William Dieterle (1893-1972) was an actor and director in the German silent cinema who began his career in Hollywood by directing German language versions of Frank Lloyd's The Way Of All Men (1930) and John Francis Dillon's Kismet (1930). He directed more than fifty films in Hollywood between 1931 and 1955, the best known of which were made at Warner Brothers in the 1930s - A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), The Story Of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life Of Emile Zola (1937), and Juarez (1939). His American masterpiece is probably All That Money Can Buy (The Devil And Daniel Webster), made at RKO in 1941, and unfortunately impossible to see today in its original form. In the late forties/early fifties, he made a number of film noir that, at the time, were viewed as lurid crime dramas unworthy of the cultured screen biographer of the likes of Pasteur and Zola. However, as today it is becoming more and more apparent that the best films of many “big” directors were “small” genre films; and as the late forties/early fifties period is emerging as perhaps the richest, and certainly the most neglected, in the history of the American Cinema, we are hopeful that these two never-revived Dieterle noir works will be worthy of rediscovery. Dark City marked the Hollywood screen debut of Charlton Heston: he portrays a gambler pursued by women, the police, and a killer. With Lizabeth Scott co-starring as a nightclub singer with a heavy crush on Heston, Dark City has the ingredients of a prime noir thriller, worthy of Bosley Crowther's New York Times put-down of Dark City as “low and lurid.”