The Naked City

Jules Dassin's police procedural shot in New York, and one of the films that changed how the genre thought about place. A model is found dead in her flat. Detective Muldoon and his young partner run the investigation; the film proceeds step by step, eliminating leads and turning up new names. The real subject is not the story but the method. Instead of a studio the production worked in the actual city, in more than a hundred locations: real apartments, real precinct houses, real streets and real crowds. The camera was sometimes concealed, because people on the street were not meant to perform. The producer Mark Hellinger narrates; his voice runs throughout, and at the close he delivers the film's most quoted line: there are eight million stories in the naked city, and this has been one of them. It won Oscars for cinematography and editing. A genre classic for anyone who likes 1940s American crime films and city films shot on real locations. For a viewer wanting depth of character it is procedural and keeps its distance.