“There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” as the narrator immortally states at the close of this breathtakingly vivid film—and this is one of them. Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin and newspaperman-cum-producer Mark Hellinger’s dazzling police procedural, The Naked City, was shot entirely on location in New York. Influenced as much by Italian neorealism as it is by American crime fiction, this double Academy Award winner remains a benchmark for naturalism in noir, living and breathing in the promises and perils of the Big Apple, from its lowest depths to its highest skyscrapers.
FILM INFO
- Jules Dassin
- United States
- 1948
- 96 minutes
- Black & White
- 1.37:1
- English
- Spine #380
- On the Blu-ray: New 4K digital restoration by TLEFilms FIlm Restoration & Preservation Services, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- On the DVD: Restored high-definition digital transfer
- Audio commentary from 1996 featuring screenwriter Malvin Wald
- Interview from 2006 with film scholar Dana Polan
- Interview from 2006 with author James Sanders (Celluloid Skyline) on the film’s New York locations
- Footage of director Jules Dassin from a 2004 appearance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
- Stills gallery
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author and critic Luc Sante and production notes from producer Mark Hellinger to Dassin
September 8, 2020
