It's about the density, sprawl and darkest edges of The Big Apple - though in truth, the apple's about the size of a cranberry
"We don't like this place," sneer the small town parents of a murdered girl, "this 'fine city.'"
The city in question is, of course, New York - or, as the title would have it, The Naked City.
It's a city that takes you in, corrupts you, then spits you out. This is not, as filmmakers of the '30s would have it, a land of concrete possibility; this is the big city a la 1947, a jungle as dense and dangerous as any zone inhabited during the war years.
And yet, for all of its realism and scale - the film was shot largely cinema veritee, in over 100 real-life locations - The Naked City is more like an underdressed hamlet; it's nowhere near as frank or grand as it thinks it is. In fact, it's rather melodramatic and small.
Yes, it's a flatfoot's tour of post-war New York - The Big Apple on one suspect's photo a day - but, save for the climactic shootout under the El tracks, these periodic excursions into malt shops, beauty parlors, hotel rooms and gymnasiums are but attempts, with the help of a street-wise narrator, to add grandiosity to something on the scale of a modestly priced Charlie Chan vehicle, with Barry Fitzgerald and Don Taylor playing Irish-American versions of the great Oriental logician and his Number One Son.
Together, they make a pastime of grilling handsome, deadpan Howard Duff, who plays a small time thief with ties to the murdered girl. Inevitably, the crook cracks, and Fitzgerald and company are on to a cabal of sweaty wrestlers(!)
Still, the high percentage of location shooting in the film, despite the fact that entries from 1944's Lost Weekend to 1946's Calling Northside 777 were there first, was enough to raise it in the eyes of many to a very high standard. Judging by the calibre of the DVD packaging, that's where it remains, for better or worse, to this day.
A few years later, director Jules Dassin would find himself in France, courtesy of the McCarthy scare. There, he would employ most of the techniques used in the making The Naked City to create a far better film, 1955's Rififi - and in the process help to usher in The Nouvelle Vague.
In Dassin's Naked City, dreams, what the poor, idealistic blonde with those small town parents had a headful of, do not die hard. They are imminently disposable. Dreams of what kind of film this might be, if inspired by the slick, all-important packaging, might well shatter just as quickly.
To paraphrase the film's famous closing line, made more familiar to us by the TV tie-in, "There are 8 million on-line reviews of The Naked City. This has been one of them."
