Malvin Wald
Screenwriter Malvin Wald, who received an Academy Award nomination for The Naked City (right), Jules Dassin’s 1948 mix of neo-realism and film noir, died Thursday at a hospital in the Los Angeles suburb of Sherman Oaks. He was 90.
The Brooklyn native (born in 1917) wrote several feature-film screenplays and adaptations, most notably helping to transfer (with Oscar Saul) James Warwick’s play Blind Alley to the screen — it eventually became Rudolph Maté’s film noir The Dark Past (1949) — and co-writing (with Collier Young and Ida Lupino) the scenario for Lupino’s Outrage (1950), a (for the time) daring melodrama in which Mala Powers plays a rape victim.
Wald was responsible for the story for The Naked City (his Oscar nod was in the "Best Writing, Motion Picture Story" category), in addition to co-writing the screenplay with Albert Maltz, one of the "Hollywood 10."
"No one had done a film where the real hero was a hardworking police detective, like the ones I knew in Brooklyn," Wald told the Hollywood Reporter last year, when The Naked City was one of the films the Library of Congress added to the National Film Registry.
From the early 1950s on, however, Wald worked mostly on television, writing for shows such as Jungle Jim, Peter Gunn, Daktari, Perry Mason, and The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. (Curiously, Wald was not associated with the popular Naked City TV series.)
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The naked city is one of the best films of the genre. Documentary style. naturalistic lighting. good performances. Love Barry Fitzgerald in just about everything he did. he is really good hree.
Can’t say I’m crazy about “The Naked City,” but it certainly is an important motion picture.
Sorry to report that I can’t say I’m crazy about Barry Fitzgerald, either — though he was fine in “Going My Way.”
I’d also recommend “Outrage.”