This highly influential neorealist thriller, shot on location in New York’s teeming streets, tells an ordinary murder tale through the accumulation of procedural police details. Despite the obvious genre conventions, the film’s real mission was to impart an authentic impression of the city and its everyday life through the use of hidden cameras and gritty, quasi-documentary photography, which earned an Oscar for cinematographer William Daniels. The narrator’s final words have become a widely quoted urban cliché: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”