The Naked City (1948)

The Naked City (1948) – A beautiful young woman is dead.  It looks like suicide at first, but as two police detectives dig into the story, will it turn out to be murder?

Directed by Jules Dassin                         Starring Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff

Why I Liked It – A curious mixture of nor with a comic edge to it.  It’s a love poem to New York City.

This movie has been a puzzle from its beginning.  Universal was confounded by it and almost scrapped the movie once it was shot.  It went on to be a hit and get two Oscars.  I knew the title from the television show of the same name.  It aired from 1958-63 and then in re-runs for years.  The closing line “There are eight million stories in the naked city.  This has been one of them.”   So I thought I had a good idea of what was coming.

And I got a surprise as well.

The story is told in a semi-documentary style, with a voiceover that fills in pieces here and there. (The voiceover was done by the producer, Mark Hellinger.  He died just before the movie was released.  When the studio wanted to kill the project, his family fought for the movie, and won.)  It includes all the usual elements of a film noir, a cynical world view, sex, murder.  What surprised me was the sly humor that seeps in on a regular basis.  Suddenly, there’s a quick wink-wink moment in the movie.  It’s a strange, and strangely delightful, twist to the movie.

As film noir, the movie does a wonderful job.  Every little twist of the plot, each revealed frailty in the personality of the characters.  Some of the story is clunky, showing its age and the different approach to this kind of topic of that time in Hollywood.  A modern version would be grittier, but the story is enough to carry the movie along.  The opening scene, where the young model dies, has an intensity that surprised me for a movie of the time.  And the chase scene that makes up most of the end of the movie can stand with any of those that followed it through the years. 

The other aspect of this movie that grabbed me is the obvious love for the city of New York held by the movie makers.  While terrible people do terrible things in her streets, the city itself is glorious.  Even though shot in black and white, the visuals of this movie are stunning.  It was for cinematography and editing that it won its two Oscars.

The clunky bits of the movie are enough to drag the movie down a rating for me.  The voiceover is awkward, the acting is stiff at times, and the documentary style of storytelling limits the movie in some ways.   But the rest is so very, very good.

Rating *** – Worth A Look