"The Naked City"

Paper Summary:

This paper uses Foster Hirsch's book "The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir", which characterizes and identifies film noir by certain stylistic conventions, to review the film "The Naked City". The author looks at Hirsch's key elements of film noir in order to examine whether "The Naked City" fits the criteria. The writer concludes that "The Naked City", although not specifically a film noir, it does have many elements of film noir.

From the Paper:

"Hirsch notes that the film noir often uses "a jumbled time sequence" to "support the characterizations, which are also, and often spectacularly, crooked rather than straight, devious rather than forthright" (74). This usually applies to the protagonist, but in The Naked City, the protagonists are police officers and honest ones at that. They have no reason to be devious, but those they are investigating do. Significantly, it is the character of Frank Niles, the seemingly honest man who is anything but, who is depicted in a flashback as he tells his story. This time shift has the effect of emphasizing his deviousness and his basic dishonesty."

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