Dark City

William Dieterle's 1950 noir is remembered as Charlton Heston's first major Hollywood role. Gamblers who fleece an out-of-town mark in a rigged poker game find themselves shadowed by a dark vengeance after their victim's suicide. The story runs on classic noir logic: it is not the crime that is told but its consequence, and the perpetrators are drawn one by one into a tightening circle. It is interesting to see Heston here as an uneasy, passive character, far from the monumental bearing of his later career. The singer played by Lizabeth Scott stays inside the genre's templates for women, yet she is what gives the film its emotional weight. Dieterle's lighting and the design of the night scenes make this, with Paramount's studio resources, one of the genre's better-looking examples. Who it's for: viewers interested in 1950s noir and in Charlton Heston's early work. Who it's not for: anyone expecting the intensity of the genre's better-known classics, or arriving unprepared for suicide as the story's starting point.