United States, 1948
Directed by Jules Dassin
With Barry Fitzgerald (Police Lieutenant Dan Muldoon), Don Taylor (Police Detective Jimmy Halloran), Howard Duff (Frank Niles), Dorothy Hart (Ruth Morrison)
Words spoken – and not written, for once: from the very first seconds, “The Naked City” stands and claims to be a departure from the average feature, with credits told by a narrator who introduces himself as the film’s producer and duly explains how different the film purports to be. The voice of Mark Hellinger would remain a companion to the images and the audience, commenting the action in a teasing and bantering manner, asking questions about the characters and the plot which are addressed directly to the characters as well as to the audience, a jocular and clever narrator who is fully involved and reveling in the story he is telling, feeling strongly for the characters and eager to illuminate the audience, even if he sounds at times too talkative and too explanatory.
The first images, aerial views of Manhattan, also point to another original aspect of this noir: they are not mere establishing shots, though truly spectacular, they are the first steps into a wider exploration of a city cast as an essential character, a world that is as much the topic as the crime story at the core of the film. The plot does not emerge swiftly: in an ingenious manipulation of the editing, only fragments are edited among a wider, jerkier, stream of images that are as many snapshots and vignettes covering the life of the denizens of the Big Apple, some narrated by the own voices of the characters featuring in the picture. In a way, that long, stunning first part of the film sounds like a love letter of those who have made the film to New York and the New Yorkers. The story of the murdered model Jean Dexter is precisely framed as just one possible story among the many happening every day among the eight million inhabitants of the city.
It turns out New York is not only the living ecosystem of the story, and a character on its own right, but also a movie studio: nearly all the scenes were shot on location, the most radical and ambitious departure of this production from what is usually done in the American cinema at that time (and before). It took a lot of gusto and imagination, an amazing ability to invent and to adapt too, for director Jules Dassin, director of photography William H. Daniels, and art director John DeCuir, with Hellinger always on the ground to check everything went as smoothly as possible, but that was the whole point of the production: to dive into the churning but exciting waters of real life, away from the artificial world studios demanded but straight into the hustle and bustle, the gritty and immediate reality the audience experience before and after spending their time in the movie theater.
To be as lively and realistic as it is technically possible and as much as the audience can fancy was also about giving the noir genre, and the wider corpus of crime stories, a fresher and more thrilling edge, moving away from the great successes of the genre shaped by the sophisticated approach inherent to the studios and the star system to deliver tauter, tenser, bolder films with more technical challenges but also lesser budgets. This was an audacious endeavor that oddly resonated with what Italian filmmakers had been trying since the end of World War Two, though it is not sure that the first neorealist films were widely known in the United States in 1948 – the parallel is striking but it does not imply one element really inspired the other; anyway, what Hellinger and Dassin crafted was released well before another landmark, that even bolder, freer, and livelier cinematic effort that “Little Fugitive” was in 1953, and the various films of the Free Cinema and Nouvelle Vague movements (whose purpose were of course far more radical and ambitious and which, contributed to lasting changes in filmmaking).
It remains decades later engrossing, though of course far better stuff, more gripping and pristine images, even more dramatic and dynamic scenes have been shot, and in spite of rather flat, conventional acting performances. The plot is delightfully convoluted, though the point is rather didactic, showing how a cop’s mind and the wider process of inquiry, with its string of dead ends, false hopes, unexpected finds, strikes of luck, but also tenacity and hard work, work – the blackboard displayed in the office of Police Lieutenant Dan Muldoon is not just useful for his thoughts, it is a fitting, glaring, symbol of what the scenes and the words of the narrator try relentlessly to impart to the audience. It may be a bit clumsy and boring, but this documentary nature of the film was part and parcel of the wider effort of being realistic and conveying an accurate and lively image of what actually happens in a police station – but clearly another point is to let the audience enjoy the company of a seasoned and wise policeman dealing quietly but archly with his business and with the zeal and zest of his new deputy, a dashing but impatient young man, working hard and eager to be the best, even if it means at the end taking foolish risks, Police Detective Jimmy Halloran.
So, it takes time to link various elements and to discover the few missing bits of the puzzle, although the likelihood that Frank Niles, the shady fiancé of Jean Dexter’s colleague and best friend Ruth Morrison, has been playing a key part in the model’s tragic fate runs high as soon as a first interview with Dan Muldoon is conducted; the whole story boils down eventually to a nasty but sophisticated scheme of stealing jewels thanks to the blackmailing of a professional who knows too much and had too much troubles. The tough guy doing the job whatever it takes, including murder, is caught in the final section in what is arguably the most astonishing, complicated, fascinating scene in “The Naked City”, involving hair-raising stunts (for both the characters and the crew) on a bridge, a great finale for a unique feature.