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The Naked City, 1948
A young woman is murdered in her apartment, leading detectives Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and Halloran (Don Taylor) to investigate the killing. Their chief suspect is a man named Niles (Howard Duff), who was "friends" with the victim. Yet the further they dig, the more seems to be going on beneath the surface.
I tried to watch this movie several years ago and remember totally failing to click with it. I ended up barely paying attention to it and returned the DVD afterward. This time I liked it much more, but I also remembered why it was that I had a less positive reaction the first time I tried it.
There is a lot of really great stuff happening in this film. Some of the visuals are simply stunning, and true to the title, make great use of the sights and geometries of the city.
It's also nice to see a film attempting to portray the nitty-gritty of detective work, with montages showing us that talking to all the jewelry stores in town is a huge, huge ask with very little payoff sometimes. There is time given to the forensics, the interviews, the family identifying the body, the impact of publicity, and the dangers involved. The film also takes moments to zoom out, to remind us that the dead woman is just one person out of hundreds of thousands, and one of the most chilling shots is simply a cut from a discarded newspaper with her face on the front being swept into a trash bin to her bereaved parents on their porch back in the countryside.
Fitzgerald is a fun actor (I really like him in And Then There Were None), and Taylor is a good counterpart as the fresh-faced detective just learning the ropes. Duff is a perfect blend of pathetic and smarmy as the deceptive Niles. There's also a good turn from Adelaide Klein as the murder victim's mother, who rails against her daughter's immorality before breaking down in sobs when she finally sees her body.
There were two things that I didn't care for in this film and definitely were the reason I couldn't click with it perviously.
The first is that the movie has some elements that really work against each other. For all of the talk about this being a real look at the process of a murder investigation, complete with some documentary-like flourishes, the murder investigation itself is incredibly outlandish, involving chases, more murders/attempted murders, conspiracy, multiple players, an attempted suicide, scandal . . . and so on and so on. And I absolutely hated the cutesty voice over, which took several sequence into the realm of camp. In one shot, a woman nervously bites her thumb as she looks at a front page headline about the murder. "Don't worry young lady," the voice over intrudes in a chipper tone, "Not many stenographers getting murdered these days!". Just . . . why. Why. I honestly don't mind that the film is a bit over-the-top or improbable, but it goes entirely against the realism it is purporting to show. This persists for the whole film and dinged every scene it was in.
Then very specifically, I HATED a sequence where Halloran goes home and then engages in the world's longest conversation with his obnoxious wife where she just repeatedly insists that he go upstairs and beat their child. (The fact that she does this after offering him "jellied tongue" for lunch makes this easily one of the most repulsive sequences of middle class America I've ever seen). And the scene just does not end. Please someone tell me why this interaction had to last more than 60 seconds. I do not understand.
Overall I enjoyed this, and I finally consider myself as having actually watched it.
The Naked City, 1948
A young woman is murdered in her apartment, leading detectives Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and Halloran (Don Taylor) to investigate the killing. Their chief suspect is a man named Niles (Howard Duff), who was "friends" with the victim. Yet the further they dig, the more seems to be going on beneath the surface.
I tried to watch this movie several years ago and remember totally failing to click with it. I ended up barely paying attention to it and returned the DVD afterward. This time I liked it much more, but I also remembered why it was that I had a less positive reaction the first time I tried it.
There is a lot of really great stuff happening in this film. Some of the visuals are simply stunning, and true to the title, make great use of the sights and geometries of the city.
It's also nice to see a film attempting to portray the nitty-gritty of detective work, with montages showing us that talking to all the jewelry stores in town is a huge, huge ask with very little payoff sometimes. There is time given to the forensics, the interviews, the family identifying the body, the impact of publicity, and the dangers involved. The film also takes moments to zoom out, to remind us that the dead woman is just one person out of hundreds of thousands, and one of the most chilling shots is simply a cut from a discarded newspaper with her face on the front being swept into a trash bin to her bereaved parents on their porch back in the countryside.
Fitzgerald is a fun actor (I really like him in And Then There Were None), and Taylor is a good counterpart as the fresh-faced detective just learning the ropes. Duff is a perfect blend of pathetic and smarmy as the deceptive Niles. There's also a good turn from Adelaide Klein as the murder victim's mother, who rails against her daughter's immorality before breaking down in sobs when she finally sees her body.
There were two things that I didn't care for in this film and definitely were the reason I couldn't click with it perviously.
The first is that the movie has some elements that really work against each other. For all of the talk about this being a real look at the process of a murder investigation, complete with some documentary-like flourishes, the murder investigation itself is incredibly outlandish, involving chases, more murders/attempted murders, conspiracy, multiple players, an attempted suicide, scandal . . . and so on and so on. And I absolutely hated the cutesty voice over, which took several sequence into the realm of camp. In one shot, a woman nervously bites her thumb as she looks at a front page headline about the murder. "Don't worry young lady," the voice over intrudes in a chipper tone, "Not many stenographers getting murdered these days!". Just . . . why. Why. I honestly don't mind that the film is a bit over-the-top or improbable, but it goes entirely against the realism it is purporting to show. This persists for the whole film and dinged every scene it was in.
Then very specifically, I HATED a sequence where Halloran goes home and then engages in the world's longest conversation with his obnoxious wife where she just repeatedly insists that he go upstairs and beat their child. (The fact that she does this after offering him "jellied tongue" for lunch makes this easily one of the most repulsive sequences of middle class America I've ever seen). And the scene just does not end. Please someone tell me why this interaction had to last more than 60 seconds. I do not understand.
Overall I enjoyed this, and I finally consider myself as having actually watched it.