Naked City season 2 (1960)

Having watched and written about selected episodes in the second season of Naked City (which originally went to air on ABC from late 1960 to mid-1961) I’m now filling in the blanks. The more I see of this series the more I love it. Everything about it is unconventional, offbeat and original. Even the outrageous episode titles.

It’s not unconventional just for the sake of being unconventional. These are complex literate scripts that are concerned with exploring the psychological underpinnings of crimes. Why do some people go off the rails so spectacularly? The scripts are also concerned with another question - if we understand why people do bizarre and anti-social things does this actually help the police in dealing with these issues? Does it help society in dealing with damaged and dangerous people? The series rarely offers easy or comforting answers. Sometimes it’s even difficult to tell good from evil.

Naked City takes a very different approach compared to a series like Dragnet. Dragnet aimed for everyday realism - ordinary cops investigating ordinary crimes, the sorts of crimes that are committed every day in a big city. And they’re solved by following established procedures. Joe Friday relies on legwork, not sudden flashes of insight, to solve crimes.

In Naked City the cops are very much ordinary cops but the crimes they investigate are cases that are a little bit out of the ordinary. The aim of the series is to get inside the minds of the criminals and sometimes that’s easier if the crimes are spectacular or unusual. The crimes don’t have to be realistic. In reality the police do encounter bizarre crimes but in Naked City most of the cases have a touch of the bizarre. The bizarre nature of the cases is used to illuminate some dark recesses of the human psyche.

Of course a series that takes a deliberately offbeat approach is going to have its share of failures, of episodes that just don’t quite work. The amazing this is that this series has so few misfires. And even the misfires are interesting.

There have been other fine cop shows since Naked City but none has ever been able to equal this great series. It remains a uniquely brilliant achievement.

With some fine location shooting it also provides a wonderful glimpse of early 1960s New York City.

Episode Guide

The Pedigree Sheet begins with two dead bodies in a crashed car. And a live 17-year-old girl who was also in the car. One of the dead men is the foreman of the jury in a major criminal case. The other dead guy is a hit-man. And nobody knows who the girl is but the police are pretty sure she’s the key to solving the case. That’s what the story seems to be about, but it isn’t really. It’s actually about the girl, a good girl gone bad, and her father, once a famous lawyer and now a drunken bum, and how they got to be that way.

So it’s a pretty good mystery story and a psychological study. Trying to combine the two is the sort of ambitious thing that Naked City would do throughout its run and what’s truly remarkable is how often they did it successfully. And this story is definitely one of those successes.

A Succession of Heartbeats is a whodunit. Millionaire playboy Ben Harlow is shot to death along with his latest girlfriend, a married woman. Harlow has lots of girlfriends. The list of people who would have liked to kill him is practically endless. There are at least three people who could have done so. Some of the clues point to one of the suspects, some at others. But this is Naked City so it’s not just a solid mystery story but a character study as well. Can you put a life back together again once it’s been broken? And guilt can destroy the innocent as well as the guilty. A very fine episode penned by Stirling Siliphant.

In Down the Long Night Norman Garry tells the detectives at the 65th Precinct that a man named Max Evar is going to kill him. A year earlier Garry's printing factory burnt to the ground. Max Evar’s house, which was next door, was destroyed as well with Evar's life and child being killed in the blaze. Evar is convinced that Garry was responsible for the fire. Since Evar hasn’t committed an actual crime there’s nothing the cops can do but Adam Flint has a bad feeling about it and decides to look into it anyway. Evar runs a carnival funhouse and his family has for generations specialised in illusion, magic and the manufacture of terror for entertainment. He’s the kind of guy who would certainly know how to use fear as a weapon and that’s what he seems to be doing.

This is another intriguing psychological study, in this case a study of two men. And the funhouse climax is extremely good. A very fine episode.

To Walk in Silence is a reluctant witness story. A very respectable man, a Mr Weston, witnesses a murder in an illegal betting establishment. In fact he himself suffers a minor gunshot wound in the course of the murder. He’s not willing to talk to the police since it might threaten his professional and social position. What he fails to understand is that he might not have a choice. It features a good performance by Clause Rains as Weston. As a character study its interesting although the plot is rather predictable. An OK episode.

In Killer with a Kiss a psycho killer is stalking cops. He’s killed one and almost killed another. In the latest attempt he pretended to be a blind man. And he kisses his victims on the hand. The breakthrough in the case comes when Adam discovers the headless toy soldier. This episode is another attempt to grapple with psychological disturbance. It works quite well.

The Human Trap is the story of a murder among the rich and fashionable. Playboy Tobias Bennington Tennant III is dead with an icepick in him. Dress designer Walda Price claims she killed him in self-defence after he tried to maul her teenaged daughter Jessica. Adam Flint thinks the story doesn’t quite add up, and his boss Lieutenant Mike Parker doesn’t think so either, but neither woman will change her story. Jack Lord gives a great guest starring performance as Jessica’s devoted mobster father. A very good episode.

In Bullets Cost Too Much Adam Flint is in a bar when an armed robbery takes place and a man is killed. Adam thought about drawing his gun but decided that it would have put too many people at risk. Now the press is after his blood. And a young doctor has to make a choice between his brother and one of the hold-up men who was shot in the robbery. It’s a typical Naked City story, with the emphasis on the effects of crime on people’s lives rather than on the solving of the crime. And it’s an extremely good story.

Landscape with Dead Figures is another wonderfully offbeat episode. Famous dead artist Albert Blakely escapes from a mental hospital. He doesn’t know he’s famous and he doesn’t know he’s dead. But he’s worth a lot of money. In fact he was worth more dead than when he was alive. Everybody assumes he’s just a mental patient. Everyone but Adam. Adam thanks there’s something screwy about the story of the escaped mental patient who suddenly starts defying paintings. His obsession nearly gets him kicked off the force. The vital clues are in pictures done by Blakely - a doll without a face, two men in front of a pile of rocks. Wildly offbeat yes, but a fascinating story. Great stuff.

The Well-Dressed Termite starts with the accidental death of a telephone linesman. Only the guy was no telephone linesman. So what was he doing in a phoney telephone company truck and who was his partner doing with the telephone lines? And there’s a woman, who is currently divorcing her husband. He’s a rich businessman but a social nobody. Now she’s found a new man who is rich and a social somebody. But how does this relate to the dead guy tampering with telephone lines? A typically ingenious episode with a jigsaw puzzle that has to be pieced together but the cops have no idea what the final picture is supposed to look like. Great stuff.

The Day It Rained Mink involves the theft of a million dollars’ worth of fur coats. It’s a clever plan but the focus of the story its on the motivations behind the crime rather the crime itself. Thwarted ambitions, greed and lust are pretty good motivations. And a million dollars is a big payoff, but easy money isn’t always the solution. Lust in particular is a dangerous motivation.  In Naked City the biggest danger to criminals is not necessarily getting caught.

The Deadly Guinea Pig is another of the countless stories about Nazis that were such an obsessive feature of American TV at this time. Unfortunately they tend to be rather predictable and this one is no exception.

The Fault in Our Stars is the story of an actor named Donny Benton Donny’s career is going nowhere and he’s broke so he turns to murder. He’s so self-absorbed that he just assumes that his career is more important than the lives of a few dumb schmucks of cab drivers. Tracking him down proves to be surprisingly difficult and finding evidence that would stand up in court is even more of a problem. Typically for this series the story takes some very dark turns, much much darker than you’d expect from network TV in 1961.

The story also offers some fascinating insights into the strange unreal world of the theatre and the even stronger psychology of actors. A bravura performance by Roddy McDowall as Donny makes this another exceptional episode.

Tombstone for a Derelict is another Nazi episode. Or is it? A homeless person is brutally murdered by four young men. Three other murders follow in quick succession. The only clues are Nazi stickers posted on the wall near two of the victims. And an odd letter to the editor of a daily newspaper, and an even odder complain to the police by a concerned citizen. It seems they are dealing with rampaging Nazis. But it’s not that simple. Nowhere near that simple. This story seems like it’s going to one of the rare misfires but it ends up making sense, in a nonsensical way. So it’s an interesting episode.

A Memory of Crying is another attempt to deal with psychological abnormality. Willard Manson is a man with no human feelings, until he marries his fifth wife Jessica. He still doesn’t know he has emotions until she dies in childbirth. He then refuses to accept her death and cracks up, but he cracks up in a dangerous way. He convinces himself he needs money to pay for the hospital and he will go to any lengths to get that money. This one is perhaps not entirely convincing but at least it’s an interesting attempt. When an episode of this series doesn’t quite work it’s usually because it’s been too ambitious and the ambition at least has to be respected. And Luther Adler’s performance almost makes it work.

A Very Cautious Boy is a hitman (played by Peter Falk of all people) who kills with his bare hands. He is a karate expert. His latest target is a lawyer who is causing problems for an elderly restaurateur and ex-racketeer. Along the way he kills an ill-tempered bouncer and that’s what initially attracts the attention of the police. Adam Flint only appears briefly in this episode so it’s left to Frank and Lieutenant Parker to solve this one. And it’s a story will some cool twists.

Economy of Death is not as obvious as you think it’s going to be. Lazslo Lubasz escaped from Hungary in 1956 and has been paying Miklos Konya to find his missing granddaughter. Then Lazslo finds that Miklos has been lying to him, Lazslo’s wife dies of grief and Lazslo blames Miklos. But then there are a number of plot twists to make things more interesting. This is one of those episodes in which we discover that evil deeds are not always committed by evil men. Sometimes they’re committed by good men. And justice is a complicated thing. A very good episode despite a hammy performance by Sam Jaffe as Lazslo.

Final Thoughts

Naked City is one of the all-time great TV cop shows, very character-driven rather than plot-driven. Must-see TV.