The Naked City ***** (1948, Barry Fitzgerald, Don Taylor) – Classic Movie Review 1581

Director Jules Dassin’s influential, double-Oscar-winning 1948 documentary-style thriller is still sizzlingly exciting and atmospheric. It succeeds triumphantly in being designed to give a feel of vibrant ‘you are there’ reality by being based on a true case and being made wholly on location on the streets of New York City. It features landmarks such as the Williamsburg Bridge, the Whitehall Building and an apartment building on West 83rd Street in Manhattan as the murder scene.

Barry Fitzgerald stars as a sincere and dogged veteran cop, Homicide Detective Lieutenant Dan Muldoon, who is placed in charge of the case to investigate a young woman’s murder in a New York City apartment. With the help of his young associate, Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor), beat cops and detectives, Muldoon sets about to find the model’s killer. Nothing new there then, so it’s all about the way it’s done. And it’s done brilliantly.

William H Daniels’s superb cinematography and the crisp film editing by Paul Weatherwax both won deserved Oscars, and it’s those plus Miklos Rozsa’s score that contribute in a large degree to the intense, believable, urgent mood and dynamism of the movie. Though Malvin Wald and Albert Maltz carve out an excellent, credible screenplay from Wald’s story.

Over the years, it has been much imitated, and it led to the classic TV series with the same title running from 1958 to 1963 and using the film’s famous concluding line ‘There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.’ 

It also stars Howard Duff and Dorothy Hart, and features Ted de Corsia, Adelaide Klein, House Jameson, Grover Burgess, Frank Conroy, David Opatoshu, Paul Ford and Arthur O’Connell. The narrator is the film’s producer, Mark Hellinger, who died suddenly of a heart attack on December 21 1947, aged 44. Kathleen Freeman appears uncredited as a stout girl in her second movie.

It is the film debut of veteran character actor John Randolph, a victim of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunt blacklist in the 50s, who died in 2004, aged 88. Director Dassin was another victim, after being reported to the House Un-American Activities Committee in a 1951 testimony by film directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle. His Hollywood career instantly collapsed and Dassin was subpoenaed by the HUAC in 1952 and was blacklisted after refusing to testify before it.

As well as the 1949 Oscars for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (William H. Daniels) and Best Film Editing (Paul Weatherwax), it won the BAFTA Film Award for Best Film.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1581

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