TCM at midnight: Jules Dassins THE NAKED CITY (1948) proclaimed that There are eight million stories in the Big Apple, and over a half century of prolific movie and TV productions since has done its darndest to make the prophecy come true. Producer-narrator Mark Hellinger was very self-consciously proclaiming a new postwar era of location realism, ad THE NAKED CITY, like the neo-realist bellwether THE BICYCLE THIEF, was not so much an innovation in aesthetics as an application of smooth, studio-style narration to a real city used as a sound set. The national reputation of Universal-International Pictures got a big boost from the favorable critical reception accorded William Danielss Oscar-winning photography, the edgy score by Miklos Rozsa and Frank Skinner, and the textbook editing of Paul Weatherwax. Above all, especially for subsequent detective series on TV, the film put the finishing touches on the urban policier as a natural anthology format in which a group of detectives comes in contract with zanies, grifters, suicides, and murderers in a multi-story format. Policemen are people too is one of the movies messages, especially in the interplay between Barry Fitzgeralds cranky, off-beat veteran and Don Taylors bland rookie. On the criminal side, Howard Duff and Ted DeCorsia apply brains and brawn in testing the meddle of the law enforcers, leading to a rousing chase that climaxes tensely on the Williamsburg Bridge.
Posted on: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 23:50:28 +0000
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