By David in TN
wednesday, june 21, 2023 at 6:19:00 p.m. edt
TCM is showing The Naked City (1948) Friday morning at 9:30 a.m. et. Although grouped in the Noir canon, it was the first police procedural, and spawned a series of pseudo-documentary crime pictures. It had tropes such as the veteran detective (Barry Fitzgerald) and the young partner (Don Taylor), which became standard.
The Naked City was filmed in the summer of 1947 in New York City, and is a time capsule of how it looked and the demographics. The story is supposed to be “dark,” but as in many films of the period, late 1940s New York City looks very civilized.
Mark Hellinger, the producer, narrated with the most famous line, (“There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them”). Hellinger died at 44, of a heart attack, right after seeing the final cut.
Some film historians and reviewers have said the climax takes place on the Brooklyn Bridge, but there is a sign reading “Williamsburg Bridge.”
N.S.: Since the best crime pictures TCM broadcasts are rarely programmed by Red Eddie Muller, I see only two possible, complementary explanations for this practice: Out of his own aesthetic and moral perfidy, Muller deliberately schedules bad or mediocre movies, and/or someone at Turner makes a point of compensating for Muller’s bad taste, by scheduling great crime pictures for slots that Muller does not control. Thus, you see pictures like Raoul Walsh’s gangster masterpiece, The Roaring 20’s (1939), John Boorman’s classic neo-noir (post-1960), Point Blank (1967), William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and The Naked City under the auspices of a different, nameless producer, who surely gets paid a fraction of what Red Eddie gets.
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