The Naked Street is the penultimate of the five films Shane directed after writing dozens of B films (none of which I have seen), starting in 1937. It is an okay combination of family drama and gangster film and though it has dark elements I would not call it a film noir, though Eddie Muller showed it recently in his Noir Alley series on Turner Classic Movies. It stars Anthony Quinn as gangster Phil Regal, Anne Bancroft as his sister Rosalie Regalzyk, Elsa Neft as their mother, and Farley Granger as Nicky Bravna. When Phil finds out his sister is pregnant, that Nicky is the father and is on death row for murder, Phil gets Nicky off by using his goons to make witnesses change their stories and when Nicky is free Phil gets him a job as a truck driver. Nicky resents not becoming part of Phil's profitable organization and turns back to crime after Phil blames him for the death of Rosalie's baby. Phil frames Nicky for another murder but before Nicky is executed he spills all the beans on Phil to journalist Joe McFarland (Peter Graves). Phil dies when he is chased by the cops and Joe and Rosalie end up together.
Shane gets excellent performances from his actors, including Else Neft as Phil's mother, and Floyd Crosby's black-and-white cinamatography is crisp and beautiful (Crosby worked on everything from F.W. Murnau's Tabu in 1931 to Roger Corman's The Haunted Palace in 1963), with most of the film shot in the studio. But Shane's direction is flat and lacking the fatalism that would make it a genuine film noir, a genre, if one can call it that, that more or less came to an end in 1955 with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly.
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