Malvin Wald, who conceived and was a co-writer of the gritty 1948 crime film “The Naked City,” a prototype for modern police dramas, including the popular television show of the same name, died on Thursday in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 90 and lived in Sherman Oaks.
His death was confirmed by his son, Alan.
Ending with the famous lines “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them,” “The Naked City,” which was written with Albert Maltz, was inspired by Mr. Wald’s adolescent years on the streets of Brooklyn.
“No one had done a film where the real hero was a hard-working police detective, like the ones I knew in Brooklyn,” Mr. Wald told The Hollywood Reporter last year. “We knew we were making a new genre that became the police procedural.”
Besides its television spin-off, which ran from 1958 to 1963, many other films and TV shows drew inspiration and tone from “The Naked City,” including “Dragnet,” “Hill Street Blues” and “CSI.”
Mr. Wald was nominated for the Academy Award for screenwriting for “The Naked City,” which won two other Oscars, for its cinematography and editing.
It was one of more than 150 scripts by Mr. Wald. His other film credits, for writing or story, include “Al Capone,” (1959); “Battle Taxi” (1955), about the first use of helicopters in war; and “Ten Gentlemen From West Point” (1942), about the early years of the military academy. He wrote television scripts for, among other shows, “Perry Mason,” “Peter Gunn,” “Have Gun — Will Travel,” “My Friend Flicka,” “Daktari” and “Playhouse 90.”
Malvin Daniel Wald was born on Aug. 8, 1917, a son of Rudy and Bella Danglo Wald. His wife, Sylvia, died in 1999. In addition to his son, of Sherman Oaks, Mr. Wald is survived by a daughter, Jenifer Morgan, of Redondo Beach, Calif. His brother Jerry Wald, an Academy Award-winning producer, died in 1962.
Mr. Wald graduated from Brooklyn College in 1936. By then his brother Jerry had gone to Hollywood as a screenwriter. Malvin Wald soon followed.
The idea for “The Naked City” came to Mr. Wald from a photography book of the same name showing the bloody crime-scene coverage of the famed tabloid photographer Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee.
The film script follows Detective Dan Muldoon, played by Barry Fitzgerald, as he trails the killer of a woman found drowned in the bathtub of her Upper East Side apartment. The movie was shot on city streets, on East River piers and finally on the Williamsburg Bridge, where the killer climbs a towers, is shot and lands with a thud.
“My concept was that the Police Department — with all its fingerprint experts, crime scene photographers and autopsy physicians — solved murders, not Sam Spade-type private eyes working alone,” Mr. Wald later wrote.
At one point in the script, Detective Muldoon says, “Haven’t had a hard day’s work since yesterday.”
Da The New York Times, 11 marzo 2008
