A Film Canon

The masterpiece of American neorealism, this extraordinary film uses a relatively straightforward murder mystery to elaborate the late modernist metropolis - from the opening sequence, in which the producer introduces himself and the cast, while promising that "this is the city as it is...the buildings in their naked stone, the people without make-up", to the spectacular conclusion, shot on location on the panoramic girders of Brooklyn Bridge. Unlike his silent forbears, however, Dassin is less interested in the city as a sublime machine than as a multifarious ecosystem, dwelling more on the physicality than the functionality of its topography, most notably in the first, panoramic transition from night to day, and constantly intercutting the action with vignettes, whether in the form of spoken commentaries on professions or places, incidental interludes, or internal monologues on the part of incidental figures, to the extent that every scene partakes of the quality of a vignette, the murder simply feels like another slice of urban life, and the investigating team another constellation of urban professions. It's this documentary impulse, or suffusion of everything with the quality of a representative sample, that justifies a slightly one- dimensional script and cast (with the exception of Barry Fitzgerald as a charismatic police officer), as does the relative invisibility of the culprit (Richard Widmark), the narrative turning on the difficulty of extracting him from the cityscape ("This is a big, beautiful city. Just try and find me") and identity of John Doe; that is, from his status as such a sample.