The Public Eye is a 1992 American neo-noir film written and directed by Howard Franklin, and produced by Robert Zemeckis and Sue Baden-Powell. The drama features Joe Pesci, Barbara Hershey, Stanley Tucci, and Richard Schiff.
The film is a character study loosely based on the famed New York Daily News photographer Arthur "Weegee" Fellig. Some of the photos shown in the movie, in fact, were taken by Fellig.
Leon "Bernzy" Bernstein is a free-lance photographer for the New York City tabloids of the 1940s, dedicated to his vivid and realistic work and his ability to get shots nobody else can get. He is very confident of his skills. At one point in the movie he says, "Nobody does what I do. Nobody."
With a police radio under the dashboard of his car and a makeshift darkroom in his trunk, he quickly races to the scene of horrific crimes and accidents in order to snap exclusive photographs. He's so good at his job that he becomes known affectionately as the "Great Bernzini."
Bernzy meets the sultry widow Kay Levitz, who owns a nightclub. It seems the mob is muscling in on her due to some arrangement with her late husband. Kay asks if Bernzy could investigate an individual she considers
(This is information generated from a Wikipedia article, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.)