While the City Sleeps

Director: Fritz Lang Fritz Lang

Overview

When media mogul Amos Kyne (Robert Warwick) dies, his business, which includes a major newspaper, a television station, and a wire news service, is turned over to his sole heir, his foppish, ne'er do well son (Vincent Price). The younger Kyne has no knowledge of how to run the company his father built, preferring to spend his time spending the money that it generates, and he decides to let the heads of the three divisions -- newspaper editor John Day Griffith (Thomas Mitchell), wire service chief Mark Loving (George Sanders), and photo chief Harry Kritzer (James Craig) -- fight it out among themselves, winner-take-all. Each one has a key alley: Griffith, in Edward Mobley (Dana Andrews), a top reporter who is lately appearing on television as well; Loving, in resourceful but sluttish columnist Mildred Donner (Ida Lupino), who has her own way of digging up secrets; and Kritzer, who doesn't think he needs to dig up secrets because he's sitting on the biggest one of all, his "friendship" with Kyne's ex-model wife, Dorothy (Rhonda Fleming). Mobley becomes a focal point because the story-of-the-moment concerns the "Lipstick Killer," a serial murderer, burglar, and sex fiend who has been terrorizing the city -- break that case first and the job is won, and Mobley's specialty is crime reporting. The Lipstick Killer, a disturbed teenager named Robert Manners (John Drew Barrymore), continues to elude the police, and Loving's stumbling attempts to get information out first don't aid in the manhunt. Meanwhile, Mobley, using his own deductive powers and some basic psychology, manages to get under the killer's skin from afar on television and in print; however, unbeknownst to the reporter, the murderer is feeling more pressure to commit his crimes, and taking a very personal interest in targeting Mobley and his fiancée, Nancy Liggett (Sally Forrest). The two interwoven stories all get pulled together in a chase through the streets and into the city's subway tunnels, with Mobley, Nancy, Police Lieutenant Kaufman (Howard Duff), and the killer all crossing paths.

Product Details

Release Date:	05/13/2011
UPC:	0883316270615
Original Release:	1956
Rating:	NR
Source:	Warner Archives
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Mono]
Language:	English
Time:	1:39:00
Sales rank:	27,446

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Dana Andrews	Edward Mobley,Bar Pianist
Rhonda Fleming	Dorothy Kyne
Ida Lupino	Mildred Donner,Jim Leary
George Sanders	Mark Loving
Sally Forrest	Nancy Liggett
Thomas Mitchell	John Day Griffith
Vincent Price	Walter Kyne
Howard Duff	Lt. Burt Kaufman
James Craig	Harry Kritzer
John Drew Barrymore	Robert Manners
Vladimir Sokoloff	George Palsky
Robert Warwick	Amos Kyne
Ralph Peters	Meade
Larry Blake	Police Sergeant
Ed Hinton	O'Leary
Mae Marsh	Mrs. Manners
Sandra White	Judith Fenton
Celia Lovsky	Miss Dodd
Pitt Herbert	Bartender
Carleton Young	Police Interrogator

Technical Credits

Casey Robinson

Fritz Lang	Director
Casey Robinson	Screenwriter
Bert E. Friedlob	Producer

Editorial Reviews

While the City Sleeps (1954) was Fritz Lang's last fully successful film, one of a pair of movies that he made with independent producer Bert E. Friedlob (the other was Beyond a Reasonable Doubt). Additionally, it has proved to be one of his more enduring successes over the decades, due to the combination of its virtues as a thriller and also as a snapshot of American mores circa 1954. It may not be as respected as, say, M (1931) or Fury (1936), but it might be the Lang film that Americans of the baby-boom generation know best, through countless television showings in the 1960s and '70s, and like most for its sinister subtext. Strangely enough, While the City Sleeps was not a story that Lang that set out to tell -- producer Bert E. Friedlob rejected several of the director's proposed subjects and imposed the story on Lang, as he had already bought the rights to Charles Einstein's novel The Bloody Spur. That book was based on the criminal career of William Heirens, who had terrorized that city with a string of burglaries, sexual assaults, and murders during the mid-'40s. Heirens was identified as the "Lipstick Killer" when he left a message, scrawled in lipstick, at one of his crime scenes, asking the police to stop him. He was later caught, and he confessed and was given a life sentence (which he was still serving as of 2003). Lang jumped into this project with more enthusiasm than he had historically shown for subjects imposed from outside, primarily because he was familiar with the case and had followed it himself from newspaper articles in the mid-'40s. He made several important changes from the original story, shifting the setting from Chicago to a vaguely accurate (for the period) New York City, and moving it up to the early '50s, which allowed him to add elements of popular culture and cultural reality that were far more relevant to (and evocative of) 1954 than they would have been to 1946. The most notable of these were the intrusion of television into the news media, and the supposed corrupting influence of comic books on young readers, which is referred to as part of the killer's sickness. Lang also had fun with the casting, using actors with genuine talent and varying degrees of quirky flashiness into the leading roles; he was forced to tone down some of the more hardboiled sexuality in Einstein's book -- there were no musings by Dana Andrews' Ed Mobley about having sex with Ida Lupino's Mildred Donner here, but there was everything else but. Lang replaced the overt sexuality with a strangely neurotic coyness -- the script spends a lot of time dancing around sexuality, in connection with Ed Mobley and his fiancée (Sally Forrest), conniving Harrry Kritzer (James Craig) and Mrs. Kyne (Rhonda Fleming), and slutty Mildred Donner in connection with just about everyone. The picture moves a little slowly at times for some modern viewers, and may seem too conventional by modern standards, but it's a major Lang film just the same, winding its tensions and its just-short-of-bizarre neuroses agonizingly tight across 100 minutes of screen time, and telling some truths about that period in America in the process. In the latter connection, it's a fascinating popular culture document, bringing to the fore the various sexual hypocrisies of the '50s and some aspects of American business that were still being debated 50 years later -- While the City Sleeps was one of the earliest screenplays to hook its plot around the idea and setting of the modern media conglomerate. In the end, the Lipstick Killer is almost more a pawn (though hardly an "innocent" one) being manipulated in the larger game of corporate one-upmanship being played by the competing executives, whose near-total amorality has them treating his crimes as a commodity rather than an abomination. Thus, the movie has been given very much of a dual edge to cut with, a sinister crime thriller that is also a searing and engrossing social commentary, and nearly as vicious in that mode as Lang's earlier, ultra-cynical classic The Blue Gardenia.

All Movie Guide - Bruce Eder