FLM20 • DVD Feature

The Naked City • by David Luhrssen, arts editor and film critic for the Shepherd Express in Milwaukee and executive director of the Milwaukee International Film Festival

The Naked City (1948) opens with a slow-moving overhead shot of Manhattan. A familiar device in Hollywood movies from that time, it was employed to establish New York City as the setting. New York, however, wasn’t just the setting for The Naked City, but a looming, almost inescapable character. As producer Mark Hellinger informed audiences in his voiceover, The Naked City was “a bit different than most films we’ve ever seen” because it was photographed in the real world, not on Hollywood sound stages and back lots. In The Naked City, fictional cops chased fictional criminals down real New York streets and subways, and worked from a real police station. “This is the city as it is,” Hellinger intoned.

The Naked City has been available on DVD with skimpy special features and digital transfers of uncertain quality, but previous issues don’t begin to match the new Criterion edition. The features are illuminating, especially the commentary by New York University film studies professor Dana Polan. As he points out, parts of The Naked City were actually shot on sound stages and some of the action took place against rear-screen projections of the real New York. A 2004 interview with director Jules Dassin finds the retired filmmaker in a feisty mood.

Dassin had already gained note for Brute Force (1947), part of the rising tide of film noir, hard-boiled crime dramas whose duplicitous characters gazed deeply into the shadow side of the American Dream. The Naked City was both film noir and a response to an even newer genre, neorealism. Born on the broken streets of postwar Italy, neorealism had already produced acclaimed classics such as Open City and The Bicycle Thief, shot by necessity in real settings, often with nonprofessional actors.

Hollywood was intrigued by this challenge to the norms of movie-making, and uncomfortable. Producer Hellinger not only felt compelled to explain The Naked City’s true-life environment, but continued to talk through the length of the movie as if it were a newsreel documentary in need of narration. Hellinger introduced characters, described buildings and even offered advice to the criminal in the climactic foot chase across sidewalks and streets crowded with authentic New Yorkers. One suspects that Dassin, who was well able to let the city of New York speak for itself without a tour guide, chaffed at Hellinger as an unwanted intruder.

The Naked City is a murder mystery but not a whodunnit. The killing of a young woman is shown through her apartment window, the cameras enter her room and the killers are revealed. What we don’t know for a long time is who they are and why they killed. The victim, a model, has several male friends, all of them suspects. It transpires that her entire life was an illusion, including her name and the past she invented for herself. She was a moth drawn to the bright lights of the big city, toward men with money, or who pretended to be rich. Once we meet her parents, it becomes clear why she wanted to escape the narrow options of her upbringing.

The dominant actor in The Naked City, Barry Fitzgerald, reprises his many previous roles as Hollywood’s resident Irishman, always ready with a bit of blarney. He plays the investigating officer, Lieutenant Muldoon, a beetle-browed, elfin-eared detective who wears his world-weariness lightly, leavening the murder case with a pinch of humor. The scene-stealing Fitzgerald causes his co-stars, including Don Taylor as his slightly befuddled sidekick and tough guy Howard Duff, to recede into the shadows. As Polan emphasizes in his commentary, the unsettling film noir aspects of The Naked City were set against the orderly progress of the police investigation, reassuring audiences that chaos can be contained.

The Naked City was a successful movie, winning a pair of Oscars for cinematography and editing. The paranoid politics of the Cold War, however, soon brought an end to Dassin’s promising Hollywood career. While making his final movie in America, Thieves’ Highway (1949), Dassin was accused by fellow Hollywood director Edward Dmytryk, a Communist Party member, of being a party comrade. Fleeing into exile, Dassin made a variety of films in several European countries, including the film noir classic Night and the City (1950, Great Britain), the suspenseful Rififi (1955, France) and the bittersweet Never on Sunday (1960, Greece), before his career ended in the 1980s.