Here I discuss primarily about cinematic space.The city as it is. But in spite of the spirited intention, producers probably wisely thought there has to be a crime for the audience to follow. Even Italians in their neorealism had to have a stolen bicycle, the ruins alone wouldn't do. The crime story is neither exceptional nor uninteresting, at any rate it is the thread that takes us through lives and places, wonderful places. It is thanks to that to and fro that we visit hairdressers and pharmacists, East Side and Staten Island neighborhoods.A few things about the placement of the eye. What is real is continuously reconstituted as we are by the worlds we create, always becoming. A Tony Scott film would have been fundamentally incomprehensible to a 1860s audience. So now the camera seems stagy, always cleanly framing the movement. The situations too, cleanly framing 'for' the camera a joke, a reaction or a witticism. Curiously, a narrator walks us through the film, and even narrates for the everyman on the street—forcing clean thoughts. (basically, everything about this narrator's position is odd and deserves deep inspection)Shadows would change every one of these things in ten years time.Cassavetes burrowed deep, his principle was that the integration of life around the eye decides. What is real, really seen, is a matter of finetuning the perception of the encounter, a dynamic process. In other words, it's not a realistic shot alone but the emerging view. Now this wasn't the first film of this sort, twenty years earlier a guy called Mamoulian had shot on location in Manhattan. Wonderful film, his Applause. But stringent melodrama in the plot. From Applause to this to Shadows, it's largely the understanding of life that changes.Dassin in Rififi, his first exilic movie, would silence this omniscient American narrator-god who can dictate peoples' thoughts for them.And isn't the understanding a matter of invention? In order to get the shots of New York streets, Dassin had to film with a hidden camera, still an issue. Taking a camera to people is like throwing a rock to study birds in their natural state, the presence of the eye fundamentally scares the real. To get around this, Dassin had to stage artifice: sometimes a juggler would distract crowds, sometimes a man was hired to climb on a post and wave a flag while giving patriotic speeches! Forgery, all so he could capture life unaware. I think this so very amusing and cool.But in its intended reach, seeing is as though it was new, the movie must have had the effect of an early Scorsese film in the 70s. Still a movie, but the situations, streets and character lives are a little more real than usual by Hollywood standards.If now the template seems so familiar, TV is to blame. Sure enough, this was made into a TV cop show, many more followed in this vein. Which may be a potent explication of the TV effect, realism becomes template, passage becomes handle. A TV series broadcasts not an original world so much as the habitual life. I hear this is changing these days, which makes me wonder just what is being turned into template?Noir Meter: 2/4

Amid a semi-documentary portrait of New York and its people, Jean Dexter, an attractive blonde model, is murdered in her apartment. Homicide detectives Dan Muldoon and Jimmy Halloran investigate.I have to give this film credit for pushing boundaries in the 1940s. Maybe I am wrong and maybe this was not a big deal -- after all, there is not actually any nudity or explicit murder -- but it had a gritty feel to it and when one man cracks a joke about a girl killed in the bathtub, that just seemed in poor taste.The mystery is good, and I like watching detectives track down the suspects. It does not take Charlie Chan to solve a murder this nasty and heinous, but it does take Muldoon and Halloran, who are some of the top cops out there!

Winner of two Oscars: Best Cinematography, Black-and-White for William H. Daniels, and Best Film Editing for Paul Weatherwax. Malvin Wald was also nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay.This docu-drama stars Barry Fitzgerald. I watched him the other night in The Quiet Man, and I remember him fondly from Going My Way, for which he got an Oscar.An interesting tidbit about Fitzgerald: There have been 11 actors nominated for two Oscars in the same year; most recently Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth: The Golden Age and for I'm Not There. Fitzgerald is the only actor who got two nominations for the same film. They gave the Best Actor award to Bing Crosby, and the Best Supporting Actor to Fitzgerald.They had a tendency to overact back then, but that is part of the charm of the movie.No fancy CSI, just old fashion police work; wearing out the shoe leather.

...New York! This film is presented as a quasi-documentary (it is not). Though the story is fictional, the setting is entirely real - 1948 New York City. And that is the biggest appeal of the picture (I was born and raised there so I may be biased). Some interior shots appear to have been filmed on a sound stage, but the bulk of it is on location. For example, there is a scene filmed in lower Manhattan near Rivington and Norfolk streets. It show's a bustling, thriving "family" neighborhood with well dressed folks and kids playing in the neighborhood. It looks nothing like that now - just a place to pass through to get to somewhere else (though there is a school there now - check google maps and find the intersection - you can see the same building in the opening shot for that scene).Story-wise, it's a pretty solid film especially considering how dated movies from this period can be. There appears to be a real attempt to make the movie as accurate as possible and goes out of its way to include the methods used in solving modern crimes such as forensics - probably a novelty at the time. The acting is solid throughout. I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the idea of a narrator - on the one hand, it lends authenticity to the documentary feel, but on the other, it can take you "out" of the picture at times. Overall, very worth watching. I give it a thumbs up (can I do that here?)