Stream On: There are 8 million stories in ‘The Naked City’
This highly influential 1948 neorealist thriller was shot on location in the streets of New York City.
This highly influential 1948 neorealist thriller, a landmark in film noir, shot on location in the streets of New York City, tells an ordinary murder tale through the accumulation of procedural police details.
NAKED CITY aka THE NAKED CITY
/Streaming /Archive.org /Amazon /😎87%😌79% /Trailer /1948 /NR
The term film noir, French for “black film,” was first applied to Hollywood films, notably black-and-white crime melodramas, by French critic Nino Frank in 1946. Naked City director Jules Dassin cited Italian neorealism, later seen in films like Vittorio De Seca’s Bicycle Thieves, as inspiring his use of location photography with non-professional extras. This semidocumentary approach characterized a substantial number of noirs in the late 1940s and early 1950s and brought a pervasive feeling of authenticity to Dassin’s Naked City.
Naked City was inspired by probably one of the first “coffee table” books--Arthur “Weegee” Fellig’s collection of New York City photo essays of the same name. The movie opens with a survey of how the city’s denizens made their living and spent their time, with visuals that could have been taken from Weegee’s starkly beautiful book.
Then, in the late hours of a hot New York summer night we see two men chloroform ex-model Jean Dexter and drown her in her bathtub. When one of them gets conscience-stricken while drunk, the other kills him and throws his body into the East River.
Experienced detective Lt. Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and novice Det. Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor) are assigned to the case. At the scene the medical examiner determines the “accidental” death had actually been murder.
Producer Mark Hellinger’s flat voice-over narrates the action, which about the case is mixed in with interesting observations about the city itself, as in the opening.Remember, it’s titled “Naked City"--New York City is the star here, then all of its inhabitants, and last but not least, the people involved in the murder of Jean Dexter.
The case is ultimately solved by expending shoe leather, as it were; a gradual accretion of lies from person of interest Frank Niles (Howard Duff) and more credible witness statements. The audience saw the murders, but don’t know the behind-the-scenes; that is, why the two men killed Jean Dexter (and who they were), and who orchestrated it.
Jean’s mother and father are called in to identify their daughter’s body--they are rustics, straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, but the mother has become cynical about the lifestyle that put her daughter in the situation in which she was murdered. “I hate her! I hate her for what she’s done to us!” But when she sees the body, she collapses in tears: “My baby!” The acting from 48-year-old radio actress Adelaide Klein as Jean’s mother, in her first film role, is electric, and was the beginning of a notable screen and television career. And the film overall is like that.
Naked City received two Academy Awards, one for William H. Daniels’ beautiful black and white cinematography, and another for film editing, to Paul Weatherwax. It was also the basis of the excellent 1958 television series.
In 2007, this highly influential film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Sources include Wikipedia (WP:CCBYSA).
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