He would have gone to Loew’s Delancey, or Loew’s Clinton, or the Palestine Theatre. Explicit engagement with King’s legacy turns up again in a central sequence that depicts a group of Afrocentric revolutionaries called the Council meeting with elder Black city representatives, who plead for continued diplomacy. Frank Silvera, in the role of an integrationist promoting a nonviolent ideology, was an alumnus of the American Negro Theatre and a founder of the “American Theatre of Being,” an integrated Los Angeles acting conservatory that supported the advancement of Black performers and fought against stereotypical roles. They married in 1948 and soon became further involved in various progressive and Black arts movements. Jules Dassin, eigentlich Julius Dassin[1] (* 18. I was concerned about that. What do you miss about the New York street life in The Naked City? A seminal work of crime filmmaking that lead the young critic Francois Truffaut to declare the best Film Noir I have ever seen, Jules Dassins Rififi [Du rififi chez les hommes] has influenced films as diverse as Reservoir Dogs and Oceans Eleven since its release. He thought Hellinger must have then succumbed to pressure from Universal executives to cut his most pointed juxtapositions of glitz and poverty or middle-class coziness and homelessness. Now available via the Criterion Collection, director Jules Dassin’s “Brute Force” remains as explosive an indictment of prison reform today as in 1947. The standard-definition presentation comes from a high-definition restoration, which was scanned from a composite print. I asked if he’d like some water. That’s one reason we hit it off so well. A location story in the Daily Worker described Murder on Diamond Row on the marquee at Loew’s Delancey and Charlie Chan in the Trap at the Apollo. Another was the guy banging on the Chiclets machine. When he admits to betraying Johnny, she violently attacks him but later nurses his wounds and tries to console him one last time. But I didn’t think much about the neighborhood back then, even though my father grew up there. The ink was barely dry on my tribute to Richard Widmark, and two days later the actor's Night & the City director passed away. And we had the tax photos, the 1946 phone book, and the set photos by Weegee and Stanley Kubrick, and production stills shot by Universal’s own photographer. “Nah, but I’m dying for a smoke.” He was a chain-smoker, even though he lived to ninety-six. He made Rififi, his comeback picture, in Paris: its virtuoso silent jewelry heist put him on the map as an international auteur. Is he some kind of teen prodigy? You ended that film with a quote from the LA Herald: “New York is changing rapidly and photoplays like this one will help preserve the old landmarks.” You end Uncovering “The Naked City” on a more intimate note, calling it Dassin’s “love letter to his own hometown,” saying, “few films have so affectionately captured a city’s vitality, soul, and memory.”. I never get bored of it. 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. Kiss Me Deadly admittedly comes pretty close, as does Shadow Of A Doubt, but Jules Dassin’s 1950 film truly conjures up the entire genre with just those four simple words—even though it’s adapted from a novel (by Gerald Kersh) published in 1938, almost a decade before the term film noir was coined. You can’t kill the creativity. Dee recounts the ease with which she worked with the director, Jules Dassin, and the satisfaction she derived from the writing process. She describes feeling emboldened by her “own involvement as a black woman, and as a human being in the Struggle,” which gave her “a wealth of people and experiences to draw on.” The movie remains a singular entry in her filmography, and her humanity, convictions, and life experiences shine through in every aspect with which she was involved: the dialogue, the casting, and her own performance. Though I haven’t been back since the pandemic. The Naked City has been hailed -- and rightfully so -- for effecting a transformation in the nature of crime dramas. ... Uptight is playing on the Criterion Channel now through April 30, 2021. Suffused with her characteristic empathy, Dee’s performance embodies a complex fusion of rage and pain in the face of societal injustice. Life Meets Art in Uptight, Ruby Dee’s Groundbreaking Collaboration with Jules Dassin. Shot by famed cinematographer, William Daniels and directed by the soon-to-be Hollywood black-listed, Jules Dassin, THE NAKED CITY turns out to be nothing more than a rather pedestrian police procedural. But I said we will never be able to identify the name of the laundry. New York is vital, even during the pandemic. I have all these faxes from him, like a hundred, written in this teensy-weensy handwriting. Some have argued that the film was a progenitor of Blaxploitation, but it’s more complex in its moral and social worldview than that association might imply. Directed by Jules Dassin • 1968 • United States. Were there any that jumped out that you didn’t see before? It helps to have a high-definition copy of the movie, of course. It’s easy for me to imagine the day they shot there—the crew getting there at dawn and grabbing that shot of the street-cleaner truck under the archway, and then, around seven o’clock, before it gets too crowded, doing those shots underground in the subway at Lexington and 110th Street, and then going down seven blocks, to 103rd, to grab the exterior of the rush-hour crowd getting into the subway. It was like being with Princess Di. The film is set in Cleveland, Ohio (where Dee was born), in the Flats, a declining Black neighborhood skirting the city’s steel mills and industrial infrastructure. Greenfie Pickle Pr” across the street. It’s not the one we remember and we’re nostalgic for, and maybe not in the same neighborhoods. Is there an equivalent to Naked City’s bustling street life now? There actually is a great clue in the frame. He did describe some of the things he did to distract the crowds away from the shoot. No classic film noir sports a more quintessentially noir-ish title than Night And The City. . Then you look at it closely, and you say, just wait a minute. She found the work fulfilling and was able to quickly and thoroughly imagine the scenes that Dassin proposed. You know, “My God, that’s Jules!”. You focus on the unstressed vignettes and visual details that, more than anything else, bring Jules’s movie to life. Out now on Criterion: http://www.criterion.com/films/654-rififi I’m talking about the teens, the twenties. Jules Dassin died earlier this week at the age of 96. Boy, the pictures of him taken by Kubrick and Weegee—he’s having so much fun in the streets, getting down with the people.