Fitz Lang | While the City Sleeps / 1956

worse than murder

by Douglas Messerli

 

Casey Robinson (screenplay, based on the novel The Blood Spur by Charles Einstein), Fitz Lang (director) While the City Sleeps / 1956

 

If you think Ben Hecht’s and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page portrayed a group of ruthless and vengeful reporters, you need only watch one of the grubbiest versions of the media world in Fritz Lang’s 1956 noirish film, While the City Sleeps.

    Throughout his long career Lang always recognized evil when he saw it, and pointed it out to viewers again and again. Based on an actual murder spree in 1946 by William Heirens, in this film named Robert Manners, who was dubbed “The Lipstick Killer” because in one of his three murders he penned a message to the police with the victim’s lipstick, the story Lang tells does not focus as much on the pitiable effeminate “momma’s boy” (played by John Drew Barrymore) as much as on the reporters who are all out to crack the case.

     Media baron Amos Kyne, who lies dying in an early scene of the work, would like to have willed is empire to former reporter and now TV newsman Edward Mobley (Dana Andrews), who, a bit like the gumshoe private eye in The Big Sleep, would rather lay back and enjoy a drink than go out to get his pet more cat food, and who seems to have little ambition except, perhaps, to bed newswire secretary Nancy Liggett (Sally Forest).

     Accordingly, when Kyne dies, his kingdom goes instead to his detested playboy son, Walter (Vincent Price), who, would rather spend its money than properly run the company.

  Walter determines to find a new executive for the media combine by pitting three heads of departments: newswire head Mark Loving (George Sanders) vs. Sentinel editor Jon Day Griffith (Thomas Mitchell) and “honest” Harry Kritzer (James Craig), who is having a not-so-secret or honest affair with Walter Kyne’s wife Dorothy (Rhonda Fleming). So already, even though they are not playing gay characters in this film, we are presented with two figures played by Price and Sanders who ooze from all sorts of gay associations they played throughout their careers, which help turn Lang’s film into a rather bitchy affair.

      Loving (Sanders) has gossip columnist Mildred Donner (Ida Lupino) in his court, so he is sure he’ll uncover the murderer; while Kritzer, with his inside “connection” is certain he’ll get the post.

     But Griffth has a more important ace in his pocket: Mobley, who a has old time connections with police head, Lt. Burt Kaufman (Howard Duff, later married to Lupino and rumored to have had gay affairs). Moreover, Griffith is simply brighter than all the others.

    Although he is the most likeable and objective member if these news hounds, Mobley, so Lang insinuates, is the most like the murderer himself, successfully seducing the only “normal” person in the film, Nancy; and like the murderer, furtively clicking her door open so that he might reenter it at any time. In at least two meetings he is drunk, and later he allows himself to be seduced by Mildred, while blaming Nancy for her suspicions. Worst of all, he uses Nancy as “bait” for the killer, announcing his involvement with her and hinting of her location on national television.

     By the time Mobley finally realizes that the murderer might kill in the daytime as well as at night, it’s almost too late; the man keeping an eye of Nancy has left for the day.

     The murderer attempts to kill Nancy’s neighbor, who happens to be Walter’s wife, who has rented the next-door apartment for her affairs with Krizer; and Mobley finally joins the police to chase down the killer in a scene that vaguely conjures up Holly Martin’s chase after Harry Lime in The Third Man—this version filmed supposedly in the New York subway, but actually set in the Pacific Electric Belmont trolley tunnel of Los Angeles.

      Griffith finally gets the job and Mobley the girl. In the end these two appear to be the only slightly redeemable folks in the entire Kayne empire, but it is difficult to see this ending as a happy one. Griffith will surely still plot day and night to keep his job, and Mobley’s and Nancy’s marriage seems doomed from the star. It’s clear that in Lang’s world no one is truly innocent, everyone being equally guilty just for being part of the human race. More than any other director, Fritz Lang, it seems to me, truly believe in original sin.

     Yet, this underrated work reminded me yet again of how honest and gritty the mid-1950s film could really be: no sweet housewives here, nor in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man of the same year, or Sweet Smell of Success in the following year. Too bad that by this time, Lang had pretty much given up on Hollywood.

 

Los Angeles, January 3, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).