331 - The Naked City, United States, 1948. Dir. Jules Dassin.

Monday, November 27, 2017

331 - The Naked City, United States, 1948.  Dir. Jules Dassin.

The Beginning of the Police Procedural.

Producer Mark Hellenger himself opens the film with a voice-over introduction as a helicopter flies over Manhattan.

He describes the city, showcases its defining characteristics, discusses what happens in the night versus the day, and shows us the event of the murder.

Detective Lieutenant Daniel Muldoon, the Irish character actor Barry Fitzgerald, winner of the Academy Award for Going My Way, appears on the scene.  He is a veteran.  He knows what he is doing.

His young partner, James Halloran, arrives with him.  He is new on the job.  Makes the same mistakes Muldoon made when he was his age.  But he is smart and talented and learns fast.

The men collect evidence.

They collected witnesses and people of interest.

They follow up on every lead.

They work the case.

Jean Dexter, 26 years old, unmarried.  Murdered.  She used to be a dress model at Grace Hewitt's on West 57th Street.  She is no more.

Miss Dexter lived a fast life.

This is what one person says of her.

"She needed a good spanking.  Took stimulants by day and needed sleeping pills to sleep at night.  I told her to slow down but, no, life was too short for her."

The person who said it was her doctor.

The men talk to her doctor, Dr. Stoneman.  Then they talk to others who work at Grace Hewitt's on West 57th Street.  Her friend Ruth Morrison.  Their supervisor.  Their workmates.

They talk to Frank Niles.  A fine, upstanding young businessman.

Or perhaps a pathological liar.

Who may have something to do with Ruth Morrison.

And something else to do with Jean Dexter.

Then there is a man named Henderson.

And Dexter's parents, the Batorys.

Somebody named Backalis.

And somebody else who plays the harmonica.

And what about that second body?  The one that turned up in the East River a couple hours after Jean Dexter's?

It is a lot to sort out.

Halloran does his best.  Muldoon helps him.  He has been on the force 36 years.  He knows what to do.  They do it methodically.  Procedurally.  By the book.

The Naked City is not a film noir movie.  Neither was yesterday's Brute Force.

Stylistically, neither has high contrast lighting; neither has stylized artificial lighting; neither has deep focus; neither has unusual camera angles.  There is no wet street and no fog.  Both are shot with conventional lighting conventional camera angles, conventional coverage, conventional framing, and conventional staging--in well-lit shades of gray.

Thematically, there is nothing nightmarish, strange, ambivalent, erotic, or cruel.  There is no doomed protagonist; no femme fatale.  In fact, there is almost no sex at all--other than traditional domesticity.  There is no philosophical exploration of naturalism, determinism, or fatalism.  There is no bribery, extortion, money laundering, racketeering, or blackmail.

The two films do touch upon crime--Brute Force taking place in a penitentiary and The Naked City following a homicide case--and they were both filmed in the 1940s, so some folks mistakenly label them as film noir.  But a crime film from the 1940s is not automatically a film noir.

Yes, Brute Force does have an unusual and violent death with the flame throwers and the shop press, and it does present the fanaticism of the national Socialist leaning Munsey, but otherwise it is a straight prison drama, a rather straightforward moral told in a straightforward manner--with flashbacks interspersed to show the lives of the men with their women before they were incarcerated.  Then it becomes an escape movie like A Man Escaped, Escape from Alcatraz, and The Shawshank Redemption, only with a failed result.

Meanwhile, The Naked City goes out of its way to portray its subject matter not as strange or ambivalent or nightmarish, but, on the contrary, very ordinary, routine, and able to be understood and resolved.  The film even explicitly says so.  After showing a drunk man shoved into the river Hellenger states, "And even this, too, can be called routine, in a city of 8 million people."  The film further makes the point that it has not been filmed in a sound stage or on a lot and has not used movie stars, but goes on location in the vein of Italian neorealism and in the manner of a documentary.  Dassin praised the documentary form, because he believed that it, with added poetry, was a solid way to get at the truth.

The Naked City is a comforting film.  It presents the police as good guys doing noble work.  It portrays their work as being explicitly good and ultimately successful.  It details the forensic process in a methodically organized manner.  It affirms the best ideals of a young country. 

As such, The Naked City has stood as the prototype for many procedurals to come, from its own television series to franchises of today, such as Law & Order, CSI, and NCIS.

There are 8 million stories in the naked city.  This has been one of them.