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142 8 Cloaked in Compromise jules dassin’s “naked” city Rebecca Prime Is it the director’s fault if the title lies, if the city hasn’t been unveiled to us but on the contrary, its reality modestly hidden? After all, we can still find in it, in filigree, the traces of another sort of reality. Jean Paul Marquet, Positif (1955) The Naked City (Universal, 1948) was Jules Dassin’s heartbreaking big break. The film was a commercial and critical success, its vivid depiction of New York recognized with Academy Awards for best cinematography and editing. Yet Dassin walked out of the film’s premiere in tears. Gone were his shots of bums on the Bowery, his satirical jabs at Upper East Side socialites; what remained was a portrait of a city that James Agee described as “bursting with energy, grandeur, sunlight , and human variety” but stripped of the stark contrast between wealth and poverty that the director considered its most defining aspect.1 Utterly disillusioned, he swore he would never make another film. More than just the familiar tale of Hollywood taking a hatchet to a director’s vision, The Naked City’s transformation from the social document Dassin imagined to a rather innocuous Hollywood genre film has political dimensions that become evident when examining the film’s production. The Naked City finished shooting on October 21, 1947, just one day after the first congressional hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee commenced.2 During the hearings, one of the film’s writers, Albert Maltz, was called to testify. Considering the committee’s obsession with the presence of Communist propaganda in Hollywood films and the film industry’s rapid capitulation to the committee’s concerns, it stands to reason that a film with a blacklisted screenwriter would receive particularly close scrutiny from the studios. The Naked City was further compromised by a personal tragedy: the untimely death of producer Mark Hellinger in December 1947. Without Hellinger around to protect his project, the executives at Universal had free rein to edit the film as they saw fit, which—as Dassin put it—meant excising any scene that “smelled of politics.”3 Considering the impact of these events on the final form of The Naked City, it is curious that accounts of the film deemphasize the political drama of its production Chap-08.qxd 9/17/07 2:16 PM Page 142 cloaked in compromise 143 in favor of the stylistic and thematic contributions it made to postwar realism and to the film noir subgenre of the police semi-documentary.4 A more historical emphasis , however, reveals the degree to which The Naked City’s troubled production history mirrors and reflects the tensions dividing Hollywood during a period of intense political, economic, and cultural upheaval. With America rapidly embracing the new conservative, capitalist ethos of the Cold War, Hollywood progressives like Dassin and Maltz suddenly found themselves at odds with the nascent political climate. The conflicting artistic and political visions that contributed to The Naked City’s final form serve to illustrate the complex interplay between liberal and conservative impulses that characterized Hollywood during the late 1940s. The Naked City belongs to the small cycle of semi-documentary police dramas that enjoyed a brief heyday in the years immediately following World War II. As its name suggests, the semi-documentary was a hybrid form, combining techniques associated with documentary filmmaking with plots derived from Hollywood genre formulas. The enthusiasm for documentary aesthetics within the film industry is usually ascribed to the war, during which time many film personnel were recruited or conscripted to work on government documentaries.5 The war had also accelerated the development of technological advances such as faster film stocks and lighter 16mm cameras that facilitated location shooting.6 From an industry perspective, this yen for realism was to be encouraged, at least with regard to film style. By 1948 Hollywood had entered its postwar economic slump, and the inflation of labor and production costs encouraged the studios—even conservative MGM—to welcome the cheaper production values of the semi-documentary.7 However, the film industry’s embrace of the documentary was half-hearted, encompassing aesthetic but not ethical considerations . This conception of the genre reflects the influence of the two men most closely associated with its development: Louis de Rochemont and Darryl Zanuck. In 1943 Zanuck hired de Rochemont to produce a new series of “living journalism ” films for Fox...

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