NFR Project: 'The Naked City' (1948)

 

NFR Project: “The Naked City”

Dir: Jules Dassin

Scr: Albert Maltz, Malvin Wald

Pho: William H. Daniels

Ed: Paul Weatherwax

Premiere: March 4, 1948

96 min.

“There are eight million stories in the naked city. This was one of them.”

So intones the voice of Mark Hellinger, New York journalist and this film’s producer, who died weeks before this film opened. Hellinger’s voice is the first you hear in the preamble to this story of a crime and its solution, as a sometimes-sardonic offscreen chronicler of New York City’s bigness and complex functions, faithfully telling a police procedural story as a documentary-style “location” film, before anyone else and most successfully.

For a lot of this was shot on New York streets, starting a trend that would accelerate as the years passed. The movie is a classic policier – the story of a given case from the perspective of law enforcement, from beginning to end. Here, a murder sporting two suspects branches off into all manner of scenes with a cross-section of New York’s vibrant culture.

The leader of the investigation is Dt. Lt. Muldoon, played by Barry Fitzgerald. You finally get a good look at Fitzgerald as a legit character actor, and not as his typical comic Irish stereotype. He wisely prods witnesses, focuses his team’s attention, and delegates the legwork to an eager young Detective, Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor).

The trouble comes down to a shifty suspect (Howard Duff, in a truly villainous role) and his relation to several women. There is jewel theft, and a wrester that plays the harmonica (Ted de Corsia, sweaty and desperate). Somehow Muldoon and Company take down the bad guys, the last of which is vanquished at the summit of the Williamsburg Bridge (William H. Daniels won Best Cinematography at the Oscars that year for it).

One of its more trivia-minded aspects is the onslaught of New York acting talent that surfaced in this film. If you pluck out in your memory the now-familiar faces of character actors Kathleen Freeman, James Gregory, Nehemiah Persoff, John Randolph, Paul Ford, John Marley, and/or Arthur O’Connell, you would be seeing for the first time in years a “real” East Coast film.

It is by today’s standards sedate, but it was revolutionary for its time. It was wildly successful. You did not have to go to Hollywood to make a movie, once again. People liked seeing “the real thing,” and naturalism became the name of the game in film, at least in black-and-white. (Note: there was a string of “Technicolor noirs” concurrently, some of which were such sterling examples as Vertigo, House of Bamboo, and Leave Her to Heaven.) There was a big pool of cheap talent in New York. In future, views of the city would increase appreciably on nation-wide screens.

The director, Jules Dassin, was not a Frenchman, but a kid from Harlem. He knew his way around the city. He had just made the hit Brute Force; after Naked City, he would make, in a row, Thieves’ Highway, Night and the City, and Rififi. A true noir master. Saying that, it is interesting how Dassin presents the story in pseudo-documentary style, with Hellinger’s narrative voice continuing, moving the story along.

Dassin doesn’t exercise any style. His directing is strictly functional. They want it to look like the real thing? We get the drudgery of daily police work, see its odd chances at grasping the truth, trace the track-down of a criminal on an iconic NYC bridge. It is proud of its pedestrianism. It was all done surreptitiously; no one gave their permission to use their image to the filmmakers. They just went out into the streets and got it.

The blacklist got Dassin shortly after. He got off Thieves’ Highway, but he had to scamper to England to make Night and the City, away from the bad press that labeled him as a Communist. He then stuck to working in Europe, still producing popular and visually adroit films such as Rififi, Never on Sunday and Topkapi.

The Naked City epitomizes the tough urban thriller. Shot on location willy-nilly, it’s gritty and tough, delivers a New York sensibility that would soon revitalize the industry. It’s NYC neorealism.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Pearl.

NFR Project: 'Louisiana Story' (1948)

 

NFR Project: “Louisiana Story”

Dir: Robert J. Flaherty

Scr: Robert J. Flaherty, Frances H. Flaherty

Pho: Richard Leacock

Ed: Helen van Dongen

Premiere: Sept. 28, 1948

78 min.

A slightly interesting artifact. This is a promotional film, commissioned by the Standard Oil Company. They wanted to show rural audiences that letting them drill for oil on their property was a lovely, interesting way to make them some money.

They hired the great documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Moana, Man of Aran) to direct it. He and his wife wrote the scenario. In it, a young boy and his parents live in a shack out in the Louisiana swamp. The oil company comes through and gets the old man to sign a contract. Soon an oil rig is towed to the portion of the river nearest their home.

The boy watches the goings-on at the rig with curiosity, slightly intimidated by the huge pieces of machinery and the loud clankings of its operation. However, the drillers are nice guys, and soon make the boy feel at home.

The progress of the well is deterred briefly by a blowout (the pressurized emission of a pocket of gas and salt water). However, things soon get back on track and finally, they strike oil.

Meanwhile, the boy has some adventures in the swamp. He loses his pet racoon to an alligator, then captures and kills and skins the gator in consequence. The cinematography by Richard Leacock is beautiful; the boy grows up in an enchanted world.

The movie ends when the family gets paid off. Mother gets a new cooking pot; the boy gets a new gun!

The film also contains an exquisite score by Virgil Thomson, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Best Composition.

The fable-like falsity of the narrative sells the viewpoint of the entity commissioning the product. Drilling is good, the end. The rest is just wondow-dressing. It is quite a comedown for Flaherty, who get points for crafting a visually interesting film – but turns over control of its meaning to its owners. It is a work-for-hire.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Naked City.

NFR Project 'Letter from an Unknown Woman' (1948)

 

NFR Project: “Letter from an Unknown Woman”

Dir: Max Ophuls

Scr: Howard Koch

Pho: Franz Planer

Ed: Ted J. Kent

Premiere: April 28, 1948

86 min.

This is a very uncharacteristic Hollywood movie. This is due to three men – writer Stefan Zweig, producer John Houseman, and director Max Ophuls.

Zweig (1881-1942) was one of the world’s most popular writers. An Austrian, he wrote histories, biographies, and fiction, and was translated into many languages. When Hitler came to power, he escaped his homeland and came first to England and then America. He wrote of life and love in turn-of-the-century Vienna quite eloquently, and with a nostalgia for the pre-World War I culture of the capital. Tragically, his despair over the loss of that culture led to his eventual suicide.

John Houseman (1902-1988), known today for his acting work late in his life, was in fact a Hungarian who was educated in England, and who moved to America in 1925. After a successful career as a grain merchant, he turned to the theater and became a highly regarded writer and producer, best known for his collaborations with a young Orson Welles. When he moved into producing films, he was noted for his meticulous work on prestigious projects. Letter from an Unknown Woman is an example of his superior attention to period detail.

Max Ophuls (1902-1957) was the third Jewish man of this triumvirate of talent. An acclaimed and experienced film director, he also escaped the Nazis and came first to France, and then to America in 1941. Here he continued his career. Letter from an Unknown Woman is his most honored film from this period; he returned to Europe after World War II and made his masterpieces – La Ronde, Lola Montes, Le Plaisir, and The Earrings of Madame de . . . .

Letter is an urbane and mature work, adapted from Zweig's 1922 novella, which examines a curse of unrequited love. A young woman (Joan Fontaine) falls in love with a promising – and womanizing – pianist (Louis Jordan). After years, she finally engineers an evening with him, which he promptly forgets. However, she becomes pregnant, gives birth, and raises their son alone, unknown to him.

Years later, the woman has married an officer, who adopts her son. By chance, she sees the pianist at a concert and determines to see him again. Her husband notes this and promises that he will act with decisiveness if she pursues her passion. Ignoring him, she attempts to reunite with the pianist but finds him a shallow individual who has wasted his talent. Unfortunately, she and her son contract typhus shortly after this and die, but not before she writes a letter to the pianist explaining all. At film’s end, the pianist finds that he has been challenged to a duel by the woman’s husband, and he sets off to an uncertain fate.

The film is told primarily in flashback, and we are given a vision of fin-de-siecle Vienna, gorgeously recreated for the cameras. The subjects of sex outside of wedlock and illegitimate birth was unheard of in Hollywood at the time, but Zweig, Houseman, and Ophus together craft an adult and sophisticated story that accepts the fact that these things happen, and that morality is not entirely black and white.

Ophuls’ patented swooping camera moves are here, and his delicate touch renders this most unconventional story realistic and comprehensible. Its maturity was far beyond the American standards of the time – Ophuls would have to return to Europe to craft more films in this vein.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Louisiana Story.