The Naked City

Jules Dassin died a few days after Richard Widmark did, and is another one of those movie people that I had heard of without seeing much or any of their work. Dassin and Widmark teamed together on Night and the City, which has been floating at the top of my Netflix queue with a "Long Wait" status for several days, so in the meantime I'll take a look at some of Dassin's other films.

Dassin is, sadly, probably best known for being the victim of the blacklist. He was unrepentant communist and was exiled to Europe, where he found some success with films like Rififi, Never on Sunday, and Topkapi (which I hope to view in the next few weeks). But before he was derailed by anti-communist hysteria, he made a few gritty crime dramas: Brute Force, Thieves Highway and The Naked City.

The Naked City, from 1948, is not a noir film, although I'm sure it's been labeled such in convenient bagging. Noir usually takes the viewpoint of an outsider--a criminal or private eye, and owes its style to German Expressionism. The Naked City is the flipside--it is a police procedural, being told from the point of view of the cops, who represent orderliness and comforting blandness, while the criminals are seen as the aberrant viruses that infect a city. And the style is reminiscent of the Italian neo-realists, who used the streets as their soundstages. The Naked City, as we are told in the opening voiceover by producer Mark Hellinger, was completely shot in New York City, which at that time was a novelty.

The film opens with Hellinger telling us we are seeing a different type of film, which is clear when the credits are spoken rather than presented graphically. After some shots of typical New Yorkers going about their day (including the characters we will end up focusing on) a murder is witnessed: a young woman is drowned in her bathtub. The detective assigned to the case is played by Barry Fitzgerald, with his typical Irish twinkle, and he's assisted by Don Taylor as a young detective. Most of the film is devoted to the considerable shoe-leather expended by the cops as they chase down leads. One of their prime suspects is a young man played by Howard Duff who has a habit of telling whopping lies. Eventually they find their man, and things wrap up after a spectacular chase across the Williamsburg bridge. The film's most famous line is its last one: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."

As police thrillers go, this is a good film with some wobbly moments. Fitzgerald, who is certainly a capable actor, really pushes the leprechaunish qualities of his character. It is interesting, though, that he is not some Sherlock Holmes super-sleuth. In fact, two of the biggest leads they get he initially tells his men not to pursue, but after they press him a bit he gives in, suggesting that every man on the force has a say. We also get some humanizing scenes, such as when Taylor goes home and his wife urges him to give their son a whipping for running out into the street, but he is reluctant to do so. Perhaps because violence can be part of his job he would rather not use it at home.

The action drifts into overripe melodrama every once in a while and there are some extraordinary coincidences, such as when the cops are searching for an acrobatic man who plays the harmonica, and Taylor wanders into a wrestling gym and after asking "Do you know anyone who plays the harmonica?" being told, "Sure! Willie the harmonica player!" I'm also not so sure that it was so easy then, or even now, to immediately identify jewelry as being stolen by merely
checking a list on a piece of paper. Though the murder in the opening scene is rather brutal, the rest of the film has a kind of fuddy-duddy stuffiness to it, the kind of pseudo-documentary style common to industrial and educational films.

Still, there's no questioning the skill in the photography, by William Daniels, which won an Oscar, or the direction by Dassin, who keeps things moving with the pace that led to the phrase a "New York" minute.