While the City Sleeps (1956)

Too much of everything

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Good movie but grossly overrated

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

De gustibus non est disputandum...Taste is not a matter for argument. The great director's next-to-last American-made movie is either a fine example of the man's social criticism or a tedious melodrama. Review "numbers" that we amateur critics have given the film range from a barely watchable 4 to an enthusiastic 10. Talk about a lack of consensus.The twin plot lines concern a fight over management of a news media empire and the hunt for a young male serial murderer of attractive women. The element connecting the two is the contest among executives set up by the callow new owner of the company, the ne'er do well son of the hard-working founder. The "contest" offers the position of second-in-command to the newsman who solves the mystery of the murderer.The newsmen are a mixture of high-mindedness and venality, genuine romance and shabby use of women. I don't have a clue as to the background of my fellow reviewers, so I can't say why some found insightfulness in Lang's portrayal of a modern news media company while others, such as this reviewer, saw nothing beyond the obvious. It was the longer scenes between male and female that proved hardest for me to watch, and not because Lang was making an unpleasant point. To be blunt, the scenes seemed ridiculous. We've all seen films with lots of snappy dialogue between men and women, in which realism takes a back seat to cleverness. There's nothing snappy in these scenes.If one is curious, one might want to watch this movie to see how unfamiliarity with the everyday behavior of people from a different culture than a director's own distorts the director's attempt to produce realistic scenes.

Not one of the great Fritz Lang's greatest, "While The City Sleeps" despite its great Film Noir title never really wakens itself up. It has its moments but with a confusing plot-line, some confused casting and acting to go with it, it was something of a disappointment to this long-term Lang fan.It starts well enough with the shocking murder of a young girl in her apartment, although too soon we're shown who the murderer is, a young Elvis lookalike and given the usual Freudian explanations - father left when he was young, mother wanted a girl instead of a boy - for his crimes. Hitchcock of course treated the subject of a mother-fixated psychopath just a bit better a few years later and I would doubt he learned much from his great contemporary's earlier take on the subject.Mixed in with this is a weird background story of three prominent newspaper staff members set against each other for the top job on the paper by a miscast Vincent Price as the heir to the paper's owner who conveniently dies barely minutes into the film. The late mogul's preferred choice to take over the reins is crusading Pulitzer Prize winning author and now occasional reporter and TV broadcaster, Dana Andrews, whose character appears more often drunk than sober and who has an unattractively off-hand way with his adoring girlfriend, at one point offering her as bait for the killer without even asking her. To be fair, this race to the top amongst the three contenders holds almost no viewer interest and only detracts from the main plot. Throw in Ida Lupino as an on-the-make female reporter, content to seduce Andrews at the behest of her equally miscast editor boss George Sanders, Rhonda Fleming as Price's philandering wife and Sally Forrest, with a trendy boy-ish hair cut as Andrews' too young now-she-loves-him, now-she-doesn't girlfriend and there really are too many cooks spoiling this particular pot-boiler.There are also several scenes which are just plain odd, like when Lupino's character attempts to beguile Andrews by using an old-fashioned, supposedly salacious spectrograph which turns out to contains an image of a swaddling baby or when Price, in a natty pair of shorts practises his putting while in conversation with his statuesque wife who is striking poses in her beach-wear. The film really had no attractive characters and the female characters in particular are poorly written. There is a noticeably adult approach to the filming of the loosely-termed love scenes (one especially where an adulterous conversation is played out with a bed prominently in the background) and the final attack on Price's wife is noticeably realistic, but this film lacks the imaginative flair of director Lang's best work and ranks as one of his few failures in my book.

Not the best of the Directors lexicon. A master movie maker with great style and always a sense of subject, but not here. This has a very heavy feel to it, weighted by an over lit look and some over the hill actors. The usual edge of gamy, gritty goings on give way to inflexible, stagy looking scenes with very little camera movement.There are a few interesting bits of badness. An underground chase scene, the mama's boy and his mama, and the snarling leather clad biker look of the killer are the best and they seem detached and removed from the talkative, boring, stilted, "professionals" who drink too much, and flirt a lot.There is also a minor point of contention. The pretentiousness propaganda linking the killer to someone who reads the "so-called comic books". Along with rock n' roll, comics were under attack in the 50's for its alleged contribution to juvenile delinquency. As it turned out this was a manufactured misdiagnosis from right wing fascists and religious zealots. Including that here is a way of perpetuating scare monger tactics and is not thoughtful it is unforgivable.

'While The City Sleeps' is a tale about nocturnal goings-on and those who engage in them. In this case, villains, cops & journalists. The villain in question is a serial killer. Dana Andrews plays a star investigative reporter at a paper with executive power struggles.There's plenty of American stalwarts of the day, including its director, but the movie never generates much momentum. Lang seemed to be making a point about the interaction between the three branches of life. As a result, presentation is piecemeal and priorities seem a little confused. We focus on the petty rivalries of those at the paper, whilst some villain is murdering lonely women. A great deal of time is spent following Andrews' character's turbulent love-life. This would be fine if the movie was a romantic comedy of manners, but it tends to eclipse the stalking beast and his terrible crimes. Likewise the squabbling over promotion amongst his colleagues.All the threads rub along together. there's almost no developing tension. Only when the stalker goes after Andrews' fiancée do things move up a gear. But he's caught after a pretty formulaic chase. Then we're back to the office squabbles again.It's often described as a film-noir, but doesn't cut it for me. It's too stagy, filming is unimaginative, the plot is too predictable, the action too stilted and even the script is only average. Chandler it ain't.Worth a watch if there's nothing else to do, but it's just a pot-boiler, and certainly no classic.