The Naked City (1948)

The Naked City
Directed by Jules Dassin
Written by Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald
1948/USA
Hellinger Productions/Universal International Pictures
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[last lines] Narrator: There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.

This film was ground-breaking in several ways.  Seventy years of the same tropes appearing on prime-time TV makes it seem fairly average today.

After an opening offering a panorama of life in New York, the story focuses on the murder of a model.  We follow the Homicide Squad’s investigation in all its mundane detail.  Eventually, Lt. Det. Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) begins to focus on Frank Niles (Howard Duff).  Niles says he did not know the model well but Muldoon catches him in a number of lies. The case breaks when the police discover that jewelry stolen from the model’s apartment had previously been stolen.  With Don Taylor as a rookie detective and Ted de Corsia as a thug.

This movie took the semi-documentary style pioneered at Twentieth Century Fox to new heights.  The entire story was filmed on location and, for me, the film was most interesting for its authentic mid-century setting and panoramic cinematography. Fitzgerald is by far the most natural of the actors, the rest of whom tend toward the wooden or histrionic.

The Naked City won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (William H. Daniels) and Best Film Editing.   Malvin Wald was nominated for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story.

Clip – Opening sequence – note unique oral credits