La cinquième victime

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.

An interesting and twisted thriller, being based on "The Bloody Spur" by Charles Einstein. It is an interesting and nice picture , but also lends the story a certain disjointedness in its storytelling. A serial killer known as "The Lipstick Killer" has been killing beautiful women in New York and the new owner (Robert Warwick) of a media company offers a high ranking job to the first of his senior executives who can get the earliest scoops on the case with the editorship of their paper the prize . TV newsman Ed Mobley (Dana Andrews) wants newspaper editor Jon Day Griffith (Thomas Mitchell) to get the job and sets out to help him find the killer. Throughout the film a competition is developed between three journalists (James Craig, Thomas Mitchell, George Sanders) to get the best fron page news. With information from his police contact, he challenges the killer on air, putting both himself and, especially, his own fiancee, Nancy Liggett (Sally Forrest), in danger. Suspense as startling as a strangled scream !. Sensational Lipstick Murderer!. The story of these big-time newspaper people is more sensational than any crime they cover !. It will keep you on the edge of your seat... and your nerves !. Ten top stars!. Ten peak performances ¡, They'd sell out their own mothers! Ask Mother What Sins Are Committed...

Nice and entertaining thriller-plus with the emphasis on the reporters' ruthless methods of gaining information rather than on the killer's motivations. This engaging film contains murder thriller, plot twists , suspense and some far-fetched elements including plausible events. The movie is both a slick, smooth crime yarn and a jaded look at the morals of big-city newspapermen. This is a real critical on the American journalism; as this tale develops, a variety of submerged elements slowly surfaces to make this picture far more one of intrigue. It packs a memorable subway pursuit climax, though suffers only from having too many roles which throws meat to a hungry familiar cast. The movie was adapted from a novel, "The Bloody Spur" by Charles Einstein (1953), which in turn was based on a real murder case that took place in 1946. The picture ¨White the city sleeps¨results to be a classic film (1956) by Fritz Lang, a brilliant and masterly exposition in which Lang gets a first-hand view of the journalistic system, being finely starred by a great star-studded-cast. Acceptable acting from starring Dana Andrews, he is well cast in the impulsive main role, playing a writer who attempts to chase a series killer, while Sally Forrest as his girlfriend, but she seems a little long in the tooth in a role that called for more sparkle. And a good all-star-cast, such as: Rhonda Fleming , George Sanders, Howard Duff, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, John Barrymore Jr, James Craig, Ida Lupino, Mae Marsh, and Robert Warwick.

It displays an adequate and atmospheric musical score by composer Herschel Burke Gilbert. Functional and evocative cinematography in black and white by Ernest Laszlo. This decent motion picture was compellingly directed by Fritz Lang who gets first-hand view of journalism. Here Lang completed 20 memorable years in Hollywood after a distinguished early career in the German cinema that incluyed such classics as Metropolis. Being one of Lang's last Hollywood movies and last big success, it has improved with age, although it still doesn't grip as it should, at times. This great German director Lang made various prestigious silent movies as ¨Metrópolis¨ , ¨Woman in the moon¨ , ¨Doctor Mabuse¨ , ¨Spies¨ , ¨Spiders¨ , ¨Nibelungs¨. And shot other excellent and classic films in all kinds of genres, such as: adventure movie as ¨Moonfleet¨ ; noir films : ¨Beyond a reasonable doubt¨, ¨While city sleeps¨ , ¨The big heat¨ , ¨Clash night¨ ; Drama : ¨Woman in the Window¨ , ¨Human Desire¨ , ¨Scarlet Street¨ , ¨Fury¨ ; Western : ¨Rancho notorious¨ , ¨Western Unión¨ , ¨Revenge of Frank James¨. Rating: 6.5/10. Better than average.

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 has an interesting premise. A newspaper is taken over by a rather dissolute millionaire who sets three executives scrambling for a big promotion. They all have different angles to get the job, but the main focus is on the attempt to show off their skills by getting the best news on a wanted serial killer.

This is a promising setup for a hard-edged examination of the cynicism of the newspaper industry, but it lacks that hard, cynical edge. The movie doesn't seem to be all that appalled by the actions of its executives nor does one get a real sense of hard men doing anything to get ahead. In other words, this is no Sweet Smell of Success.

The movie also has some pretty dumb plot elements, most notably reporter Andrews absurd plan to catch the killer. Admittedly this is pretty typical of movies of the kind, but that doesn't make it any less stupid. The dialogue is artificial and often a little ridiculous.

On the plus side, the movie has an entertaining adult sensibility. Even though the Hayes code means little is said explicitly, there is a remarkable amount of implied sex in this movie, and the sleaziness of most of its characters is the most interesting aspect of the film. But overall, this is just sort of watchable.

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.