“As you see we’re flying over an island, a city, a particular city. And this is a story of a number of people and a story also, of the city itself.” Though the intrigue in The Naked City, Jules Dassin’s 1948 film noir, suffers from predictability—the police investigation of a slain model–the manner in which it was shot, and its use of New York as a veritable canvas, expands an otherwise uninspired story. (It won Oscars for Best Cinematography and Editing in 1949.) Narrated by its producer, Mark Hellinger, the film begins with an aerial view of Manhattan and a sermon-like address, testifying to the film’s authentic portrayal: “It was not photographed in a studio... This is the city as it is—hot summer pavements, the children at play, the buildings in their naked stone, the people without makeup.” The documentary style, paired with the melange of actors and New Yorkers, adds an element of immediacy, a sort of "day in the life" whodunit. What enlivens the murder investigation is the city unscripted: the vitality of kids playing at an opened fire hydrant, the start and end of the work day, the ferry, the rattling elevated trains, young men swimming in the East River. Among the eight million stories, it tells again and again, “this has been one of them.”

Shadows is John Cassavetes’s first feature. Spun from improv workshops, it conveys that effortless strut and closeness that, when done well, only improvisation can generate. The sort of verve that emanates from the characters, loosely centered around the interracial relationship between Lelia and Tony, is partially an effect of the city’s landscape: the neon glow of Times Square marquees, the energy of a raucous party, a Godard-like threesome run through Central Park, the loud silence of a fight in an alleyway. The friendship between one of Lelia’s brothers, Hugh, a singer, and his manager, Rupert, is an ode to city hopes of matchless invisibility, of making it together. But the third brother, Bennie, with whom the film starts and ends, and whose cool, beatnik, shades-at-night manner, his this "baby," that "baby" speak, delivers something undeniable. One morning, when all three siblings are lying on Lelia’s bed, he tells a story about Charlie Parker. And yet, despite the morning calm, he cannot abandon that restless New York urge to be doing and moving; Ben toys, the entire time, with his trumpet.

God Help Bobby and Helen, they’re in love in Needle Park. An addict, Bobby–Al Pacino in his first major role–meets clean Helen (Kitty Winn). The two spend an afternoon walking around the city, eating sandwiches and soda, paid for by a TV Bobby lifts from the back of truck and sells to Esther, the old lady at the pawn shop: “Estha’, I’m a dope fiend, I’m a sex crazed dope fiend,” he jests. This sort of playfulness, the way Pacino says "terrrrrific!" makes up only the beginning of the film. Soon, Bobby, who claims he’s “not hooked, just chipping,” gets Helen to do favors for him, "picking up." In a scene that brings the entire movie to a standstill, Bobby, while playing with some kids in the street—a New York stickball game where mothers and sisters watch from the windows with their arms and elbows resting on pillows—Bobby peddles some line about having once been "The Greatest," and runs to kiss Helen. But she’s high, and Bobby asks, "When did that happen?" The innocence of falling in love in a city of millions dies there. Their story inhabits the world of other Sherman Square regulars, and as the Fever grows, so does the panic. This love story, set against a desperate New York, exemplifies the city as described by the late John Gregory Dunne, who co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Joan Didion. “New York,” he writes, is “a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world’s great cities.”

The Naked City and Shadows are available on Criterion Collection DVD.