I couldn't give away the ending if I wanted to, for the simple reason that I grew so sick and tired of the whole beastly business that I didn't stop … - C. A. Lejeune

They have not only given us a first-class detective story but they have added the suggestion that this sort of thing might impinge on any one of us, unknowingly, on our way home from business; but would not in the end affect a community armoured with life and decency, private concerns, family responsibilities, mealtimes, bedtimes, train schedules and sunlight. The film has been shot almost entirely, and most magnificently shot, in the streets, homes, stores, and Government departments of New York, and I have never seen a picture that expressed more fundamentally the difference between the extraordinary person who practises crimes of violence, and the normal, blessedly ordinary person who doesn't. The Naked City is at once keen observation and grand filmmaking.

It is an odd and somewhat ironic commentary on the entertainment of the times that the best, happiest, most intelligent and human picture of the week, I was about to say of the year, should be a murder story. But so it is: The Naked City (Gaumont and Marble Arch) is a thriller and a beauty.

He has a funny voice that makes you nervous on its high notes, a funny face, no one could call handsome; he cannot, so far as I know, act, and he never appeared yet in a film that merited a moment's serious attention. And yet this frank and friendly Yankee hoofer, hat, white tie, tails, and everything, been elected to the academy of international celebrity. After the first gasp of surprise, however, at the thought of Fred Astaire in company with Pythagoras and astronomies and the alimentary canal and the origin of species, you realise that the compilers of the Encyclopaedia [Britannica] have behaved in a perfectly natural way, assuming—as it is reasonable to assume—that they are going to do their job properly for Mr. Astaire [in the next edition to be published].