The Naked City

FOLLOWED BY: UNCOVERING “THE NAKED CITY” (BRUCE GOLDSTEIN, 2020)

Shot almost entirely on location in New York City, Jules Dassin’s The Naked City broke Hollywood convention at a time when most films were still made largely on studio sets. Producer Mark Hellinger and cinematographer William H. Daniels turned streets, apartments, bridges, and crowds into an essential part of the film, bringing a documentary immediacy to the police procedural. Its influence extended to the television series of the same name and generations of New York location filmmaking. The screening is followed by Bruce Goldstein’s Uncovering The Naked City (2020), which revisits the film’s locations more than seventy years later.

After a former model is drowned in her bathtub, Detective James Halloran (Don Taylor) and Lieutenant Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) attempt to piece together her murder. A friend of the victim mentions Mr. Henderson, and the police also find the actions of Frank Niles (Howard Duff) peculiar. As Muldoon and Halloran start to fill in the details of the victim’s past, they find that she had a lively social life, filled with many suitors, and the mystery becomes even more complex.

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UNCOVERING “THE NAKED CITY”
Directed by Bruce Goldstein
USA | 2020 | 24 mins | English

In this original short documentary and personal essay, Bruce Goldstein, founder of Rialto Pictures and repertory director at New York’s FIlm Forum, tracks down many of the 100+ New York City locations—from the Bronx to the Lower East Side—used in his friend Jules Dassin’s classic police procedural ‘The Naked City’ while also spotlighting the contributions of producer Mark Hellinger and cinematographer William Daniels.