• The Naked City, 1/16/23 (Mon)

Jules Dassin’s 1947 hit was supposedly highly influential as a prototypical film noir, setting a pattern for an entire genre. The story is a pretty run-of-the-mill murder mystery about the search for the killer of a social-climbing model, but the movie is distinguished by two points.

One is the intricate detail in which the policemen’s methods are shown: putting together small clues, seeking info through tedious visits to potential suspects or witnesses, weighing whether the stories they hear are true or willfully misleading, following potentially important leads like a man’s pajamas or diamond ring, testing theories among each other, connecting and reconnecting dots as more info becomes available, and so forth. I immediately thought of Kurosawa’s similar methods in Stray Dog, released just two years later, and was not surprised to learn that the Japanese director expressed admiration for this film. The lead officer, played by Irishman Barry Fitzgerald (the only real name in the cast), held court as his men diligently pursued the case, including a young officer eager to make his mark – which he subsequently does in a not-so-good way. The film does a nice job of showing the tedium and frustration involved in solving a murder from the ground up.

Second is the amazing location shooting in New York, turning the city itself into a character of sorts. The filmmakers reportedly shot from a van with cameras hidden by one-way mirrors, giving them a truly electric portrait of life on the street as it’s actually lived. Unlike Kurosawa’s carefully constructed approach, much of the action here is necessarily out of their control, and they weave their story in and around the constant movement of a crowded city with, paraphrasing the film’s most famous line, eight million stories, only one of which is this one. Some of the people approached don’t even appear to be actors (though I recognized Yiddish theater star Molly Picon in a brief cameo, and evidently there were others). This gave the proceedings the feel of a documentary, something I don’t recall seeing on this scale until some of the French New Wave flicks much later. The vibe of the streets is the part of the film I remember most vividly.

On the other hand, the acting for the most part was laughably poor. The performers seemed to be robotically going through the motions in what must have been a string of first takes. Fitzgerald was a happy exception in a winking performance that was heroic under the circumstances. The script was also unexceptional, though a few gems crept in. (After a beautiful witness leaves: “Nice long legs, huh? Follow them.”) The mystery is laid out patiently, methodically and logically, if not especially interestingly, and everything falls neatly into place in the end. While the dialogue was fairly flat, there were some effective scenes such as the interview with the mother of the victim, who shows no love for her daughter (nor any acting skills) under questioning but breaks down in tears when she sees the corpse. Most memorable is the final chase scene and the thrilling climax on the Williamsburg Bridge. I have to assume that the dangerous climb on top of the bridge was not a location shoot, but it certainly felt like it. That was great filmmaking.

One especially grating feature of the film is the off-screen narration that accompanies it throughout. It’s interesting at first in setting the scene and adding to the semi-documentary style. It quickly becomes stale, however, giving us information that is either obvious or irrelevant and telling us what the drama should be showing us. I don’t know what went through the mind of producer Mark Hellinger, who did his own narration, but this is the first thing that should be jettisoned in any remake. (Hellinger tragically died just before the release of the film but did see the finished product.)

The film’s no-nonsense just-the-facts-ma’am approach is sound and would have been much a more forceful experience with a more competent cast. But the dazzling fly-on-the-wall look at post-war New York is obviously irreplaceable, adding an essential dimension to the policemen’s efforts in finding the criminal needle in the haystack of the masses. That element alone makes the film worth watching.