New York. The Big Apple. The Naked City. The City That Never Sleeps. Gotham. The Capital of the World. The City So Nice, They Named It Twice. I've never been, but I know a few people that have, so it must exist in the real world and not just on movie sets across the world. New York has been well represented in and well treated by Hollywood over the years. Make a list of your top 10 films. Go ahead, I'll wait. I'd wager good (as opposed to morally rehensible) money that New York is featured at least once in that list. How could it not be? Sweet Smell of Success, Ghostbusters, All About Eve, On the Waterfront, Marty, the Apartment, Rosemary's Baby, Midnight Cowboy, Do The Right Thing, the French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon, King Kong, Once Upon a Time in America, When Harry Met Sally, Metropolitan, the Fisher King, Eyes Wide Shut, the œuvres of Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, and, spoilers ahoy, Planet of the Apes. And that's just scratching the surface. Some of these films are merely set with the five boroughs as a backdrop, others represent the city as its own character.
As a kid, I fell in love with the architecture and feel of New York through Ghostbusters. To this day, I still have a yearning to climb those steps and visit the New York Public Library (which I intend to do in November, touch wood). Film is definitely a medium that idealises many aspects of life, whether it be locations, emotions or situations (both tragic and comedic). Most films do this implicitly, seemingly unaware of their actions or their consequences, but one of my favourite films confronts this head on and also happens to be one of the greatest New York movies of all time; Woody Allen's Manhattan.
There's much going on in Allen's love letter to the town that raised him, especially when pontificating on constant battle between anticipated and realised states in love. However, most of the later scenes in this film are forgotten in favourite for the tour de force that is the opening montage. Voice over is a tricky commodity. It's a particularly delicate tool in a filmmaker's bag. When it goes well, it goes so far in making a film distinctive and successful, (though more recent examples seem to have a comedic presence attached; see Adaptation, Goodfellas, the Big Lebowski). Never has been more apparent to me than watching Jules Dassin's Naked City.
My housemates have been away on holiday this week, so I've been taking advantage of the incredibly quick internet connection in the kitchen by watching high quality streamed films via my film rental service of choice. I've been getting home from work, doing a bit of tidying, doing a bit of study, having tea and sticking something on the old PS3 streaming do'hicky. On Wednesday, I queued up Naked City. I was shocked. The opening sequence was, albeit less successful, riffing on the some of the same ideas as the introductory shots to Manhattan.
The strength of the introduction to Manhattan is how multifaceted it is. Primarily, it acts at a superficial level to introduce us to the setting and the main character, Woody Allen's affected writer Isaac. Context also allows us to extrapolate that Isaac (and therefore by proxy, Woody) is writing autobiographically about his feelings toward New York, all the while providing us with vibrant visuals and music. It's hard not to romanticize New York out of all proportion when presented with a backdrop like that. Furthermore, it introduces us to some of the themes of the film - the gap between expectation and reality, acting according to how one feels as opposed to how one is expected to feel. All that, plus it's funny as well. It's an invigorating sequence made all the better by how well its various aspects work together in unity.
Naked City could not be further from this. Its biggest problem is how disjointed it is. As Jules Dassin would further prove with Rififi, he was a great visual storyteller. There is a completely silent, 33 minute long heist sequence at the heart of Rififi which I can't praise enough. The same sort of visual panache is evident throughout Naked City, in fact, I'd go so far to say that it is visually one of the most consistently high quality films out there. So what's the problem? Well, much like Manhattan, we are presented with a montage of images highlight the different walks of life present in New York, the energy, the sights. Also like Manhattan, there's a voice over. This voice over is one of the most ill-judged and flat out confusing aspects of a film I have seen since Quentin Tarantino being cast in, well, anything.
The narration is presented in an odd, almost Rod Serling manner by producer Mark Hellinger. He tells us who he is, names the players involved, generally acts as a title sequence. The whole thing has a 'you've not seen anything like this folks', PT Barnum showman vibe as it opens, but as it continues, it just becomes more baffling. It starts telling you exactly what you're seeing on screen. First, if you've started watching a film, do you really need someone in the film telling you how good it is? No, that's the job of the promotional material, the film should just be concerned with being good. Secondly, as I've mentioned above, Dassin (and his Oscar winning DP William H. Daniels) know how to construct a story visually. All the information that Hellinger provides, we've already seen. It doesn't require any further pointing out. The whole thing is hokey and redundant. My only hypothesis is that, given that Hellinger died during the post production, the voice over acted as a tribute to a man they enjoyed working with. Unfortunately, it near derails this beautiful example of 40s noir.
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Other musings
One of my friends has traded his car in for a disused taxi. I can't think of anything worth sharing more than that.
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