Ralph Bunker Movies

Young model Jean Dexter is knocked unconscious and drowned in her own bathtub in her Manhattan apartment, and a lot of jewelry that she supposedly owned is missing. The Naked City is actually about six days in the life of New York City that coincide with the murder and the subsequent investigation by Lt. Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and Detective James Halloran (Don Taylor). The account of their work, and the workings of the New York City police department, is interspersed with brief vignettes about the life of the city around them, and, especially, the reaction of residents to the murder and the newspaper reports of the progress of the case. Muldoon and Halloran first must determine why she was killed, which may (or may not) have to do with how a woman with a minimal income came by the jewelry -- was it a love affair gone bad (and if so, with whom?), or something more complex and sinister? Retracing the final 18 months of the victim's life, their investigation reaches out to a mysterious "Philip Henderson" with whom she was supposedly linked romantically, and to Frank Niles (Howard Duff), who's a little too fast-and-loose with the truth when he doesn't have to be to make Muldoon comfortable; to make things more complicated, Muldoon determines that there were at least two men involved with the actual commission of the murder. The victim turns out to have led a wild life, filled with men and parties, and was tied up with several sordid figures. Their investigation carries them into the highest and lowest ends of New York's social strata to find the killer, and it turns out there are a lot of interlocking reasons why at least three men might've wanted her dead. In the process, we get glimpses of the private lives of the detectives, which was something new in movies at this time; in the midst of all of this activity, the writers set up a fascinating contrast, in adjacent scenes, between Halloran, his wife, and their young son looking toward the future, with the parents of the dead woman, looking back with bitter regret and recriminations -- no movie ever presented in more subtle fashion the contrast between the zeitgeist of the 1930s and that of the postwar era. The final chase on the Williamsburg Bridge is one of the classic pieces of suspense cinema, as the armed and desperate killer races up the walkway past children playing and adults strolling, while detectives close in on foot from behind and patrol cars come up from ahead, with crowded subways rolling past, and then into the superstructure of the bridge for a stand-off and shootout. Sharp-eyed viewers will spot future character leads Paul Ford, James Gregory, John Marley, Kathleen Freeman, and Arthur O'Connell as well as familiar faces Tom Pedi, John Randolph, Molly Picon, and Walter Burke in the supporting cast. Cinematographer William Daniels and editor Paul Weatherwax won Oscars for their work, but awards might just as easily have been presented to director Jules Dassin, writers Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald, composers Miklos Rozsa and Frank Skinner, and, most notably, to producer/narrator Mark Hellinger, who intoned the closing monologue, which opens with one of the most famous tag lines in movie history: "There are eight million stories in the Naked City." ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

Wealthy American Joe Martin (Eugene Pallette) purchases an ancient Scottish castle and then has it dismantled and transferred to his Florida estate where he plans to reconstruct the castle brick by brick. Martin is unaware that his new acquisition comes equipped with an 18th-century ghost, played by Robert Donat. As the spectre, who feels as though his honor has been besmirched, flits around haunting one and all, Martin's daughter Peggy (Jean Parker) carries on a romance with the ghost's descendant, also played by Donat. It is only natural that the "live" and "dead" Donat will become mixed up, and this comedy of errors dominates the final scenes of The Ghost Goes West. The film was the first English-language production of French director René Clair -- and almost the last, due to producer Alexander Korda's insistence upon tampering with the original concept as laid down by Clair and screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Catherine Calvert plays Adora Winstanley, a chorus girl who works her way up to star in The Pink Moon. She is courted by a large crowd of wealthy Stage Door Johnnies, but the one who catches her is Billy Kelvin (Joseph Bruelle), who proposes to her on his yacht. Naturally, his father (William Black) does not approve of Adora in any way, shape or form -- to him she's "that woman." Billy refuses to listen, and on threat of being disowned, merely becomes a chauffeur. At this point the senior Kelvin will do anything to separate the young couple, but he doesn't seem to be terribly imaginative. First he hands her a sizable check if only she will disappear. She takes it and tosses it away. Then he tries to prove to his son that Adora is faithless. This, too, fails. In the end he gives up and accepts the tenacious Adora into the fold. ~ Janiss Garza, Rovi

Constance Talmadge dominates this comedy in her usual, mischievous manner. She's Georgiana Chadbourne, a young widow. Her dead husband was such a straight arrow that it bored her, and after a proper enough mourning period, she goes out in search of adventure. She gets in trouble for picking flowers in Central Park, but is rescued by Jack Garrison (Rockcliffe Fellows), who she mistakes for an artistic, bohemian type of character. To her frustration, she discovers he is as good as her husband was. Since he has already won her heart, she has no choice but to make a bad guy out of him. When she discovers that Garrison is friends with her brother, she hatches her plot. Georgiana pretends that she is her brother's wife, not his sister, and shocks Garrison by vamping him. In spite of his super-human efforts to reject her, he can't help but fall into her trap. Eventually all is explained and Georgiana is more than happy to wed and "reform" her man. ~ Janiss Garza, Rovi