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This has been one of them.” - Christopher Bonanos The closing words of his narration linger in pop culture: “There are 8 million stories in the Naked City.
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Poignantly, it was the last thing Hellinger did in his short career: He died at 44, of heart disease, a few days after he saw the final cut. It all climaxes in an elaborate chase sequence on foot, atop the roadway and into the towers of the Williamsburg Bridge. One little subplot - young cop gently arguing with his wife about whether spanking their kid is barbaric - feels unexpectedly modern. The immigrant accents are all ours, too, from the transplanted brogue of the wry police detective (Barry Fitzgerald) to the Yiddish syntax of the soda-fountain proprietor (Molly Picon). The Naked City is profoundly realist in both conception and execution: Hellinger had been a well-loved New York newspaper columnist and man-about-town before going to Hollywood, and the film’s title and look are drawn from the news photographs of Arthur Fellig, a.k.a. In 1947, however, the producer Mark Hellinger and director Jules Dassin demanded that their highly explanatory police procedural, at first intended to be titled Homicide, be shot on location. The microphones were too awkward and the ambient noise too great.
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With the coming of talkies in the late 1920s, the well-established business of filming on New York City streets - see Speedy, at No. (Honestly, all the terrible special effects probably just add to that effect.) - Bilge Ebiri And in order to generate enough good will to defeat the ooze, the Ghostbusters have to bring the Statue of Liberty back to life on New Year’s Eve and march it into battle while playing “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.” It’s all so conceptually deranged that Ghostbusters II might as well be an underground movie. The ghost of Fiorello La Guardia is haunting the current mayor. It may not be as zippy or as inventive as the original, but Ivan Reitman’s 1989 follow-up has one of the most perfect and versatile cinematic fantasy conceits of all time: All the negative energy of New York City is seeping into the sewers and creating a river of paranormal ooze that now threatens to consume the inhabitants. The mostly forgotten, supposedly lesser Ghostbusters sequel just happens to be a great New York movie. Photo: RGR Collection / Alamy Stock Photo/ This film is a dream of New York, so beautiful that even tragedy can’t break the spell. Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics are the air that the story breathes and that the dancers walk on. But Wise goes for Technicolor expressionism and deliberately theatrical sets whenever he’s focusing on the Romeo and Juliet–style love story between Polish American ex–gang member Tony (Richard Beymer) and his Puerto Rico–born true love, Maria (Natalie Wood). The opening aerial views of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, for example, memorialize the time before a large part of the area, then known as San Juan Hill, was bulldozed in the name of urban renewal. Photo: Collection Christophel / Alamy Stock Photo/Ī commercial smash that swept that year’s Oscars, Robert Wise’s film adaptation of the racial-tolerance fable West Side Story feels dated in some ways (the earnest yet stereotypical portrayal of Puerto Rican characters with brownface) and bracingly modern in others, poised between Hollywood backlot fantasy and shot-on-location immediacy. In assembling this list of the greatest New York movies, we laid down a few ground rules: in the interest of fairness, a director could only be represented twice on the list any selection had to take place mostly in New York City (even if it wasn’t shot in New York City) and, most important, it had to feel deliberately set in one of the five boroughs. Many reflect the perilous reality of living in Brooklyn today and the Bronx yesterday others, the urbane fantasy. Great New York City movies find beauty in the rot of Times Square and ugliness in the penthouses of Central Park West. The anxious pace of a weekday commute, the philharmonic overlapping of sidewalk talk, the sweaty jockeying for position on any square foot.
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We’re talking about a great New York City movie that transcends establishing shots and dodgy accents to immortalize something distinct about this place. What makes a great New York City movie? Not just a movie set in New York - there are plenty of those.
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