While the City Sleeps (1956)


Despite sharing a title with the 1928 movie starring Lon Chaney, While the City Sleeps is based on a novel called The Bloody Spur by Charles Einstein, published in 1953 and loosely based on a series of murders that occurred in 1946.  The original murder is even referenced in the movie, where the killer wrote "Catch me if you can" on a mirror in lipstick at the second murder scene.  William Heirens, the true lipstick killer, only made it to three victims before being captured.

What makes this movie a bit different is the perspective.  While it does contain some references to forensic research at the time the story is told not from the perspective of the police pursuing the killer but rather from a group of newspaper men working for the fictional Kyne Media company, which includes broadcast television, radio and a paper called the New York Sentinel.  While it has several homages to Citizen Kane it also is one of the first movies to establish tropes in modern crime films.

Ed Mobley (Dana Andrews) is a Pulitzer Prize winner and the broadcast face of Kyne Media.  He is friends with its founder, Amos Kyne (Robert Warwick), who even from a hospital bed orders his team to pursue the story of a man dubbed the Lipstick Killer (John Drew Barrymore), so-called after leaving the message "Ask Mother" on the wall of his victim Judith Felton (Sandra White).  However, Amos dies after setting Mobley and the others on the trail, leading Mobley to be the first to announce his passing on the air.

Amos's son Walter (Vincent Price), a playboy millionaire, takes over his father's role as head of the company.  Not wanting to handle the day-to-day workings of his father's empire he decides to pit the Sentinel's editor John Day Griffith (Thomas Mitchell) against wire service head Mark Loving (George Sanders) and photographer "Honest" Harry Kritzer (James Craig).  Both Loving and Griffith try to get Mobley to help them win the price of Executive Director, while Kritzer is romancing Kynes's wife Dorothy (Rhonda Fleming).  Meanwhile, in an effort to catch the killer, Mobley works with Lt. Burt Kaufman (Howard Duff) to use Mobley's fiancé Nancy (Sally Forrest) as bait to catch the killer.

The movie is well-written and, since it is directed by Fritz Lang, there are hints of his famous serial killer film M such as showing the killer early on.  Despite being drunk most of the movie, or probably because of it since Mobley is also an alcoholic, Dana Andrews manages to present a human and flawed performance, while still getting a chance to be heroic in the end.  John Drew Barrymore spends most of his time lurking as the killer, but the one major dramatic scene he has with his mother (Mae Marsh) is quite memorable.  Lang pushed the envelope in a number of places as far as he can for a movie of this period. 

The best thing about it, however, is the ensemble casting.  Ron Howard's The Paper seems to have taken quite a bit of inspiration from While the City Sleeps for its portrayal of journalists.  While idealized at times this makes me a bit nostalgic for when respected reporters had to earn what they did and often came out just as scarred and cynical as the police, politicians and criminals (often some combination of one in the same) they pursued.  Casey Robinson's script and the performances that Lang pulls from his cast are earthy and believable.  It is even pretty honest about how women in such a business were treated as objects rather than coworkers, with Nancy having to put up with the advances of both Loving and Mobley while gossip columnist Mildred Donner (Ida Lupino) finds herself having to use her body to get her way.  

There are also many firsts here, such as using television to enrage and lure the killer into the open.  It has become such a part of movie storytelling when it comes to serial killers that one forgets how far back this goes.  While not so well-known today While the City Sleeps was influential on many modern crime thrillers and, despite being firmly planted in the time period it is in, does hint at the way these movies would begin to change in the next decade.  

While the City Sleeps (1956)
Time: 100 minutes
Starring: Dana Andrews, Sally Forrest, George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, James Craig, Rhonda Fleming, Ida Lupino, Howard Duff, John Drew Barrymore
Director: Fritz Lang

 

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