On two occasions this year the Williamsburg Bridge (from Manhattan to Brooklyn) has made a guest appearance in the plot of my life.
In January, as faithful readers know, we set up shop in Manhattan. One day we strolled over the bridge from the Lower East Side to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The bridge is a splendid monument of nineteenth-century technology and the view from above is spacious and commanding. It's a restless, busy path from one side to another; all around you, automobiles, subway trains, bicyclists, runners, baby carriages -- the works. NYC in a Victorian nutshell.
Then, a few days ago, came the news of the death of Jules Dassin. Dassin is famous for Never on Sunday and Topkapi, but as movie-lovers know, he was a polished director of films noirs during the 1940s -- before Nixon, McCarthy, and the blacklisting boys drove him into exile. We decided to embark on a Jules Dassin festival and tribute right here on our very own giant TV. Our first choice was Naked City (1949), a highly un-subversive policier, markedly patriotic but disturbing because all the bad guys are vaguely "ethnic." The climactic scenes of Naked City were shot in the Lower East Side (just where the Williamsburg Bridge hits Delancey). The murderer/wrestler/harmonicat Willie Garzah attempts to flee. A voice shouts, "he's on Norfolk near Rivington." Right where we had just a few months ago wandered! It's right off the bridge! And then Garzah panics and tries to escape by running across the Williamsburg into Brooklyn. Police in pursuit, squad cars, pistols, shouting, shots. Garzah climbs the girders--the very same girders, which, just a few months before, I had decided to honor my acrophobia by not climbing. And then he's wounded, and, as always in the movies, falls theatrically to his death.
It's peculiar, isn't it, when a store or a street-corner that you know in real life appears in the movies. Does it mean that film tells the truth, is real, or does the celluloid appearance provide us with some evidence that our own life is genuine? Why should the movies sometimes seem more substantial than the reports of our own five senses? How can art validate life? And at the same time, don't we feel a little cheated--in the sense that our privacy--our uniqueness--has been violated and the things and stuff that are personal to us have been delivered over to an unappreciative anonymous world? It's odd and disorienting when a familiar non-fiction bridge plays a supporting role in a fictional film.
Naked City is a good, solid, intriguing piece of work, well-paced and well-written. I'm not entirely happy with the way it treats women or the working-classes, but then, many such films are far more culpable. I liked best the authentic, unstaged street shots of Manhattan as it was sixty years ago. Delancey Street was nostalgic and poetic (although the shop signs, then lettered in Hebrew, are now mostly Chinese).
The Williamsburg Bridge, solid and substantial, has weathered the years extremely well. It's well positioned to star in many another film.
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