Four episodes of the hour-long version of TV's classic cop show comprise Naked City -- Portrait of a Painter. It, along with Naked City -- Spectre of the Roses Street Gang are the fifth and six DVDs of the seminal New York show, which Image has slowly been trickling out since January 2003.

Long before NYPD Blue, The Naked City was for years considered the most realistic of cop shows, and a rerun favorite in East Coast cities, though it gradually seemed to fade from view most everywhere else. Loosely adapted from Jules Dassin's classic 1948 noir film, the TV version followed a decade later, where young, handsome police detective Jimmy Halloran (James Franciscus) learned the trade from worldly senior Lt. Dan Muldoon (John McIntire) and battle-scarred Frank Arcaro (Harry Bellaver). When McIntire left the show, his character was spectacularly killed off, a concept almost without precedent in 1959, and which shocked TV audiences. Detective Mike Parker (Horace McMahon) took his place, and the half-hour show was expanded to an hour for its last three seasons. For these last seasons, Paul Burke replaced Franciscus, cast as yet another neophyte, Adam Flint.

The show was a quasi-anthology, with more than equal time accorded to guest stars playing criminals and their victims, and the format for the hour shows typically focus on them for the first half, and the investigation in its second. McMahon (who resembles Law & Order's Jerry Orbach) and Bellaver especially, with their average, middle-aged looks, use of realistic police jargon, and understated performances, lend an authenticity to the program that set it apart from other cop shows. It was also filmed in New York, and good use is made of real locations, though obvious and sometimes rudimentary sets often stand-in for interiors.

Each of the four 50-minute shows features guest actors well known even today. Though one of the shows is pretty lousy, the other three are quite good.

Portrait of a Painter Written by Howard Rodman and Mel Goldberg. Directed by David Lowell Rich. Airdate: 1/10/62. This episode features William Shatner, who in the early '60s was making a name for himself guesting on various anthologies. He plays a former mental patient-turned-painter who becomes unglued and may or may not have killed his wife. The best of the four shows, it also features Theodore Bikel as Shatner's arrogant psychiatrist, Barry Morse as an art dealer, and Lou Antonio as the former lover of Shatner's dead wife. The program gets off to a rocky start -- there's too much psychoanalytical and art theory mumbo-jumbo -- but it quickly becomes engrossing and concludes quite unexpectedly.

Don't Knock It Till You've Tried It Written by Joel Carpenter (actually blacklisted writer Arnold Manoff, according to colleague Stephen Bowie). Directed by Alex March. Airdate: 12/26/62. Though this mostly-comic episode stars longtime favorite Walter Matthau, the show is pretty much a disaster. Matthau plays a married psychiatrist (what, another one?) who is kidnapped by a spurned mistress, a Las Vegas dancer who takes him at gunpoint hoping to marry him. The episode features three irritating, childish characters (four, if you count Adam's girlfriend, played by series regular Nancy Malone).

Alive and Still a Second Lieutenant Written by Shimon Wincelberg. Directed by Ralph Senensky. Airdate: 3/6/63. This good episode stars Robert Sterling as an unhappy "vice president in charge of not rocking the boat." The script may be the first ever to deal with road rage, as Sterling accidentally kills a man when they fight over a parking spot. Though the script clumsily likens the escalation of violence to the arms race, it also shows how vulnerable all of us are to our emotions. Though Sterling's mousy failure had been a staple in TV drama since Patterns, the script otherwise has a good understanding of human nature. Jon Voight has a small role as the victim's son.

The Tragic Success of Alfred Tiloff Written by Howard Rodman. Directed by Alex March. Airdate: 11/8/61. This episode top-bills the late Jan Sterling (no relation to Robert), who plays the heartless wife of a basically decent man talked into kidnapping a young girl in a get-rich-quick scheme. The husband is well-played by Jack Klugman, who along with Shatner was one of the most sought after anthology actors during this period, with Klugman usually playing sensitive losers (as he did in three of his four Twilight Zone appearances). The episode is more a police procedural than the other episodes.

Video & Audio

All four black and white shows have minimal wear and basically look great. Though crammed with 200 minutes of programming the bit-rate was fine and there was no obvious digital artifacting. There are no subtitles to accompany the standard mono sound or Extras of any sort.

Parting Thoughts

The also-filmed-in-New York East Side/West Side may have better captured the grittiness of urban life, but Naked City is a strong, authentic show with notably three-dimensional characters and simple good storytelling. Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. He is presently writing a new book on Japanese cinema for Taschen.