Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

stories. And in order to remind the spectator that the feature was not filmed in a studio but
has engaged with the nitty-gritty of urban life, the narrator concludes with: “There are eight
million stories in The Naked City. This has been one of them”. This closing narration was
celebrated in the famous television series of the same name from 1958-63 on the ABC
television network. Every episode closed with the same lines by the narrator.
Figure 50. The Naked City
While up to the early fifties film noir and semi-documentary had developed in an
almost autonomous manner, they came to be parallel modes in the fifties crime film.
However, the two modes represent two diverse parts of Hollywood’s realist aesthetic, as
Borde and Chaumeton have remarked:
The American police-procedural documentary is in reality a documentary
glorifying the police (...). There is nothing of this kind in noir films. If there are
policemen, they are rotten – as the inspector in The Asphalt Jungle, or that prime
example of a corrupted brute incarnate by Lloyd Nolan in The Lady in the Lake –
sometimes even murderers (Fallen Angel and Where the Sidewalk Ends directed by
Otto Preminger). (Borde & Chaumeton 2002:77)
While the social and spiritual malaise of film noir was integrated differently into
these police thrillers, these noir semi-documentaries also changed significantly during the
fifties, especially in terms of the characters and their moral depth and complexity.
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