While The City Sleeps (1956)
Surprisingly mature Fritz Lang picture from the 1970s and 1980s that foreshadows the structure of many a thriller from the 1970s and 1980s, notably in how it combines a serial killer’s pranks with a sarcastic analysis of mass media heroism.
Even though it was made on the cheap, it has a pretty nice cast once you get over Dana Andrews – I couldn’t help but wonder whether he tasted as much like cedar as he acted when he kissed his fiancée.
When Amos Kynes (Rwick) dies, he rants about his responsibility as a news provider while ordering his employees to play up the sensational murder that has just occurred (“Call him the Lipstick Killer!”) and laments that TV news anchor, author, and ex-crime-beat reporter Edward Mobley (Andrews) will not take over the business from him.
This puts Walter Kyne (Vincent Price), Amos’ playboy son and overall jerk, in control, and his brilliant business plan is to hire someone to do all of his work. But who will be hired? Mark Loving (George Sanders) is a haughty wire service editor. ‘Honest’ Harry Kritzer (James Craig) is a sleazy picture editor.
He has an inside track since he’s dating Kyne’s wife Dorothy (Rhonda Fleming), who has pledged to help him arrange the job. Will it be fantastic if scruffy managing editor John Day Griffith (Thomas Mitchell), who suffers from ethical attacks on occasion, takes over?
While they compete for status, they attempt to get other newspeople to join their camp of supporters, including Women’s reporter Mildred Donner (Ida Lupino, in a magnificently world-weary performance) and Mobley himself, who is more focused on drinking and romancing Loving’s secretary Nancy (Sally Forrest). Obviously, whomever can produce the major news storey – the killer’s capture – will be a shoe-in for the big job.
But our little buddy the murderer, a pharmacy store delivery guy portrayed by John Barrymore Jr as a lip-twisting, bug-eyed oddball who’d be arrested on the street on principle, gets around by taunting the cops with clues gleaned from the comic books he enjoys. When Mobley sets out to apprehend the murderer, he mocks him on TV as a maniac and a momma’s son, hoping to push the killer into attempting to kill Nancy.
Surprisingly, this puts Mobley’s relationship with Nancy in jeopardy less than Ed’s inebriated one-night affair with Mildred… What’s most intriguing about this picture is that it gets dangerously close to portraying real people with actual sex lives, and the language skillfully communicates this even as the film scrapes the edge of censorship at the time.
Add in some cheap Freud to drive the murderer, some juicy office politics, and a narrative that continues twisting in unexpected ways until the last reel, and you’ve got yourself a fairly fascinating little flick.
