the desire to glitter
by
Douglas Messerli
Albert
Maltz and Malvin Wald (based on Wald’s book), Jules Dassin (director) The Naked City / 1948
Any detailed
summary of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City plot
would sound like involuted nonsense, since the point of the story is to circle
around itself so that the homicide police, Detective Lt. Dan Muldoon (Barry
Fitzgerald) and rookie detective Jimmy Halloran (Dan Taylor), can slowing make
impossible and sometimes illogical connections to get their man. Let’s just say
that a beautiful model is found dead in her bath tub, clearly murdered. And the
police spend days to chasing down clues, including another dead body and an
attempted murder, finally linking up the murders with the heads of a jewel
heist ring, headed by Frank Niles (Howard Duff) and the murdered woman, with
whom he was having an affair, and carried out by two thugs, Willie Garzah (Ted
de Corsia) and Pete Backalis (Walter Burke). Finally piecing together the
facts, the police solve the case. Enough said.
Besides what truly matters about The Naked City is not its somewhat
hackneyed police story, but the city itself, a gritty, grimy and glowing Manhattan
from another era, skillfully shot by New York photographer Weegee and William
H. Daniels. The cinematographers and director determined to film most of their
movie on location in a day where all but a few films had been shot in studios
or in controlled environments. In a day before easily portable recording
devices and in a time when live shooting, as Dassin relates, drew crowds of
hundreds, they hid their camera in a delivery truck, created a portable florist
stand, and played tricks such as detracting would-be audiences with a political
shill, and using the crowds themselves in some scenes.

It is the towering skyscrapers, the vast
array of small businesses (now mostly gone from the city landscape), the small
corner vendors (one played by the great Yiddish actress Molly Picon), elevated
trains, busses, subways, and numerous shots of children playing and fighting
not only on the city sidewalks, but in the middle of streets, and even on the
Williamsburg Bridge that make this film so very memorable. Because of the sound
problems much of the outdoor camera scenes are mostly silent—some of them
showing unheard conversations—or are narrated by the producer Mark Hellinger,
who died, at a young age, just before
the film was released. His last line, "There are eight million stories in
the naked city. This has been one of
them” has become famous for those of my generation who saw the TV series of
this film in the 1950s.
The last 20 minutes of the film are the
very best, as the murderer and the young detective race through the city,
acrobatically jumping backyard fences, cutting in and through vast lower
East-side crowds, and finally climbing to the towers of the Williamsburg Bridge.
And, although the script of The Naked City is often mundane and even
sentimental, the acting is not half bad, particularly Fiztgerald’s Lieutenant,
who he plays as a cleaver, witty, and cavalier Irishman with an accent as heavy
as lead. Duff, the failed son of a privileged family, whips up amateur lies
faster than the Trump administration, and Dorothy Hart as the murdered woman’s
best friend, Ruth Morrison, like the young and handsome Dan Taylor are a treat
for the eyes.
At one poignant moment, the dead girl’s
mother, Paula Batory (Adelaide Klein) turns in a rather remarkable performance
as she damns her daughter for her greedy desires at the very moment she
expresses her sorrow and pain for her death. And then Molly Picon’s recognition
of the villain suddenly turns to deep regret; she likes the harmonica playing
ex-wrestler because he’s good to children.
Dassin reports that after seeing the final
film in a movie house, he left early with tears in his eyes after
seeing how much the studio had gutted his final cut after Hellinger’s death.
Clearly his original version contained a much more nuanced balance between the
Capraesque everyday scenes and visits to the homes and clubs of well-healed Manhattanites,
presumably to show up just why the dead model and her family-disgraced
boyfriend had turned into jewel thieves and to reiterate the differences in the
“naked” city between the poor and the rich.
But if you look carefully enough,
particularly in the scene where detectives return an expensive ring to the
wealthy Mrs. Edgar Hylton (Enid Markey) and compare it with the sad and
contradictory grieving of the Batorys, you’ll still see the traces of that
important theme. A bit like the mad Mrs. Antony (Marion Lorne) in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Hylton, although
delighted for the return of her daughter’s ring, is a bit incensed that the
police have not found her “other” stolen jewels. As she puts it, “I like to
glitter,” the very thing the simple gardener Batory and his wife hate, and the
reason why the beautiful young lovers turned to thievery and lying.
Clearly Dassin, with his slightly
socialist commentary, had hit a nerve with studio chiefs, which would be
further played out soon after this film when he was visited at his home by
Daryl F. Zanack and told to immediately get himself out of the country, and was
soon after blacklisted by the McCarthy committee for his membership in the
Communist Party (which he had quit in 1939). Dassin, however, says that underneath
it all Zanack was his savior, allowing him to direct one final American studio
film, Night and the City in England,
before the director would be forced to turn to French and later Greek support.
Although Dassin would later return to the USA and direct further US movies and
plays, he had been irreparably altered, and his later American films could not
match The Naked City, his later
French Rififi, or his Greek-based Never on Sunday and Topkapi. A gentle caring man had been transformed into sort of pariah,
another of the American Right’s sacrificial lambs.
Los Angeles,
February 10, 2017
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