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.