La cinquième victime

Maybe I was expecting too much from this picture. It's billed as a film noir, but I thought the mood was all wrong for a film noir. More like a melodrama bordering on a drama but for the presence of John Barrymore, Jr. It had a great cast with lots off recognizable names and the director was Fritz Lang.

I just thought it wasn't up to the lofty standard set by Lang in earlier films like 'M" and "The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse", but truth be told, these pictures were made many years before this one. Too much dialogue here, and this picture dearly needed an injection of excitement to break the tedium of the love stories in the sub-plot.

I like Dana Andrews, Thomas Mitchell, George Sanders, et al. A big boost was provided by Ida Lupino, always professional, as a sleep-around newspaper columnist. I also felt Barrymore tended toward ham in his portrayal of the psycho killer. My overall impression is of a master director who was losing his fastball, which is a shame. It could have been so much better.

5/10 - Website no longer prints my star rating.

One of my favorites by Fritz Lang, "While the City Sleeps" is also one of the neglected masterworks of 1950s American cinema, a decade as you may know full of insight and social criticism (e.g. "Ace in the Hole", "Bigger Than Life", "Phenix City Story", etc.) It was Lang's penultimate American film and one of his personal favorites.

The film, a dazzling allegory on media manipulation and modernity may not work on single viewing and perhaps that's why it's so underrated, despite a superb cast: Dana Andrews, George Sanders, Ida Lupino, Vincent Price, Mae Marsh, Rhonda Fleming and John Drew Barrymore(the son of the great John Barrymore).

In discussing the picture, Lang often compared it to his German masterpiece, "M"(1931) and the comparison is not inapt. In "M", Peter Lorre's Hans Beckert terrorizes the whole city and creates a paranoia among its citizens. In "While the City Sleeps", Manners's crimes mainly function as a gimmick for the press to sell papers while the normal life in the city seems to continue. Rather than simply conveying the necessary information in "M", the media here in "While the City Sleeps" (consisting of an interplay between television and newspaper) is much more ironic and cynical: they use Manners and his victims to terrify the public to sell more papers, something that is equally true today as it was back in 1956.

Not to be missed.

When media mogul Amos Kyne dies his playboy son takes over the seat of power but, knowing he is unable to manage such an organisation he decides to create an executive directorship just below his role to do all the real work and day to day managing of the company. Meanwhile a serial killer is stalking the city, strangling young women in their homes. With this story becoming big news Kyne Jr decides how he will appoint his new Ex Director – it will be the first of the potential employees to bring him the scoop on the Lipstick Killer, as he is known.

With an intriguing plot and an impressive ensemble approach with the casting, this film offered much and, although it could have been darker in tone, it still offered a lot of potential to be a slick urban mystery. The story is basically a mystery where a group of mercenary journalists compete for a top job by trying to catch a serial killer. Typical for this sort of thing, the journalists are all hard-talking and hard-drinking while still being likable rogues to a man; the driven edge they have offers much but the film doesn't follow through – for example I was shocked by the idea of Mobley offering his own fiancé up as bait but disliked the way she treated it as a bit of a laugh and didn't respond convincingly. Likewise the story contains adultery and betrayal between the characters and while it hints at much it doesn't throw up as many ethical shadows as I felt it should be doing. Regardless of this the story is still good; the mystery aspect is not that interesting and, despite the fact people were being killed I didn't ever feel like it was a race against time or anything. What the story does better is to develop the various characters and draw the drama from their relationships and tensions.

For this reason the ensemble cast does pretty well and features a host of big names. Andrews is the lead of the group and he has a good presence although I would have liked him to be a little bit less likable and be as ethically questionable as his methods suggest he was. Sanders is not that great, mainly because his material is not as strong; conversely Craig is better because his material is more interesting. Price is good in his role and Mitchell provides good support and fits the newspaper editor stereotype. Fleming and Lupino are much better than Forrest, who is a bit weak when viewed alongside such actors. Barrymore, Warwick and others do well in smaller roles but the guy who played the Lipstick Killer was a bit of a pain as he seemed to relentlessly ham it up and skulk around all to obviously.

Overall though the film stands up and is an enjoyable ensemble drama with a bit of mystery tension. The actual race to find the killer is less of a draw than the tensions between the journalists and their partners and it never got as exciting as it should have done but it is still interesting. Viewers who like their noirs to be a bit murkier and darker may be disappointed to find that the script hints at darkness but also keeps everyone likable – a failing I must admit bothered me because I could see the potential but other than this it is still worth watching.

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.

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.