a similar name from whom he wanted to distinguish himself and he did all too good a job of it. I can't grasp how he managed to untangle those two names himself. Maybe he was confused too. Why didn't he simply call himself H. H. Morgan? Or Humbert Humbert Morgan? Is that too much to ask? Has he no pity? Okay. I've been waiting twenty years to get that off my chest. Yes, doctor, thank you. the Xanax helped.The five hoods soon sort themselves out. They all cheat when they can inveigle some stranger into playing poker with them, but their attitudes towards cheating differ. Hubert Horatio Morgan, known as "Soldier," is a bit of a dull bulb but generous and mostly helpful. Ed Begley is a professional who harbors no particular ill will towards anyone but just makes his living by illegal bookmaking and gambling. Jack Webb is not his Dragnet self. Not at all. A cynical, hard-headed character whose guiding vision is a dollar sign. He snarls a lot and natters the good-natured Soldier.Heston has probably never had a nastier role. He was sometimes abrasive -- "The Big Country," "The Naked Jungle" -- but always proud and needful. In this film he has Lizabeth Scott (nee Emma Matzo) singing smoky ballads to him in her nightclub and mooning over him night and day. But due to some traumatic experiences with a woman while he was in the Army, he wants nothing to do with anybody. And he's not afraid to express himself. To Scott, who is trying to comfort him: "I want to be alone." To Webb: "Get out." The gang get the innocent Don DeFore hooked into a game in which DeFore unwisely loses five large that don't belong to him. He hangs himself. When DeFore's estranged, murderous brother gets wind of this, he begins stalking the gang members one by one. First to go is Ed Begley, found strangled in his flat. The police question Heston and Webb. "What was Barney like when you saw him last?" "He was -- just Barney," replies Heston indifferently, while Webb taps his foot impatiently, bored. Some friends, Begley had.Webb gets the feeling he's being stalked too. He turns all sweaty and fidgety. He IS being stalked, too, and by a Mount Everest of muscle, Mike Mazurka, in real life a former pro wrestler. Webb is found hanging in his bathroom but nobody grieves.Then it gets a little complicated, with Heston blowing town for a job in Las Vegas, trying to hide, knowing that if you're going to get lost, Las Vegas is the place to do it. He's gotten a little close to Don DeFore's widow, Viveca Lindfors, who is magnetic in appearance and demeanor but doesn't sparkle in the trashy way that Lizabeth Scott does.I won't give away the ending. It's about what you'd expect. In his first film, Heston isn't very expressive but then the role calls for a somewhat arid character. Not counting the sympathy generated by the plight of the two women -- one loving from afar, the other a the widow of a nice guy -- the best performance may come from Horatio Hornblower Morgan in the role of the moral simpleton. He could have crawled out of the pages of a Russian novel.

calvinnme ... as this film that starts out rather slow becomes a Hitchcock-like game of cat and mouse across the country involving a psychopath bent on vengeance against a group of crooked gamblers that drove his brother to suicide after he lost money that belonged to his company in a card game. The psychopathic brother is hunting the gamblers down one by one and hanging them - which is the way his brother killed himself. Up to the end all you see of this guy is a big beefy hand with a large black ring on one finger. The gamblers that know they're targets don't even know that much about the appearance of the man out to get them. And this is their one hope - to find out what the guy looks like so they can at least have a chance.At first Charlton Heston may seem out of place here as a gray character at the center of a film noir, but he carries the role admirably. Dean Jagger is the police captain that introduces himself as head of vice but for some reason gets involved in first the suicide of the guy the gamblers took, and then in the murder cases of the gamblers. It's very strange though that he keeps dragging Heston's character downtown just to tell him he's doomed to die at the violent hands of the rampaging murderer - and then seems to do nothing about it other than to taunt him. You'll see several actors playing against their normal type here including Jack Webb as one of the gamblers that is at first a bully full of bravado turned to quivering coward as the killer closes in, and Harry Morgan as an ex-soldier turned simple by something that happened in WWII that is never explained.Only one thing is a bit annoying in this film - for some reason the makers of this film seem to think Lizabeth Scott's nightclub singing is some kind of treat for the audience. I found it distracting and found myself groaning every time she'd show up for another number.Another thing that's very interesting - five years after WWII ends much of the problems of the characters is laid at the feet of the destruction and upheaval of that war citing problems that must have been common in American society at that time - hastily made wartime marriages that went lukewarm after the war, men who went soft in the head as a result of being soldiers, men who went hard as a result of being soldiers. If you want to watch a highly effective little thriller I highly recommend this film.