“There are Eight Million Stories in the Naked City: This Has been One of Them”: See the Original, Classic, Police Procedural (and Father of the Classic, Eponymous TV Series) Picture, The Naked City (1948), Shot on the Streets of New York, for Free, Plus Music, without Commercial Interruption, on the Streets of WEJB/NSU!

[“See the Last Episode of Naked City, the Legendary TV Drama that Starred the Streets of New York City, Guest Starring Steven Hill: S04E34 ‘Barefoot on a Bed of Coals’ (1963).”]

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.”


A Suite of Miklos Rosza and ….. Music to The Naked City: “Pursuit” and “Epilogue: Song of a Great City”

“Two movements from Miklos Rozsa and Frank Skinner’s ‘Background to Violence’ suite (aka the ‘Mark Hellinger Suite’ or ‘Naked City: Six Dramatic Moods’). The pieces come from his score for The Naked City (Universal Studios 1948), and were here re-performed by Rozsa himself, conducting the RPO in London.”



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.

Postscript, November 24, 2023: The greatest procedural of all, by far, was Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), which was an adaptation of Salvatore Lombino’s An 87th Precinct Novel: King’s Ransom (1959). Lombino wrote Ransom under one of his two most successful pseudonyms, Ed McBain. His other most successful pseudonym was Evan Hunter. An agent had advised the young Lombino to change his name.

At imdb, someone screwed up and gave as the author of the novel, buried in the “full cast & crew” credits, “Evan Hunter (novel) (as Edo Makubein).”


The Naked City: The Complete, Restored Version





The WEJB/NSU Theater, 1902-1981:

Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902);

The Great Train Robbery (1903);

C.B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man (1914);

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915);

D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages (1916);

Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1918);

Starring “Jack”: See the 1920 Silent Picture Classic of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde;

Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920);

Buster Keaton's One Week (1920);

D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920);

F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1921);

The Kid (1921), Charlie Chaplin’s First Feature as Director;

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s First Pictures Featuring the Evil Genius, Dr. Mabuse: Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, Teil I (Dr. Mabuse, the Player, Part I); and

Dr. Mabuse, Teil II: Inferno (Dr. Mabuse, Inferno, Part II, both 1922, released one month apart) with English subtitles;

James Cruze’s The Covered Wagon (1923);

John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924);

Charlie, in The Gold Rush (1925);

Lon Chaney, in The Phantom of the Opera (1925);

King Vidor, Laurence Stallings, and Harry Behn’s The Big Parade (1925), Starring Gilbert and Adore!

Buster Keaton’s The General (1926);

John Ford’s 1926 Western, 3 Bad Men;

Josef von Sternberg and Ben Hecht’s Underworld (1927), the First American Gangster Picture;

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927);

“Wild Bill” Wellman’s Restored, Classic Silent Picture, Wings (1927), One of the First Two Best Picture Oscar Winners;

F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, One of the First Two Best Picture Oscar Winners);

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s Dystopian Science Fiction Epic, Metropolis (1927), the Greatest S/F Picture Ever, Plus Its Soundtrack Suite;

Frank Borzage and Austin Strong’s Seventh Heaven (1927);

Samson Raphaelson, Alfred A. Cohn, Jack Jarmuth and Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927), the First-Ever Talkie, Starring Al Jolson, by Warner Brothers;

St. Louis Blues (talkie, short, 1929);

Fritz Lang & Thea von Harbou’s First Talkie: M: Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931) (M: A City Searches for a Murderer);

Paul Robeson in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (talkie, 1933);

The Man Who Knew too Much (1934): See the Original Version of the Early Hitchcock Classic

Kate Hepburn in the Super Chief’s Quality Street (1937);

Cary Grant and Roz Russell in Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, and Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940);

Zero’s Since You Went Away (1944);

William Dieterle’s A Portrait of Jennie (1948); and

https://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2023/11/there-are-eight-million-stories-in.html>Jules Dassin, Albert Malz, and Malvin Wald’s The Naked City (1948), Plus Music; and

Paul Newman, in Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981).