Naked City excelled at opening up corners of life in New York that television and movies had heretofore ignored. At times, the series' stories were based on or inspired by actual incidents, or even recognizable personalities -- it's amazing they never did a story about the Collyer Brothers. In this case, the inspiration appears to have been Kenneth Fearing, a remarkable Greenwich Village-based poet and novelist, editor and leftist activist. Fearing -- whose name is mentioned and work is quoted in the script -- was one of the most widely read and reviewed poets of the late 1920's and 1930's, and also wrote one enduringly popular novel, The Big Clock; but lifelong alcoholism had turned him into a disreputable looking, disheveled figure on the streets of Greenwich Village by the late 1950's, and he died of cancer in the summer of 1961, at age 58. He appears to have been the model for Burgess Meredith's Duncan Kleist character in Arnold Manoff's script, and the fact that the episode is structured as a string of flashbacks from different points-of-view only reinforces the seeming influence of Fearing, whose fiction was often written from multiple points-of-view. As with most of the Naked City series, this episode hums with the look and ambience of the New York of the past. If its vision of a Greenwich Village poets' hangout is a little sanitized and artificial, at least the producers had a pair of authentic city musicians (Allan Gittler, Cotch Black) in the scene; once one gets past some awkwardness on the part of Herschel Bernardi in the role of Stanley, the rest of the show works. Alan Alda, playing a cocky young poet, nearly steals the scene he's in with Bernardi and Burgess Meredith, and you can also spot such future notables as Jessica Walter and Richard Castellano in the cast, and even an appearance by renowned teacher Sanford Meisner in an acting role.