The Naked City - Jules Dassin's 1948 noir - is well worth viewing if you're into modern cinema shot on the streets of New York. While the story is a bit slow-moving and cliche (too much talk - not enough death), the chase scenes are truly magnificent for such an early attempt. The best is, of course, the finale where our foreign wrestler/harmonica player/villain outruns the cops all the way to the Williamsburg Bridge. He runs out of options and heaves himself up an Esher staircase to the very top of the structure where he lingers over both Manhattan and Brooklyn shooting down at the cops. They eventually take him down (in all ways you're thinking).
The photo in this post is a famous shot by Weegee from his book The Naked City. It preceded the film by about 3 years and shares few concrete relations other than a stark, gritty realization of a stark, gritty city. Interesting that within both Naked Cities there are raging fires from trashcans, buildings and waste that somehow become prominent public gathering spots. It's a familiar site. New Yorkers huddle around to watch the flames with their coffee mugs and families. They make snide remarks about unrelated things and take joy in the danger that their time could come any moment.
There's also the loner with an equally blase reaction to the fire. He or she hangs out the window reading a book with a cigarette. It's good candlelight.
This phenomenon is articulated better than I could ever approach in Luc Sante's amazing essay entitled My Lost City. He writes:
For those of us who had been in the city for a while, squalor was not an issue. Most of the city was squalid. If this troubled you, you left, and if you were taken by the romance of it, a long regimen of squalor in everyday life would eventually scrub your illusions gray. At this remove I'm sometimes retrospectively amazed by what I took for granted. Large fires a few blocks away every night for a couple of years would seem conducive to a perpetually troubled state of mind, but they just became weather. I spent the summer of 1975 in a top-floor apartment on 107th Street, where at night the windows were lit by the glow of fires along Amsterdam Avenue. A sanitation strike was in progress, and mounds of refuse, reeking in the heat, decorated the curbs of every neighborhood, not excepting those whose houses were manned by doormen. Here, though, instead of being double-bagged in plastic, they were simply set on fire every night. The spectacle achieved the transition from apocalyptic to dully normal in a matter of days.That final sentence could be a great springboard for a discussion of our current recession/depression/doom. Maybe another time.
