Film Noir Hall of Fame VI

Happy to rewatch this from the noir countdown.

I found a page for Naked City on Archive except the page didn't work. Is there another way to watch it?

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I destroyed the dastardly dairy dame! I made mad milk maid mulch!

Lot of copies on YouTube, some are even HD. I'll message you a link.

Avoid the cheesy colorized version of The Naked City that's also on YouTube. Or check it out to see just how bad AI colorizes b&w movies.

As a rule of thumb, I don't watch colorized versions of films if I can avoid it. If the film was released black and white, that's how I watch it. This is not meant to be snooty. I want it to be an authentic presentation of the film.

I watched this last night for what I believe is the second time and my thoughts are unchanged about this interesting procedural noir.



The Naked City is a film that almost never was, Universal Pictures executives didn't know what to do with this hybrid film and wanted to scrap it but thanks to the family members of producer Mark Hellinger, they made Universal release this movie. Mark Hellinger is also the voice of the narration that dominates the parts of the film.

What's amazing about this Academy Award winning film (Best B&W Cinematography & Best Editing) is that it was shot in only 84 days, and exclusive shot in the streets and buildings of New York City. No studio shots at all. This give us a window back to NYC circa 1948 as we see sights and sounds that are absolutely authentic.

While the voice over narration is kind of odd and gets in the way at times, its also necessary as it was impossible to record sound on many of the street shots, thus a voice over narrator was used to fill in the missing sound blanks. Once we settle into the film the narration is infrequent and the actors take over and deliver up a fine little docudrama noir.

Especially good to see was Barry Fitzgerald as an experienced Homicide detective on the trail of an elusive murderer. Barry is wise, patient and while he uses his years of experience in police work, he's also teaching his young and green assistant. The film takes a low key approach and shows us the leg work that goes into tracking down 1000s of leads in a criminal case. I found the story interesting and exciting especially the police procedural parts.

Brilliant police procedural investigation Film Noir. It lacks ‘starpower’ in the acting department. However, it makes up for it with the real star of this film which is in my opinion ‘The Naked City’ itself. The city lives, sleeps and wakes up through the impressive shots of the infrastructure, architecture and apartments. It has one of my favorite Film Noir opening scenes. The aerial views or bird's eye view of New York City’s Manhattan look absolutely amazing. One of the ‘highest’ views from that era, maybe even the highest? Loved it.

The cast, although lacking in starpower, still did a great job and allow you to focus more on the interesting mystery story they're telling and the police procedurals used to solve it. A very good re-watch for me that stands out more for technical filmmaking reasons than dialogue or performance reasons.

The Naked City (1948, Dassin)

The world is a canvas. Or so it seems in this noir caper. Supplied with a voice over narration and plenty of wide open shots of the city, New York itself becomes the main character in this story. The characters involved here in this simple run of the mill story (murder mystery/jewelry theft) are adequate enough to help move things along with its breakdown of the investigation process. It also helps putting a visually stimulating landscape in the background during the big chase scene towards the end. I assume there is a discussion to be had in regards to building worlds instead of supplying enough material to help building your main characters. For here, I can say it does a pretty good job at both.

My goal is to watch Naked City either Saturday or Sunday of this weekend. Right now I'm in the middle of The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming and putting the kiddos to bed and then maybe gaming and/or reading and then sleep so it'll be a day or two. I promise I'll get to it before Monday.

The Naked City really makes you ponder how original it must have seemed on release in 1948, being one of the first police procedural movies (I can dredge up only two that come before it, 1947 Henri-Georges Clouzot film Jenny Lamour and Fritz Lang's 1931 classic M) - one that would go on to inspire the likes of Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog, released in 1949. What sticks out even more to me however is the famous location work in New York City. In fact, the structure of the film - which includes components filmed all over New York - makes this more a film about the Big Apple than a murder. I think one of the primary influences which led Jules Dassin and his crew out into the streets during the hot summer this was made were the Italian neorealist films being made overseas - and indeed in look this movie does come close to one of my all-time favourite films, Bicycle Thieves, which came out the same year. There isn't much staging done with extras, and at times shots were filmed using hidden cameras so that people on the street acted as they normally would - unaware they were being filmed.

This film isn't just a tour of New York though - there's a murder to be solved. Two detectives - the experienced (and very Irish) Lt. Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald), and the much more inexperienced Detective Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor) are assigned to investigate the murder of ex-model Jean Dexter - drowned in her own bathtub. They find a pair of men's pajamas at the scene (imagine being a murderer and leaving your pajamas at the scene) which yields the name "Philip Henderson", they discover the fact that all of Jean's jewelry has been stolen and there is a bottle of sleeping pills nearby which have been prescribed by a doctor by the name of Lawrence Stoneman (House Jameson). The police go on to interview Jean's best friend, Ruth Morrison (Dorothy Hart), and Jean's previous boyfriend - a man who goes by the name Frank Niles (Howard Duff). Niles happens to tell the detectives a whole load of lies - he fails to tell the truth with just about every answer he gives. Are there nefarious reasons for this dishonesty, or is Niles simply a compulsive liar? All of the detectives on the case do a lot of leg-work, follow up lead after lead, and close in on the true facts surrounding the case.

Lurking in the background of The Naked City is a humble narrator - Mark Hellinger, who gives his impressions as to the work the detectives do, and the city of New York, which has it's own charms and idiosyncrasies. Hellinger happened to be the producer of The Naked City - he was a journalist, writer, theatre columnist and of course film producer. Sadly, he died of a heart attack on 21st December 1947 (some sources give his date of death as Christmas Eve) at just 44 years of age, only just squeezing in an early look at this film of his. Every time I hear that laconic narration, I can't help think of him. He'd produced some pretty good films in his day - the likes of noir classic The Killers and others featuring Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney. Hellinger also fought a tenacious battle over the score of The Naked City - the last artistic choice he'd ever fight so hard over. Dassin had assigned MGM colleague George Bassman, but Hellinger was so determined for Miklós Rózsa to give the film his musical accompaniment that he begged right up until the day before he died for his choice. Rózsa ended up scoring the action, and Frank Skinner the earlier, jazzier sections of the movie. 40s film scores always sound so bombastic to me, but there's an interesting mix to Naked City's.

The cinematography, handled by William H. Daniels, won him and the film an Oscar for what was then the black-and-white category. It all starts with a wonderful fly-over of what was already a skyscraper-festooned Manhattan Island - fascinating for it's look back in time. There's so much that's inventive here because of the newness of this kind of location shooting in a city, especially for an American production. There are a lot of long shots - for example, during a climactic chase near the end of the film - which ends up giving us a sense of perspective and scale. We get a sense of how close the person being chased is to disappearing into the throng of millions of New Yorkers - which would mean he'd certainly escape. There seems to be a lot of deep focus work as well, with a lot of action in the foreground and background that Dassin wants us to be able to clearly see. It gives the narrative a sense of gritty realness which is often lost on bare, empty sets in which there's a very specific focus and not much going on in the background. We get to really feel the fact that there are millions of stories playing out around this crime drama - and a hive of activity. The movie has such a strong heartbeat in that way, much like the neorealist films in Europe had at the time.

Malvin Wald earned an Oscar nomination for his part in writing this story, and editor Paul Weatherwax won this film it's other Oscar - no doubt a challenging and very novel project for him, with so many shots recorded on busy streets with real people on them. The chase scene itself would have earned him enough praise for this to be one of his most memorable efforts (he ended up winning another Academy Award - this one for his work on Around the World in 80 Days nearly a decade later.) All of this technical effort, from camera to editing suite, brought us well-realised visual enjoyment, but where did the inspiration originate? Funnily enough, notorious photographer Arthur Fellig - much more well known as Weegee - published a book of photographs called "Naked City", and it was Weegee who ended up being hired as a visual consultant for the film. It's debated as to how much of it's look he influenced however, and how much was really influenced by neorealism as a cinematic language the photographer couldn't come close to replicating himself. Still, it's such an interesting connection - the photographer, that title and his view of this big city.

So, this was quite a combination of intricate procedural plot detail and magnificent, bright and large-scale location photography. That really made The Naked City something new and for a film from the '40s stunningly original. Very fortunate that it fell to a filmmaker of Jules Dassin's particular talent to direct this movie - a very adaptable, inventive filmmaker with an eye for what helps a film visually on both a large and small scale. I enjoyed the detective story as well, for what it was - and it's sturdiness is probably why it's been replicated so often (most recently for the game L.A. Noire - eschewing it's original New York location of course.) I particularly enjoyed the chase at the end, which was genuinely exciting - still tense after so many decades and so many other films having had a chance to bring whatever they can to what The Naked City could only invent fresh with little that already existed to fall back on. During quieter moments, my mind would veer with fascination into sneaking peeks at 1940s society going about it's business without knowing that particular moment in these people's day would be immortalized in this film forever. Anyway, all up a worthwhile investment of time, enjoying this movie - my second Jules Dassin deep dive in a row.

Rating :

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Sorry I kept getting to these late. I'm in the middle of Naked City now. Well not really the middle vis I'm ten minutes into it. I paused it to answer a text and dinner is nearly ready. Once dinner is done I'll get back to it. Phoenix mentioned that the film must have felt really fresh back in 1948 which I can't imagine it wouldn't have.

It reminds me of how Lost Weekend probably felt extreme by 1945's standards vis it's about an alcoholic delving deep into his addiction and ruining himself, and when I watched it in 2012 or so it felt relatively tame because I had seen other films delve into such a subject. My context and perception are different than theirs back then.

Back to Naked City, the narration is kind of gratuitous, which I think is a personal bias given my disliking of writing it, although it can work if done well. I like letting visuals and dialogue tell the story and not have narration explain it all. It's because I used to write with narration because I couldn't figure out another way, and someone coached me on how to avoid it, and now I always look for a way to tell a story without words, or make the words be a compliment to the visuals. Narration is too simple. Overall though the film is fine. The narration isn't terrible, and actually the guy saying the stuff about the city and the people is okay. It's the stuff like, "Some babies are 8:00 babies. Some are..." et cetera. Did we really need that as narration? There are so many other, exciting ways to show that tidbit.

That's pretty amazing The Naked City is kind of related to Night and the City and Stray Dog is kind of related to The Naked City, but we all nominated films separately without knowing what the other noms were.

Naked City is really good. I just finished it. It's done really well and really has no glaring weakness. I don't think it was spectacular though. Overall it's quite good. I liked it a lot.

Stray Dog I own. I'll need to find my copy. It shouldn't be a hard task vis I know about where to look. This week it should be easier for me to find time to watch the noir hall movie.

Synchronicity.

Stray Dog (1949, Kurosawa)

As I have grown older I have come to appreciate simple storytelling. Stray Dog is a story simply about a rookie cop that loses his gun. It becomes almost a story of obsessive guilt as Mifune ruminates over losing his piece and all that bad things that come from it. I did enjoy Kurosawa mixing in a few sequences of almost silent cinema as our young rookie goes out in the seedy places looking to find shady characters that can offer him a new piece for a price. The older detective Mifune is paired off with also helps things move along. I also like the advice that is given to our rookie detective during the closing moments.

Holiday rush is over. I’ll be catching up on reviews

Sorry this is so late.

I Want to Live! (1958)

Well if you don't like Susan Hayward, you won't like this movie; because it is all Susan Hayward, all the time. Luckily I love Susan Hayward. The only problem is I find Hayward to be very solid personality. I never believe in her vulnerability. She seems indomitable. I feel this character could use some vulnerability, if only to believe in her as a victim of circumstance.
The other star of this picture is the editing, which is mostly successful in keeping us on tenterhooks while we wait for that all important call from the governor that never comes. Any lack is probably my own impatience.
In answer to @john Constantine about the writers not being explicit about her profession. Believe me the audience knew. They were hip as Babs would say. Things didn't have to be spelled out back then. She was a reform school girl, living an itinerant lifestyle and hanging out with sailors and petty crooks. They knew.
It reminds me of the scene in Anatomy of a Murder when we find out Lee Remick's character was "barelegged" when she was out a the roadhouse. There were rules back then and everybody knew them. Nice girls didn't go out "barelegged." You had to have hose and a girdle on. Otherwise you were a slut. Those were the rules! So believe me the audience knew Babs' situation.

The Naked City (1948)

As the movie starts out, my initial reaction is that this voice over is corny and unnecessary. But at the end, the producer does deliver the iconic line,"There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."
The script itself is a standard police procedural. It is a movie with no stars and is all the better for it. Excellent character actors abound. I like the tiny but hilarious touches of the older female character actors especially the lady who played Ruth's mother.
The shame and shock of Dr. Stoneman is made palpable by the actor playing him. I thought the man was going to have a heart attack and knew he was going to try something desperate. Great scene by that actor
The real star of the movie is New York City. Jules Dassin's camera goes everywhere. He sets up fascinating tableaux. Even when Halloran makes a call from a phone booth half the screen is filled with the bustle of a street scene over the detectives shoulder. My favorite was the fat kid eating ice cream, with two fists. Garza, the murderer reminded me of the assassin that is evading the New York right now if only for his ability to fade into the woodwork.
But the movie doesn't have a center. The murdered girl is a cypher. We don't concentrate on one detective or the story of one criminal. This is its biggest flaw. Entertaining visually, contains some lovely acting but this is not the best of the movies we have seen so far. It is not even the best of Dassin's films that we have seen.

I haven't seen a lot of Kurosawa's films but of the one's I've seen this is my favorite by far. What I like is the first hand view of the underbelly of post war Tokyo...that's an interesting time frame and place in history. I liked how this young cop lost his gun to a pick pocket and his attempts to recover it expands the story and shows us this world of crime and corruption that has grown out of the poverty and desperation of a defeated, bombed out Tokyo. It's also interesting as it's very much focused on police procedure and the difficulties they face while trying to crack a criminal ring that deals in stolen guns. It also has a deeper emotional tone as the young cop's stolen gun is used in a murder which causes him even more emotional stress.

Really strong, well made film.