A throwback to 1930s film noir gumshoe crime thrillers, “The Naked City” finds Archer, a private dick struggling with self-esteem issues after his wife leaves him, investigating an artist who photographs bloody crime scenes and displays them at a high falootin’ art gallery. Archer then finds himself having to cut loose what’s left of his self-respect to infiltrate the art world
That’s about the gist of it. It’s shot in glorious black and white and it’s certainly film noiry, but for the type of story being told it’s way too short to leave any kind of real impression. In fact, this short barely scrapes the surface of a greater, much larger story to be told. It leaves you wanting more and not in a good way. Crime thrillers require time to unfold and draw the viewer in. If you don’t have that time to work with then you just wind up with a cute little scenario – much like this one.
Eric was reviewing a 9 minute short film entitled THE NAKED CITY in 2007. This is not the 1948 film of the same name, nor does it pretend to be (as you rightly pointed out, the plot and characters are different AND the running time and release year are different). Eric is criticizing the right movie, the short film. He’s not pretending to be reviewing the 1948 film.
I have recently been made aware that Rotten Tomatoes is linking the 1948 film to this review, and therein lies the misunderstanding. We did not add that link to RT, so the fix there will have to come on the Rotten Tomatoes side. For some brief history, in the earlier days of RT, their staff added reviews from FT (same was done by metacritic and to a lesser extent imdb); it was not like now, where the critic often has to individually submit the review. Perhaps that is the case here, but in any case, we did not submit the link for the film review to RT (if you look, it only lists “Film Threat” and doesn’t even include a quote), and we hope that, if you have a problem with it, that you will take it up with RT so they can fix it on their end.
Sorry for anyone that was incorrectly sent here from there but, again, this is the review of a short film from 2007.
What movie are you reviewing? There’s no Archer in this movie, or jilted cop. You really are panning the wrong movie. Poor work.