Noirvember 2024: Revisiting The Naked City (1948)
and discovering what a dope I was the first time...
I watched The Naked City for the first time 11 years ago, just as I was dipping my toe into film noir’s dark waters. I embraced a minimal definition of film noir, confining it to a narrow box consisting mostly of hard-boiled detectives, dangerous women, and heists gone wrong. With that slight mindset, I first watched The Naked City, finding it plodding and boring.
Boy, was I a dope…
Maybe I considered its setup too cliched: Veteran Lieutenant Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald, right), who’s seen everything, is paired with greenhorn detective Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor) to solve the murder of a young woman in New York City. The film is a police procedural, but I thought it abandoned the elements of noir I was eagerly expecting.
What I didn’t understand the first time was that New York City is the film’s protagonist. Shot on location, The Naked City feels almost like a documentary as director Jules Dassin takes us through the city down real streets (with a minimum of rear projection) with real people going about their daily lives.
I’ve heard Eddie Muller say that he wishes he could’ve been present during the initial run of Gilda (1946) to see and hear the audience's reaction to that bizarre picture. Although it would’ve been far less dramatic, I wish I could’ve seen The Naked City in two different theaters during its opening: one in New York City, the other anywhere else. How did New Yorkers respond to seeing their city onscreen in a way they hadn’t experienced before? And how would someone who had never been to New York have responded? Because we’ve watched so many films shot on location, it’s difficult to imagine seeing a movie so daringly dedicated to location. (By the way, cinematographer William Daniels won an Oscar for his work on the film.)
Yet when you get right down to it, I was correct about one thing: The story itself is routine. There may be “eight million stories in the Naked City,” suggesting this one might not be a standout. Here’s a guy named Frank Niles (Howard Duff) who looks good for the murder of a young ex-model. The audience doesn’t need the skills of Lt. Muldoon to know Niles is lying about nearly everything, yet watching Muldoon's work provides a master class in detection. Sure, there’s an element of young Halloran responding to some of his mentor’s skills with a “Gee, how’d you know that?” look of surprise, but Dassin doesn’t bludgeon us to death with such scenes.
I’m leaving out several plot points for readers who haven’t seen the film, but most viewers are unlikely to be surprised at any of the film’s revelations. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is how the Albert Maltz/Malvin Wald screenplay isn’t afraid to dial back the drama and tension we normally see between heroes and villains in favor of realism. The crooks aren’t larger than life, and the cops are regular guys who won’t get their picture in the paper or a promotion. They’re just doing their job. Again, it’s one story out of 8 million. No big deal.
But it is a big deal. Any movie made this well is always a big deal. We learn as the detectives learn, picking up detail after detail, trying to figure out who’s lying and what they have to gain (or lose) by doing so. The tension is incremental, and the picture asks the audience to be as patient as Muldoon. We know the case is going to break, and when it does, the floodgates will open (and they do).
For those of you who know the film, no, I haven’t forgotten about its producer, Mark Hellinger. Unfortunately, this was Hellinger’s final film. You can read more about him in an article I wrote in 2017, primarily a review of the 1952 book The Mark Hellinger Story: A Biography of Broadway and Hollywood by Jim Bishop. The title may be tough to find at a good price, but you can read it on your Kindle (or check it out via interlibrary loan through your local public library).
The Naked City is available on Blu-ray and DVD and is currently playing on the Criterion Channel.