Mientras Nueva York duerme

Fritz Lang, who brought us so many marvelous films in the '30s and '40s - Metropolis, M, Fury, Woman in the Window, Scarlett Street etc., by the 1950s was in a decline. With the problems that the studios were having coping with television and the breakup of their monopoly of theaters, no one really wanted to deal with the difficult Lang. Therefore, he was relegated to B movies, some of which, like "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" are quite impressive.

1956's "While the City Sleeps" is a little less impressive but still highly entertaining. It stars some actors who had either seen better days in film or hadn't moved up the ladder much - Dana Andrews, Ida Lupino, George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, Sally Forrest, James Craig, and John Drew Barrymore. It's a '40s cast, and the film, set in New York City, has a '40s feel to it.

Andrews plays a Pulitzer-prize winning writer, Ed Mobley, an Ed Murrow type, who does a television commentary. With the death of the big boss of the media conglomerate - which includes a newspaper, television news, and a wire service - his waste of a son, Walter Kyne, (Price) takes over the company. He sets up a competition among the three heavy-hitters in the company - the newspaper editor John Day Griffith (Mitchell), the head of the wire service, Mark Loving (Sanders) and a news photographer Harry Kritzer (Craig). The first one who solves the "Lipstick Killer" murders wins the job as director of the company.

The black and white cinematography gives "While the City Sleeps" a great atmosphere, and some of the characters are a real hoot, including Lupino, who plays Mildred, a columnist for the paper, and Rhonda Fleming as Kyne's gorgeous wife who is having an affair with one of the contenders, Kritzer. Everyone drinks like a fish at a nearby bar, Mobley gets into trouble with his fiancé Nancy (Forrest) for kissing Mildred in a cab, and Kyne's wife is discovered in flagrante delicto due to a bizarre set of circumstances. Meanwhile, Griffith and Loving fight to be first and can't figure out why Kritzer doesn't seem to be trying very hard. Well, he is, just not at the paper. Nancy is set up (with her permission) as a target for the Lipstick Killer, who uses his delivery job to unlock apartment doors by pushing in the button, and then returns and kills his single female victim.

Though a little slow at times, "While the City Sleeps" is more of a newspaper story than a mystery, so there isn't a lot of suspense or excitement to be had. It's just good, old-fashioned entertainment. Recommended for a very good cast and decent story.

Tugboats scudding down a dark river nudge us urgently into `New York City – Tonight.' Fritz Lang's While The City Sleep opens like an urban legend: A drugstore delivery man (John Barrymore, Jr.) invades an apartment on a quiet street of brownstones and murders a young woman. Scrawled on the wall in lipstick is a cryptic, chilling order – `Ask mother.'

But Lang swiftly shifts registers; the young psycho-killer is but leaven for his loaf. His prime focus proves to be how the search to catch the culprit plays out in the executive suite of a huge media syndicate. Its founder, Amos Kyne (Robert Warwick), rules his empire from a hospital bed in his office; his last order, before his ticker tocks its last, is to label the anonymous Barrymore `the lipstick killer' and play him big. (`Kyne' seems deliberately to evoke another press magnate, Charles Foster Kane, even down to the maps showing his coast-to-coast reach and the encircled `K' logo that could have been ripped off the gates of Xanadu.)

Kyne's power, however, devolves to his pompous, petty son (Vincent Price). Knowing they hold him in contempt, he sets the heads of his various divisions to finding the killer, with a new directorship as the prize. Among the contenders are Thomas Mitchell, editor of the syndicate's flagship newspaper, the Sentinel; George Sanders, chief of its wire service; and James Craig, who runs its photo operation. Above the fray is Pulitzer-Prize winning TV commentator Dana Andrews, whose only ambition is to be left alone to pursue his drinking and his girl (Sally Forrest). Nor are any women eligible for the prize, though Price's trophy wife (Rhonda Fleming) pulls strings on behalf of her lover Craig, while mink-wrapped sob sister Ida Lupino (`Champagne cocktail. Brandy float.') initiates like maneuvers for her squeeze, Sanders.

Indifference to the prize, however, doesn't dampen Andrews' journalistic ardor. Not only does he use his broadcast to bait the `momma's boy' (who watches in his jammies as his mother, Mae Marsh, dotingly dithers around), he sets up Forrest as bait. For all his menace, Barrymore's not the brightest lad in the boroughs, and thus can be excused for mixing up his targets....

With its high-powered (and hammy) cast, its blend of psychopathology and cutthroat corporate culture, While The City Sleeps would end up standing as Lang's last American film but one (the far-fetched Beyond A Reasonable Doubt, also starring Andrews). His following so many plot strands results in a thinning of atmosphere, some fragmentation of focus – there's a buoyancy of tone which was decidedly absent from his other films of the ‘50s, like Clash By Night or The Big Heat or Human Desire. While The City Sleeps tempers hard-core noir with more mainstream motives. It's a slick, entertaining, and at times even scary movie.

While the city sleeps is an excellent movie that is a commentary on the media which happens to include a story about a serial killer. Not the other way around. It has wit, intelligence, and biting social commentary, which seems to be outside the reach of most modern audiences, who would prefer explosions and blood to intelligence.

Between 1936 and 1956, during his tenure in America, the German director Fritz Lang made some of the most psychologically astute movies ever to come out of the studio system, often working with the flimsiest of material; pulpish fiction indeed. Most of these films were thrillers, though perhaps only in the most nebulous sense of the term, dealing instead with the psychosis of the killer or, as here, with the iniquitous motives of those on the periphery of the case. 'Plot', in the strictest sense of the term, never really interested Lang, 'the story' as such being secondary to the observational detail and the characterizations. In "While the City Sleeps" the serial killer whom we expect to be at the centre is side-lined to such an extent that catching him is never the focus of attention. He's the 'McGuffin', if you like, for an entirely different movie, one in which the thriller element is dispatched in favour of a study of greed and the relationships, not always savory, between men and women.

The film is set in the world of newspapers and news agencies, so you expect an aura of venality from the outset. Vincent Price is the vain, self-centered scion of a recently deceased magnate who has taken over his father's business and wants someone else to do all the work. So he creates a new executive position then sets three of his top men against each other vying for the job. The one who 'catches' or names the serial killer terrorizing women in New York, gets it.

Like many of Lang's films, "While the City Sleeps" had the tawdry feel of a B-movie. There is a kind of rough urgency to it that a more main-streamed movie might have lacked. (You could say Lang's genius was for making silk purses out of sow's ears). He didn't work with 'stars' but character players. About the biggest name in the movie and the 'star' of the picture is Dana Andrews, (superb, he was a very under-rated actor), as the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who, like many of Lang's characters, is less noble than he first appears. As for the rest, despite there being two Oscar winners in the cast, (George Sanders, one of his poorer performances, and Thomas Mitchell, excellent), they were mainly the stable diet of the B-movie, though that said there is a terrific performance from the under-rated Sally Forrest as Andrews' girl who he is not above using as bait to catch the killer and a typically flamboyant one from Ida Lupino.

After this, Lang was to make only one more film in America before returning to his native Germany, the equally cynical "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt". Indeed it's Lang's cynicism and his critique of American values and mores that set him apart, that put him, like those other European émigrés, Otto Preminger and Douglas Sirk at a critical remove from his American counterparts. In this respect, perhaps, the only American who can be compared to him is Samuel Fuller.

The thing you must know about this film is that the crime drama element is secondary, and the main story is a critique of the media and human behavior. We first get a glimpse of this when before passing away, a media mogul talks about the importance of a free press, but in the next breath talks about how to sensationalize the murder we've just seen in order to strike fear into the public an sell more newspapers. His spoiled son (Vincent Price) then inherits his corporation, and soon pits three employees (George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, and James Craig) against one another in a competition for a new executive position he's going to create (the one that will do all the work, so that he doesn't have to). We see in this a little comment director Fritz Lang has for inherited wealth as well.

One of the men runs the newspaper, another the wire service, and the third's angle is to take advantage of an affair he's having with the new boss's wife (Rhonda Fleming). The first two men scheme away, determining when to broadcast information and when to hold it for maximum effect (and personal gain). They think about how to add little elements in the story, like referring to one of the victims as "the attractive librarian," in order to titillate readers. They also use personal connections in the police force in order to get direct access to information (and even watch interrogations). It all becomes a bit of a circus, and the tragedy of the murders is lost, which is of course the point.

The main character is another man, a reporter (Dana Andrews) who is not involved directly in the fray, but is doing a lot of the investigation into the murders. He's also involved in a relationship with a woman in the office (Sally Forrest), though their relationship wasn't all that inspiring to me. The real issue, however, is that his actions don't seem all that believable, e.g. Is he really going to speak directly to the killer over the airwaves in the way he does, divulging information like that? Use his fiancée as bait? Swing from getting engaged to immediately carrying on with Ida Lupino when she tempts him? And is the media really going to be tasked with solving the crime, instead of just reporting on it?

I think that to be a satire, it needed to be a little more believable, and I could have used a little bit more of a shift into the darkness of the crime itself. The ending also undermines the film's message, and it reminded me a teeny bit of Otto Preminger's critique of the justice system in 'Anatomy of a Murder' - not immediately obvious that the critique is the main point, and then an ending that seems a little off in tone.

I did like how Lang seemed to enjoy himself thumbing his nose at the production code. The affair between Fleming and Craig is crystal clear, and under the guise of telling her husband she's going to her mother's. Andrews makes it clear to Forrest that he thinks people should "find out" about each other before marriage, and Lupino later quips that all men are polygamists as she flirts with him. Before marveling at his Forrest's nightgown (a "shorty" that "you can see right through") Andrews will also say "Get your things off; it's your wedding day, you want to look nice," which had me chuckling. It makes the fact that the middle-aged married couple (Mitchell and his wife) appearing in separate beds when he's phoned in the middle of the night extra comical, and one can sense Lang was well aware of that.

Lang may have taken joy in all this and the subversive commentary about the wonders of a free press, but it's hard to fathom it being among his personal favorite films he made, particularly given his body of work. It's entertaining enough to watch though.