While the City Sleeps (1928)


Lon Chaney was known, even while alive, for his creative and often painful makeup work he did on such films as The Phantom of the Opera and London After Midnight.  What many forget is that Chaney was a talented stage and movie actor.  As with many movies from the early days of Hollywood much of what he did has been lost or, in the case of While the City Sleeps, is not in great condition.  Although the original music score is lost to time it would be wonderful to find a decent negative to restore as this is a great early crime thriller.

Dan Coghlan (Chaney) is a plainclothes police officer in New York.  After a patrolman is killed he is sure it was at the behest of small-time crook Eddie "Mile-Away" Skeeter Carlson (Wheeler Oakman).  Problem is, as his nickname states, he always has an alibi putting him a mile away from any crime he is accused of committing.  Even worse a kid named Marty (Carroll Nye) who associates with Mile-Away is putting the moves on Myrtle Sullivan (Anita Page), the young daughter of late police officer that Coghlan also is enamored with. 

When Mile-Away's girlfriend Bessie (Mae Busch) agrees to testify against him for a deadly jewelry store robbery she turns up dead, but he still is able to avoid prosecution.  He has plans of leaving Marty's corpse behind to take the blame for a fur heist but Coghlan saves Marty, forcing him out of town and, with him gone, plans to marry Myrtle.  However, Mile-Away also has plans for Myrtle, and hopes to use her to lure Coghlan into a trap.

Within just a couple decades film noire would take over when it came to these kinds of films.  This was the type of movie that was popular in the silent era and started to fade out in the early 1930s, though some films like Scarface still carried on the same style.  There is a romantic triangle shoehorned into what is a violent crime drama with dialog and situations that only could have worked the pre-code era.  This is also one of the later silent films as innovations were being made to add sound. 

To that end it is one of Chaney's best performances.  He is like the long-lost ancestor of Dirty Harry, roughing up suspects and shooting first, but with a sense of justice and a bit of heart.  The ending is a bit predictable, not being as dark as I expected, but this has a great ending shootout between the police and Mile-Away's gang.  There is some great camera work as well, taking advantage of the fact that they were becoming a bit more mobile.

As usual with these films there are portions missing, although the running time was probably not much longer than what we have and, unlike a lot of silent films, we get the meat of the story.  It just needs a decent print to clean up and someone to add appropriate music, as the versions I know of are either devoid of a soundtrack or have music that sounds like it was lifted from another film.  It is still worth putting up with these faults to see. 

While the City Sleeps (1928)
Time: 66 minutes
Starring: Lon Chaney, Anita Page, Carroll Nye, Wheeler Oakman, Mae Busch
Director: Jack Conway

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

Image
A large portion of the world likes being scared.  This seems to be one thing we all share.  At some point when there were just a few homo sapiens gathered around a fire I am sure they told stories of old Gak who had his arm replaced with a mammoth tusk and terrorized some teenagers making outside of camp when they should have been hunting and gathering.  Everyone enjoys a good scare. Except, apparently, for the French.  Eyes Without a Face came out square in the middle of the French New Wave, a series of films that guys in the late 1950s and early 1960s pretended to understand to impress their girlfriends.  In contrast Georges Franju's film was pretty straightforward.  Although he nominally was more interested in exploring depression and loss, the framework was that of a typical mad scientist film.  However, Franju's surrealist touches set it aside from normal b-movie fare.   Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is a brilliant surgeon working in t...
Read more

The Resurrected (1991)

Image
Dan O'Bannon was known for a few things, other than being extremely difficult to work with.  He cowrote and co-starred in Dark Star , wrote Alien and directed The Return of the Living Dead .  Because of the latter he has his own version of zombies named after him.  While he had issues he wasn't the only one in his field that did, and his supposed problems seem tame when compared with a lot of eccentric directors.  Whatever the case, he had early success with his movies and was considered to be quite brilliant.  Therefore, it is a bit of surprise that he only directed two feature films and one of those is almost impossible to find.  Private investigator John March (John Terry) is contacted by Claire Ward (Jane Sibbett) to find out what her husband Charles (Chris Sarandon) is up to.  He has been acting strange as of late and recently moved into an old farmhouse in rural Rhode Island that had once been owned by a  man named Joseph Curwen (Sarandon)....
Read more

Looper (2012)

Image
Looper  was writer and director Rian Johnson's third feature film and first major success.  A major departure from the movie he had done prior, it required immense worldbuilding, a major amount of attention to making the time travel plot plausible and the ability to do so on only a moderate budget.  However, it was a gamble that paid off in major ways for Johnson, at least in the short term. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a looper, which is basically a hired assassin who takes care of people that a crime syndicate 30 years in the future wants gone.  They send them back to his time - a dismal, dystopian United States in 2044 - to be shot, for which he earns silver bars that he can spend.  What he mainly spends it on is whores and drugs, but it's because he knows that, in the end, he will have to close his own loop.  That means ultimately killing an older version of himself. When Joe's friend Seth (Paul Dano) faces just that and fails he is asked by local crim...
Read more