User Reviews

***SPOILERS*** Locked up in the exclusive Gillian Sanitarium for the last 20 years man known only by his registration number #262, Myron McCormick, while checking out the morning papers sees that there's paintings to be auction off, the works of the late Albert Blakely, at the Darrington Gallery in New York City that afternoon. Right away a bulb lights up in Mr. #262's head as he plans to crash out of the sanitarium and make his way to NYC to attend the art auction and check out the paintings. Seeing the works of Blakely are fakes #262 goes bananas and wrecks one on display until the police are called in to arrest him. As it soon turns out Mr. #262 is really the late Albert Blakely who's come back from the dead or the Gillian Sanitarium to exact revenger against those that put him there one of them being his cousin Carl Blakely, Alfred Ryder!

Sent by the police to Bellevue Hospital for observation #262 now identified as the late Albert Blakely escapes and makes his way to his daughter Elizabeth's, Rosalyn Newport, pad who, despite being worth millions, lives in a run down walk up east side tenement without heat or running hot water. With "Liz" confirming who he is Barkley now mad as hell tries to make it back to the art gallery and finish the job, in destroying all the fake works attributed to him, that he in fact started,

***SPOILERS" It's Darrington, Conrad Nagel, who's art gallery the fake paintings are displayed at who attempts to destroy them before their proved to be fakes and thus ruin his reputation. As an almost insane Darrington starts to wreck the place Carl, he hasn't the guts to do it himself, has his henchman and art forger Sorin, Jim Boles, do the job for him by smashing the out of control Darrington's skull in with an icepick. The end of this wired "Naked City" episode couldn't have come soon enough with a now totally deranged Blakely, who's been framed by his cousin Carl in Darrington's murder, breaking into the art gallery and attacking Carl with what looked like a paintbrush who has, Carl doesn't want to get his hands dirty or bloody, his stooge or henchman Sorin then try to murder him, this time with a knife that the gutless Carl handed him, as well. It's then that the cops headed by Det. Adam Flint, Paul Burke, bust in and finally put an end to this madness!

A couple of holes in the plot here, including Jim Bole's forging of the artist's freshly-painted signature shortly before the pictures are displayed and auctioned off.

Still, this is an intriguing episode, imaginatively constructed and featuring two of my all-time favorite actors, Myron McCormick and Alfred Ryder...and they are great, as usual.

No need to recite the plot, as is so often the case here with IMDB's "reviews". The interplay between characters, especially Myron and the daughter, is fascinating to watch unfold. I was disappointed in Conrad Nagel's scenery-chewing, but then I guess he's supposed to be the high-strung, artsy type. Great murder scene with Alfred R. phoning the police while the fight between Nagel and Boles is seen in silhouette through a semi-opaque glass door.

WOW-- Horace McMahon REALLY gets peeved with Paul Burke, even threatening to bust him, and maybe worse. Excellent scene with Burke and Robert Ermhardt at the sanitarium, when the puzzle pieces start to fall into place.

Check this one out.

INCIDENTALLY--- A NOTE ON THE MUSICAL SCORES FOR "NAKED CITY" and its sister show, "ROUTE 66". There's NO WAY that Billy May and Nelson Riddle actually wrote the full musical background for each of these episodes...they were much too busy and in demand to do a new, original, hour-long score each week. Of course, they each wrote the show's respective Theme Music ---Riddle the brilliant, sleek, urbane "travel music" theme of Route 66, with the ingeniously integrated, jazzy piano riffs, May the heavy, chugging, bombastic "Naked City" tune that becomes more annoying every time I hear it. Both composers likely contributed the first few scores of the first season, just to get the shows up-and-running.

After that, I suspect that it was the person credited as "ORCHESTRATION BY:" (William Loose and Gil Grau) who actually did the main composing for all subsequent episodes. I'd guess that Riddle and May would compose a THEME OR TWO for each show, and leave it to Loose and Grau to develop the score itself BASED ON THOSE BASIC THEMES (plus the series' familiar theme song) in addition to orchestrating them.

This would be the same process used -- very famously--- by Richard Rodgers in his classic "Victory at Sea" soundtrack, where he is always credited with the Herculean task of composing THIRTEEN HOURS of background score for the iconic TV series when, in fact, he composed the basic thematic material (about an hour's playing time), which arranger/conductor Robert Russell Bennett then expanded upon to produce the remaining twelve hours of score.

Thus, if you listen to any individual episode's score for "Naked" or "66", you'll hear the SAME BASIC THEME repeated in varied form throughout the show-- sometimes (like in the ridiculous "Naked" episode "A Horse Has a Big Head") to the point that you want to kick the TV screen in to make the damn' thing stop.

I'm sure some form of this process was used to meet the production deadline for these two series, in which each episode has its own, individual score. LR

Hack writer Barry Trivers handed in a convoluted Portrait of the Artist as a Sick Man story far removed from Naked City guidelines, saved only by a wonderful acting job by Myron McCormick as the suffering amnesiac. He makes the melodrama entertaining, aided by a strong confrontation between McMahon and Burke over police procedure and the search for truth.

Way too many gimmicks are used in the course of the hour to keep the pot boiling, substituting hokum for realism. Just a few: a ridiculous set of coincidences for Myron to escape from the asylum; way too many clues via his behavior and his ongoing painting to establish his identity as the now-famous (posthumously) artist with a multimillion dollar auction underway who was put in the asylum with fake death by a group of conspirators 20 years back for profit; his showing up at the auction; his further escape from Bellevue; his heartwarming reunion with his daughter; and the cops shootout with the bad guys -none of it ringing true.

Clearly, the weekly Naked City audience is expected to suspend disbelief as all this nonsense piles up, but 60+ years later it's impossible to swallow.