JULES DASSIN – "The Naked City," "Brute Force," "Never On Sunday" – was on the lam by 1950. He knew he would. I don’t know how he did it. Other parts of The Naked City, like Rivington Street and Stanton Street and Essex Street, where they filmed key scenes, look pretty much the same today. They’re not available right now because of the pandemic. Following King’s murder, Johnny and his gang ask Tank to join them in stealing weapons, but Tank is drunk and distraught watching scenes of the funeral casket, followed by thousands of marchers, on TV, and refuses to join them. Thankfully they at least carried over the wonderful interview with Jules Dassin that Criterion recorded in 2000. It wasn’t just Delancey Street—it was much of the neighborhood directly south. In Uncovering “The Naked City,” Goldstein, a friend of Dassin’s in his later years, connects the warmth and vigor beneath the movie’s commonplace storyline to the director’s bond with his hometown. Max Julien was classically trained, had cowritten Cleopatra Jones, and would go on to star in The Mack. Dee’s Laurie desperately turns tricks and accepts welfare in order to care for her children. When I visited him in Athens, he had a shelf of all her films on VHS, every single one of them. Across the street is the ubiquitous mom-and-pop candy store: it has one of those standard signs, “soda fountain, cigars, candy.” But next to that is a sign for J. GREENFIE . I’m talking about the teens, the twenties. She also worked to bring authenticity to the language and the events portrayed. He talked to me a lot about it, and we faxed a lot. Best of all, Hellinger used his New York newsman connections to Mayor William O’Dwyer and Police Commissioner Arthur Wallander to open the entire city to his cameras, from the Williamsburg Bridge to the morgue at Bellevue Hospital. Also, Edward G. Robinson, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor. As Goldstein wittily traces director Jules Dassin’s Gotham roots and influences, this twenty-three-minute documentary—now playing on the Criterion Channel—becomes an irresistible mash note to the teeming vitality of 1947 New York. One of the world’s most passionate cinephiles, Bertrand Tavernier, passed away last month. I do remember driving through the East Village with Jules, and he said to me, “Wow, they really cleaned this neighborhood up.”. A lot of great movies have terrific location work, but few with a feeling for the life of the city that The Naked City has. Tank bemoans his choice and seeks comfort from his old flame Laurie (Dee), who lives on the edge of town. I was a little bit—I wouldn’t say intimidated by him, but I was worried. The Naked City has been hailed -- and rightfully so -- for effecting a transformation in the nature of crime dramas. There are truly very few filmmakers in the history of film that are quite like legendary auteur Jules Dassin. With movies that spoke urgently to the nation post-independence, the director forged a path between the realist tendencies of the era’s art-house cinema and the pleasures of popular genre filmmaking. I said, “It must have been hard for you—that long flight without a cigarette.” And he said, “No, it was fine. I miss that. This is followed by color footage of the aftermath of King’s assassination, which occurred after Dassin had finished most of the shooting for the film. Tell me about your close-knit team—at the top of the list, William Hohauser, who previously worked with you on The Art of Subtitling in 2018, In the Footsteps of “Speedy” in 2015, and Les Rues de “Mean Streets” in 2010. This came about through Dee and Dassin’s smooth creative partnership, during which the two proved to be very much aligned. The image is consistently sharp, and the many evening and nighttime sequences contain a surprising amount of detail even in the deepest shadows, which is especially … It was the exact time period we needed. Dee was also galvanized by the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and participated in a 1953 rally at Carnegie Hall that demanded clemency for them. The Academy Film Archive has preserved Jules Dassin's film Night and the City, including the British and pre-release versions.