New Picture

The Naked City (Universal-International) is the last, and in some ways the best, of the late Mark Hellinger's pictures. It opens with a magniloquent sunlit air view of Manhattan and with Hellinger's voice, talking of his town with as happy pride and affection as if it were his year-old son, already counting to ten. Then the picture settles down to explore the city as Hellinger knew and liked it best.

A semidocumentary, The Naked City was filmed almost entirely in the streets, apartments, stores and offices of New York City. But Bellinger's New York is not a dark, tense, malignly beautiful community; evil things go on there, but by & large the city is bursting with energy, grandeur, sunlight, human variety and an eager journalistic glamor. All these qualities linger pleasantly in the mind long after the picture is over.

The story, like the movie as a whole, is a nice blend of journalistic hardheadedness and softheartedness. Peering through windows, late on a summer night, the camera finds a room in which a girl is being murdered. There is the killer, but the watcher knows neither his identity nor his motive. The body is found and the news buzzes through to Homicide. During the balance of the show, the audience follows a veteran detective (Barry Fitzgerald), his young helper (Don Taylor) and a swarm of assistants, from laboratory experts to pavement pounders, at the long hard job of smelling out suspects and closing in on the criminal. It is a remarkably thorough, fresh and engrossing exposition of big-city criminological methods.

Along with all its virtues, The Naked City has obvious flaws. Quite good in action scenes, some of the more intimate directing is crude. Some of the dialogue is painfully hammy. And not all of Hellinger's new, young actors are fully up to their jobs. Veteran Fitzgerald, acting overtime to make up for them, somewhat abuses the privilege with some high-skilled mugging.

But most of these flaws are appropriate to the special Hellinger brands of friendliness, boyishness and sentimentality that pervade the picture. It would be hard to imagine a movie melodrama less cynical, less brutal and cheaply hardboiled, more essentially kindly and sweet-tempered. And it would be hard to beat the setting and handling of the chase which climaxes the film by pulling the hair up on your head and keeping it there.

The Naked City isn't really naked, incidentally ; if Hellinger had by any chance found it so, he would probably have given it his own shirt.

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