Walkers in the City: Jules Dassin and Bruce Goldstein in New York

Uncovering “The Naked City,” Bruce Goldstein’s scintillating chronicle of The Naked City’s groundbreaking New York location shoot, is more than the best “where-they-filmed-it” doc ever made. 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. Goldstein draws revelatory contrasts between the shooting sites then and now, and uses light-fingered cinematic filigree to keep the action swift and clear, the tempo bouncy, and the mood exuberant. The details on the mechanics of Dassin’s production—cinematographer William Daniels devised hidden cameras and simple, compact lighting rigs that enabled him to shoot anywhere, anytime—should be inspirational for film students and for audiences hungry for reality-based movie magic. Uncovering “The Naked City” would be wonderful even if it didn’t contain a shot of young Stanley Kubrick photographing the making of The Naked City for Look magazine. That puts it over the top.

According to screenwriter Malvin Wald, who made more than thirty training and recruitment films for the Army Air Forces during World War II, he was the one who concocted the idea of threading an ultra-realistic homicide investigation in and out of New York City’s actual daily life. Broadway columnist turned producer Mark Hellinger (The Killers) bought Wald’s script (then called, simply, Homicide), took credit for the concept, and embraced it. In the words of the producer’s biographer, Jim Bishop, Hellinger knew that the movie “had to be so New Yorkerish that it looked like a documentary.” He renamed it Naked City after Arthur “Weegee” Fellig’s 1945 collection of sensational on-the-spot photography. (No one knows who added The.) In return, Hellinger paid Weegee a fee that he split with his publisher, and employed the photographer at $100 a week as a “technical adviser” (as Kubrick would on Dr. Strangelove). 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.

Dassin and Hellinger had collaborated on the prison film Brute Force the year before. Hellinger must have sensed how deeply Dassin loved New York. Still, Hellinger, unlike Louis de Rochemont (who produced 1945’s The House on 92nd Street and 1947’s Boomerang at 20th Century Fox), had never worked with documentary-style stories or techniques. Wald said the producer considered shelving the project until Dassin convinced him they could master a homegrown neorealism with the help of Albert Maltz, who wrote the shooting script.

Interviewed before the rerelease of Rififi (1955) in 2000, Dassin told me that he edited The Naked City in Los Angeles and went back to New York to direct a play. 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. Seeing the re-edited film for the first time at the New York premiere, Dassin said, “I walked off in tears.” He couldn’t appreciate that despite the studio-imposed changes to his work, his fearless direction had succeeded in portraying a city (as James Agee wrote in an unsigned review for Time) “bursting with energy, grandeur, sunlight, human variety and an eager journalistic glamor.”

No stranger to innovation, Dassin had acted in New York’s proletariat Yiddish theater, ARTEF, and, in his Broadway debut as a director, used Living Newspaper techniques for Medicine Show (1940), a call for socialized medicine. 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.

Goldstein shares Dassin’s instinctive understanding of New York as a vital organism: by the end of Uncovering “The Naked City,” we know in our viscera why city planners call bridge and road systems “arteries.” It’s not surprising that Fresh Air’s Terry Gross chose to interview Goldstein after 9/11, or that he recently recorded a COVID-time pep talk for the nonprofit New York Forever. Goldstein’s record as founder of the reissue distributor Rialto Pictures and repertory program director of New York’s Film Forum reflects his city’s wry, eclectic sensibility as well as his own.

After The Naked City, Dassin didn’t direct another movie in New York for twenty-seven years. A Communist who joined the Party in the mid-1930s and left it in 1939, after the Soviet nonaggression pact with Hitler’s Germany, he survived the blacklist as an expatriate director. He made Rififi, his comeback picture, in Paris: its virtuoso silent jewelry heist put him on the map as an international auteur. He then collaborated on numerous movies with Greek superstar Melina Mercouri, his second wife. He always did his best work on the streets. In 2000, Dassin told me, “The only way you really prepare locations is to walk.” That method generated the evocative atmospheres not just in The Naked City and Rififi, but also in Thieves’ Highway (1949, filmed in San Francisco and Oakland), and his masterpiece, Night and the City (1950, London).

Like Dassin, Goldstein is a walker in the city, savoring the gusto of its streets and scanning every building in his path for untold history or fresh life. He made Uncovering “The Naked City” in the late spring, summer, and fall of 2020.

“If you look quick, you can see one or two people with masks. One masked guy whizzes by on a bicycle,” Goldstein notes, in an email. “But the only real noticeable clue that it was shot during the pandemic is the marquee of Cinema One and Two.”

Uncovering “The Naked City” pulses with Goldstein’s love and optimism for moviemaking—and New York.

Was Rialto’s reissue of Rififi in 2000 the occasion for you meeting Jules Dassin?: Yes, that’s when I became friends with him. We invited him to New York, and he came. I was a little bit—I wouldn’t say intimidated by him, but I was worried. I wanted his approval of everything we did.

We had a screening at the Directors Guild Theater on 57th Street. Something went wrong with the projector and the print was shaking. I was concerned about that. We went back to the Plaza, where we’d gotten this fantastic parkside suite for him, and I noticed this jewelry store in the lobby. I said, “Well, we were thinking of putting you up over the jewelry store.” He just stopped in the middle of the lobby and started laughing. From then on, we were fast friends.

He was really thrilled to be back in New York. That’s one reason we hit it off so well. You know, Melina had died a few years before, and I think he felt a little isolated in Greece—even though he’s a national hero there. I went to visit him there twice. It was like being with Princess Di. The Greeks adored him.

When I first met him, I was expecting a decrepit old man, because he kept saying on the phone, “Well, you know I’m really, really old now, eighty-nine.” So at JFK we were on the lookout for the oldest man possible coming off the Olympic Airways flight from Athens and then we see this impeccably dressed man with a spring in his step, who turned out to be Dassin. He was old but didn’t look or act anywhere near eighty-nine.

I asked if he’d like some water. “Nah, but I’m dying for a smoke.” He was a chain-smoker, even though he lived to ninety-six. I said, “It must have been hard for you—that long flight without a cigarette.” And he said, “No, it was fine. The pilots invited me into the cockpit for a smoke.” That’s how much the Greeks worshipped him.

In his old age, even in his eighties and nineties, he had a handshake like a vise grip. He was a very strong man. And he used to brag, you know, in a nice Jules Dassin way, about how great he was as a ballplayer. Jules told me about playing on the studio baseball team when he had just started working at Fox. You remember the MGM musical Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Most of the song lyrics were written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who were old friends of Jules, by the way, from New York. So that year [1949] MGM dressed its team in gay-nineties baseball uniforms, like in the movie, right? But Jules, playing for Fox, was the hero of the game. He said there was only one thing about it that bothered him: “Buster Keaton was sitting on the MGM bench and they wouldn’t let him play.”

Your doc makes the case for The Naked City as a very personal film for Dassin. He rarely talked publicly about his boyhood in East Harlem. How much did he reminisce about it with you?: He talked to me a lot about it, and we faxed a lot. I have all these faxes from him, like a hundred, written in this teensy-weensy handwriting. When I watch the Lower East Side in the movie, I think, “This is the neighborhood he described to me.” The Lower East Side in the movie is kind of parallel to the East Harlem of his boyhood; the two were similar in many ways. My mother was born in East Harlem, actually. It was a Jewish neighborhood at that time, also an Italian neighborhood. I’m talking about the teens, the twenties. Jules talked to me about playing stickball there.

Little bits and pieces of his childhood would come out in conversation. I have a fax in which he tells me exactly where he lived as a boy on 105th Street; he remembered the number of the building. I think a hospital’s there now. Little things in the movie had to be childhood memories. You can’t be certain, but I can imagine him saying, “Let’s have an ice man, let’s have a milkman with the horse cart.” Jules once told me his favorite song was “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” It was published in 1919; he would have been eight years old when it came out. I use the song as a little homage under that montage of the scenes that I think are childhood memories.

I think Jules wanted to shoot part of the film in East Harlem to go back to the old neighborhood. 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.

The dedication at the end of the film reads, “For Jules Dassin (1911–2008) and Murray Goldstein (1914–1993).”: Yeah, and not only in memory of them—I feel it is both their memories. I mean, my father grew up on the Lower East Side, right where the climax of Naked City takes place, and he could have been in one of the huge crowds Jules shot on Delancey Street.

He would have known all those places on the street, all those businesses—Kobre’s Haberdashery, and of course, Ratner’s [Dairy Restaurant] across the street. He would have gone to Loew’s Delancey, or Loew’s Clinton, or the Palestine Theatre. There was a theater called the Palestine, believe it or not. I have a poster for it from 1925. And the bill is: “This week: ANITA ROSENTHAL, ONLY ROMANIAN WOMAN DIRECTOR, IN PERSON. Plus, TOM MIX in ‘No Man’s Gold.’” It’s my favorite artifact. That says everything about the Lower East Side in those days, doesn’t it?

Did Jules share his recollections about shooting on the Lower East Side?: I could kick myself because I didn’t ask Jules about The Naked City as much as I could have. He did describe some of the things he did to distract the crowds away from the shoot. In the documentary, I talk about the juggler—because I found the picture of the juggler. But he told me about other tricks he used, like drawing the crowd away by putting a guy on a soapbox—a Communist rabblerouser on the corner—pretty common in New York at the time.

In the doc I say a whole stretch of Delancey Street was torn down after The Naked City. It wasn’t just Delancey Street—it was much of the neighborhood directly south. 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.

I now live in a co-op on the Lower East Side that was built by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. But I didn’t think much about the neighborhood back then, even though my father grew up there. I do remember driving through the East Village with Jules, and he said to me, “Wow, they really cleaned this neighborhood up.”

I hadn’t moved to the neighborhood yet when I was talking to Jules. I was living not far away, on Elizabeth Street, where Scorsese grew up, which at one time was a Sicilian neighborhood. But now I live on Grand Street right near the East River. I just found out that George Burns grew up around the corner. Also, Edward G. Robinson, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor. Walter Matthau’s from the neighborhood and Jerry Stiller grew up right across the street [on Jackson Street] and both went to Seward Park High—as did Julius Rosenberg, I might add.

At Katz’s Delicatessen, there’s always been a person who hands you a ticket as you go in. In the sixties, when I was going there with my father, there was a guy who weighed at least 400 pounds, whose job was just to give out the tickets. And my father said, “Yeah, he’s been here since the forties.” I wish I’d quizzed my father more.

What do you miss about the New York street life in The Naked City?: If you look at The Naked City frame by frame, there’s like a candy store on every corner, one across the street from another. They were the Starbucks of their day—everywhere! We’re of an age when we can just remember the tail end of the candy store. They were also lunch counters, and you could have a cheap hamburger or whatever. I miss that. There’s no longer such thing as an ice cream parlor either, you know, a place where you can just hang out and eat something without having to take out a second mortgage on your apartment. By the way, because of the pandemic, we lost the last vestige of an old candy store downtown. There was a place called Gem Spa on the corner of Second Avenue and St. Marks Place that was probably the last place to get a good egg cream on the Lower East Side. It became more of a Lotto kind of place, but it did do the egg creams and sodas, and couldn’t survive COVID-19. You may still find some old-fashioned candy stores—there’s one on the Upper East Side and more in the outer boroughs, like on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, maybe one or two. Though I haven’t been back since the pandemic.

Another was the guy banging on the Chiclets machine. It’s funny because I had done a presentation on The Taking of Pelham One Two Three at the Egyptian at the TCM Festival, and I mentioned the Chiclets machines that used to be in the subway, because you can see them on the platform in Pelham One Two Three. I remembered when I was a kid those machines never worked—and I’m talking about the 1960s. In The Naked City you can spot a guy banging on one back in 1947!

New York magazine used to have reader competitions in the back. Once they asked you to send in suggestions for getting more revenue for the city; this was probably during the financial crisis of the early seventies. The winner said, “Put more vending machines in the subway that don’t work.”

Could you take me through the process of nailing down the locations? For instance, how did you track down that Chinese laundry?: It helps to have a high-definition copy of the movie, of course. You glance at that shot of the Chinese laundry and you think, never in a million years. Then you look at it closely, and you say, just wait a minute. There actually is a great clue in the frame.

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 . . ., and on a second line, PICKLE PR . . . We were very lucky that, of the two Manhattan phone books digitized by the New York Public Library and searchable online, one was the 1946 directory. It was the exact time period we needed. Almost like divine intervention.

Walkers in the City: Jules Dassin and Bruce Goldstein in New York

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