Tales from the Urban Jungle: Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948) (Review)

Film noir’s spiritual home has always been the streets. With The Naked City, though, Jules Dassin made that spiritual home into a literal home. Previous films had cooked up bustling metropolitan locations on Hollywood sound-stages, but Dassin’s film was the first film to take advantage of the new lightweight cameras and faster film stock that had been developed for World War II newsreels and take the production out to real New York locations. The title derives from a book of street photography by Arthur “Weegee” Fellig, a great NYC character who was famous for his near-supernatural ability to turn up at crime scenes before the police. With its story drawn from real NYPD reports, The Naked City promised to bring that immediacy and authenticity to the movies.

Since then, directors from Jean-Luc Godard to Shane Meadows have all tried, in their differing ways, to bring a kind of chaotic realism into crime genre storytelling. Despite experimenting with such wonderful techniques as shooting from behind a one-way mirror to ensure bystanders didn’t notice the cameras, Dassin’s film can’t help but creak a little now. The dialogue is as stylised as noir usually is, and the central character – Barry Fitzgerald’s Detective Dan Muldoon – is a variant on the Columbo/Miss Marple archetype of the brilliant sleuth who’s easy to underestimate. But The Naked City was never solely about realism. It has one immediately obvious non-naturalistic element in the form of a voiceover by its producer Mark Hellinger. Hellinger begins by promising something “a bit different to most movies”, and he doesn’t leave the fourth wall alone for the rest of the film. Sometimes he even gives his characters orders – “Stop and look at a tie! Maybe you’re being shadowed!” – which feels more like something from John Smith’s seminal underground short The Girl Chewing Gum than anything you’d expect from a 1940s Hollywood studio.

Who was Jules Dassin, and how did he get Universal to sign off on such a project? Back in 1948, the answer would have been “he was a safe pair of hands”. Dassin had served an apprenticeship making solid wartime morale-raisers like Nazi Agent and Reunion in France, but he’d recently made the leap to A-pictures. Nowadays, he is perhaps better-known for how his Hollywood career ended, blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee during production of his 1950 film Night and the City. (Those who still believe HUAC was dealing with a clear and present threat to the United States should note Dassin had quit the US Communist Party eleven years previously in protest at the Nazi-Soviet Pact) Like a lot of HUAC’s victims, he then set about proving America’s loss was the rest of the world’s gain, directing the classic French noir Rififi before settling in Greece.

Dassin’s exile was doubly pointless, since it’s actually pretty difficult to find evidence of Leftist messaging in most of his films. The Naked City‘s criminality is strictly street-level stuff, never broadening out into wider systemic critique and framing the police as straightforward heroes. The earlier film in this Arrow Academy Blu-Ray set is a different matter. The first film Dassin felt truly proud of, Brute Force is a film about a prison riot that is easily readable as a metaphor for wider social repression.

The protagonist is Burt Lancaster’s Joe Collins, but the film’s moral voice is provided by Art Smith as Dr. Walters, who gives some remarkably pointed speeches about the futility of a rehabilitative prison system (“When people are sick, you don’t cure them by making them sicker!”). There is no such ambiguity over who the villain is. Hume Cronyn’s Captain Munsey is one of American cinema’s most horrifying monsters, a physically slight yet ruthless sadist who deliberately sets prisoners against each other for the satisfaction of punishing them. When he gets a convict called Wilson to plant a weapon on Joe, sending him to solitary confinement, Joe beats Munsey to the punishment part by getting his friends to crush Wilson to death in a stamping machine. It’s a scene which still shocks today, and naturally Munsey takes it as an excuse to crack down even further. When the Captain invokes social Darwinism to justify his treatment of prisoners, or listens to Wagner while dishing out a vicious beating, we know exactly which European despot is on Dassin’s mind.

In the supplementary material, screenwriter Josh Olson suggests Brute Force is more of a war movie than a prison movie. By the time the guards are responding to a Molotov cocktail hitting an observation tower by strafing the prisoners with machine-gun fire, you can see what he means. I’ve long had a problem with prison movies because – bar a few maverick works like Hunger or A Prophet – the restricted space is often matched by restricted dramatic possibilities. They’re either about escape, in which case you’re usually marking time until the third-act bid for freedom, or survival. Brute Force blends elements of both with a much greater amount of sociological detail than you’d expect, and also distinguishes itself with a level of acrid pessimism that stands out even among classic noirs. Joe might be the top dog in the prison yard, but he’s still in prison, and his hopes of compassionate release (his wife has cancer) are doused in cold water by the older inmate Gallagher: “Those gates only open three times – when you come in, when you go out, when you’re dead.”

It’s a movie that genuinely haunts you. The extras feature Olson, David Cairns and Fiona Watson paying homage to its dark fascination, a commentary by Josh Olson and a look back at Burt Lancaster’s early career from his biographer Kate Buford. The Naked City has Film Comment‘s legendary critic Amy Taubin providing a history of New York in the movies, as well as an inspired commentary by Cairns, a visual essay by Eloise Ross and a fascinatingly sympathetic documentary short from 1950 about the 1947 “Hollywood Ten” trial which kick-started the blacklist. (Among the Ten was The Naked City‘s screenwriter Albert Maltz) There aren’t many discs where the production stills gallery is a highlight, but The Naked City is an exception – every promotional shot was lensed by Weegee himself, and they’re faithfully reproduced here.

Often accused of being pretentious, the Style Council chose to face down these allegations in 1987 by promoting their album The Cost of Loving with a non-linear musical satire on British identity in the age of Thatcherism, narrated by a pre-Reverend Richard Coles. Surprisingly, this did not stop people from calling them pretentious, and the resulting film JerUSAlem (it is our sad duty to confirm that yes, you saw what they did there) vanished from sight.

APRIL PATREON – POP SCREEN PLUS

Thanks for reading Graham’s review of Brute Force & The Naked City

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