Naked City “The One Marked Hot Gives Cold” (March 21, 1962)

A bolt-upright howl of anguish on behalf of the unloved everywhere, this raw, wintry Naked City showcases a powerful early performance from Robert Duvall as one L. Francis Childe, a volatile, disturbed young loner whose only friendship – with an imaginative little girl who trades tall tales with him in Riverside Park – is a sweet idyll waiting to be misunderstood.  That the cops in this putative cop show often cared more about psychoanalyzing the bad guys than arresting them, and that the storylines had to contort themselves to shoehorn the police into the action in the first place – these, in retrospect,  were the genius of this pugnacious Great Society snapshot of Manhattan’s eight million.  Writer Abram S. Ginnes exploits the conceptual loopholes to sketch out a set of vignettes of troubled souls in crisis, all linked by their hothouse craving for some absent affection.  A boy in an orphanage sees a burglar and pleads, “Mister – take me.”  A landlady seduces her tenants, then sics the cops on them if they spurns her.  Francis’ meeting with his long-lost father comes as a hallucinatory shock image, of the sort Ginnes was prone to drop into his Naked City scripts: the man (perennial movie weakling Edward Andrews) literally crawls, prostrate, from behind a sofa, an objective correlative for paternal inadequacy.  Then the false spectre of child molestation is raised, and it seems impossible that the show’s delicate parade of emotions won’t succumb to melodramatic excess.  But Ginnes’ fable-styled ending offers no hysteria, only a wounded sorrow over one little girl’s loss of faith in her parents