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The Naked City

Posted : 10 years ago on 27 March 2014 02:23

The Naked City is frequently heralded as a great film noir, but I frankly just don’t see it. It lacks much of moral quagmire that noir traffics in. Here the good guys (the cops) are straight-laced and completely heroic, while are bad guys have no ambiguity or nuance present in them. Film noir was a black and white populated by tortured souls who were effectively various shades of grey. Naked City cleans everything up, playing more like pro-police propaganda than anything else.

Or maybe it plays out more like a police procedural show? The road map is clearly there: begin with the murder, follow through with various suspects, and conclude with the apprehension of the murder. It’s formulaic, even for the time, with the only truly daring choice was to film in a primitive variation of cinema verite. The film is shot on the streets of New York, effectively become a character, and I presume the spirit of the city was the narrator since that plot device felt like lazy writing. Instead of developing a strong primary character through which to view the proceeding events, we’re given lazy narration from an unseen eye and hand held by the director throughout the entire duration. But where is the dark cynicism at the heart of so much of the crime genre? Where is the expressive, emotive lighting?

It’s not without its charms or reasons to watch it. Stories like these always work in some base level, even if they never transcend beyond being merely serviceable. And it’s not that The Naked City didn’t leave a legacy behind it. Dragnet, Law & Order, Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue these are the children of The Naked City. It’s just that it hasn’t aged well, other films from the same era did this material with more artistic daring, or tighter scripts, or more inventive cinematography. And its descendents have leapt over its small achievements. Not every classic is going to register with you, and this one certainly didn’t make much of an impression with me.


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