But once we begin to focus less on Hellinger’s play-by-play, it’s easy to get lost in the vivid look of the film. Like most vintage noirs, it begins at night with the first of two deaths but startlingly, instead of overwhelming the lens with rain-soaked streets, the endless fog of cigarette smoke, and shadows lurking in dark alleyways, a bulk of The Naked City takes place in the daylight. Instead of the genre’s overreliance on the “rack focus” as the camera fixates on a gun, then the finger on the trigger, then the person it’s aimed at, everything in The Naked City looks like photographs that have been pulled from preserved copies of The New York Times or from the pages of Life magazine. And after just ten minutes, it’s easy to see why the film earned Oscars for not only its gifted cinematographer William Daniels but also the painstaking editing by Paul Weatherwax.
Still, typical of the genre, there’s a brutal crime at hand — namely, the death of beautiful 26-year-old, fast-living dress model Jean Dexter, but straying from the norm, this time around it’s the cops and not the crooks we follow on our journey. Therefore, not conventionally noir, Naked City is best labeled as NYU professor and author Dana Polan notes on the DVD, an early example of the type of “police procedural” filmmaking, or as I view it, a far more sophisticated example of the type of stories we see every night on television whether it’s C.S.I. or Law and Order.
Essentially after the early violence, the film begins “after noir ends,” as Polan noted, and it’s framed by its “crime fighting” emphasis, which the professor stated was reassuring to those living in a post-war America and questioning just what would follow their “last great adventure.” Instead of the vagueness and existential questioning of Humphrey Bogart’s Raymond Chandler character Philip Marlowe and most of noir, Polan argued that Naked City works on a subconsciously theoretical level as proof that “there is order to the universe,” by reaffirming the positive value of life lived as a bland “organizational man.”
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