In Remembrance: Malvin Wald

     Malvin Wald, the screenwriter whose script for The Naked City created the police procedural genre, has passed away on March 6, 2008 in Sherman Oaks, California. He was 90.

     A gritty film noir filmed on location in New York City, 1948’s The Naked City followed homicide detectives trying to solve a model’s murder. Eschewing the typical Hollywood habit of making the crime solver a glamorous or exotic investigator, Wald’s screenplay showed audiences the actual steps that police detectives went through in solving a crime. For the assignment, Wald even shadowed some New York police detectives as research, though they remained skeptical of him due to Hollywood’s tendency to portray the police as dumb or clumsy.

     The film - which ended with the famous line, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” - would spawn a television spin-off and inspire numerous other films and television series including Dragnet, Hill Street Blues and the CSI and Law & Order franchises. The Naked City’s screenplay would earn Wald and co-writer Albert Maltz a Writers Guild Award and an Academy Award nomination.

     Born in Brooklyn in 1917, Wald graduated from Brooklyn College in 1936 before following his brother Jerry, who wrote the James Cagney-Humphrey Bogart gangster picture The Roaring Twenties (1939) before becoming a producer, out to Hollywood. After writing a small number of B-films for various studios, his career was interrupted by World War II, where he served in the Army Air Force making training and recruitment films in the First Motion Picture Unit at the old Hal Roach Studio in Culver City.

     Following his discharge, Wald returned to Hollywood and wrote The Naked City. He followed up the film with several other noirs including Behind Locked Doors (1948), The Dark Past (1949) and The Undercover Man (1949). He scripted the unwed mother drama Not Wanted (1949), meeting actress-turned-director Ida Lupino on the project when she took over for director Elmer Clifton when he took ill. The two would collaborate on the drama Outrage (1950).

     Through the 1950s, Wald concentrated heavily on television writing, turning in scripts for such diverse series as Lux Video Theatre, My Friend Flicka, Jungle Jim, Lassie and Climax!. He still did some film work, contributing the screenplay to the 1955 war film Battle Taxi and the story for a rare Bing Crosby foray into drama Man On Fire (1957). He would later write for such series as Combat, Daktari and The Life And Times Of Grizzly Adams. He also taught screenwriting at University of Southern California.

     Wald’s final film work was contributing to the Jess Franco film Venus In Furs (aka Paroxismus, 1969).