The Naked City

The Naked City
Studio: Criterion Collection
WorkNameSort: Naked City, The

There’s an anecdote about Martin Scorsese delaying the shooting of the lunch-date scene between Travis Bickle and Betsy the campaign aide in Taxi Driver because the weather was too blustery to get a good street exterior behind his actors through the coffee shop’s picture window. He correctly resisted restaging the scene against a wall because, he maintained, New York City was as essential and omnipresent a character in his movie as anyone with dialogue. That thinking has its roots in The Naked City, Jules Dassin’s 1948 crime drama shot in Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs with an unprecedented realism that flew in the face of the ‘Why go on location when you can build a set?â?� film technique of the era.

A pretty blonde turns up dead in her tenement bathtub, and Detective Lt. Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) is put on the case. Assisted by his still-green partner, Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor), and the police force’s retinue of record-keepers and forensic experts, the men patiently untangle the blonde’s connections among the millions of citizens of the city, teasing out how a connection to playboy Frank Niles (Howard Duff) led to her demise. If this doesn’t sound like anything new, remember that every police drama from Dragnet to CSI follows the model forged by this film, where justice is served not by lone-wolf gumshoes like Sam Spade but the painstaking work of law enforcement. Dassin (who also directed the much-beloved heist film Rififi) fleshes out his story with small, haiku-like digressions into aspects of city life, like two gabby neighborhood girls fantasizing over a dress in a shop window, or Halloran and his wife’s minor spat over whether their son does or doesn’t deserve a spanking for crossing a busy street.

For those who haven’t seen the movie before, first viewing the insightful interview with architect James Sanders included as a bonus feature is essential. Sanders raises several excellent points about how New York in the movies was a synthetic construct representing dynamism and glamour, before directors like Dassin took their cues from the Italian Neo-Realists and started placing their cameras within the true city. He notes that The Naked City was shot in 1947, a few brief years before the isolating effect of television quickly and irrevocably changed the timbre of metropolitan street life. To our modern eyes, this New York is a clean, vital, civilized wonderland of human achievement, where evil may surface but good prevails. That might be the most striking revelation of this dated yet still illuminating film.

This article appears in Mar 21-27, 2007.