Respectable attendance for 1948 screenings continued on Monday. Alan K. Rode introduced "The Naked City" and the Hal Wallis production "I Walk Alone."

"The Naked City" was presented in a restored digital format as the original film elements have tangled up in legal rights disputes. Thankfully, this seminal documentary style film, narrated by Mark Hellinger, has been preserved for posterity.

Somehow, "I Walk Alone" is a title that has escaped me over the years. I have seen portions of the movie on cable television, but never watched the movie in its entirety. The major draw is that Wallis utilized his entire stock company of Paramount players (Burt Lancaster, Lizabeth Scott, Kirk Douglas, Wendell Corey, and Kristine Miller) for this tale of two Prohibition Era bootleggers coming to grips after one serves a fourteen year prison sentence while the other flourishes in his absence and sets up a swanky night club with the profits from their former partnership. The premise is similar to a subplot in "Force of Evil" where another criminal partner wants back in on the latest racket his former associate is heading up.

While Charles Schnee is credited with the screenplay for "I Walk Alone," one of the other writing credits belonged to former Chicago newspaperman John Bright. This scribe quit journalism and moved to Hollywood to try his hand in the movies.

His most notable credit was for "Public Enemy" which put James Cagney on the path to stardom. Bright co-wrote the book and based some of episodes in "Public Enemy" on actual gangsters that he knew in Chicago. Bright's subsequent career as a screenwriter was a trifle scattershot in comparison to his other newspaper colleagues. His interest in Communist Party politics effectively finished his career in the movie industry during the Blacklist.