Last night I watched the 1948 movie THE NAKED CITY on DVD. The movie is usually classified as film noir, but to me it's a bit too brightly lit and cheefully narrated for that. It is, however, a police procedural -- in many ways, the grandaddy of shows like LAW AND ORDER.
The movie is unique for many reasons. There's that narrator, the producer, who talks more than just about any non-documentary narrator in film history. There's the fact that the narrator announces at the beginning of the film, during the airplane shot of Manhattan: The movie was shot entirely on location, on the streets of post-war New York and in its office buildings and apartments. There's New York's status as the main character in the film; outside of Barry Fitzgerald (playing the most Irish of Irish cops), there are no stars in the movie, and the film abounds with long shots that shrink the characters in relationship to the cityscape around them. And of course there's one of the most famous lines in cinema history in the last scene: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."
I was struck by how the close the tone of the movie was to several of Will Eisner's THE SPIRIT comics stories from the same era, both those done before and after the movie's release. If a movie had been made of THE SPIRIT back then, it might have looked like this.
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