The Sleeping City (1950)

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

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

***SPOILERS*** Shocking film noir that takes places in one of the country's largest hospital Bellvue, called City Hospital in the movie, involving a combination bookie loan shark and drug trafficking operation under the very noses of the hospital staff running it.It's when Bellvue Hospital intern Dr. Foster, Hurbert O'Neil,is found shot to death outside after taking a smoke break that the NYPD gets involved in finding what was the reason behind Dr.Foster's murder. Foster had been acting very strange before he was blown away and one of the things that the NYPD is very interested in is what his relations with head trauma nurse Ann Sebastin, Coleen Gray, was. It was minutes before he was popped that a very troubled Dr.Foster was trying to get in touch with Nurse Sebastin as if his life depended on it!Getting undercover cop Fred Rowen, Richard Conte, into the hospital as a new intern from far off L.A he's given the name and medical background of a Dr. Fred Glibert with only his boss Insp. Gordon,John Alexander, knowing his true identity. Bunking with fellow intern Dr. Steve Anderson, Alex Nicol, Rowan notices that he's very troubled in what he's involved in which has nothing to do with medicine. Dr. Anderson is in hock playing the horses with hospital elevator operation "Doc" Ware, Richard Tober, who's always giving him sure bets that don't come in!Rowan tying to get his bunkmate Steve Anderson to quite betting with "Doc" and stick to his work at the hospital as well as pay more attention to his fiancée Kathy Hall, Peggy Dow, has just the opposite effect in him going from bad to worse. Anderson finally ends up killing himself by jumping into the East River when the pressures of being an intern who makes $50.00 a month with debts, in playing the horses, just about breaking him became too much for Anderson to handle!***SPOILERS*** Realizing that "Doc" is somehow involved in both Foster and Anderson's deaths Rowen himself starts to make book with him and ends up over his head in owing "Doc" money that he can't come up with! It's then that the cagey "Doc" plays his trump card giving Rowen the only way out he can find: Write out prescriptions for the white stuff, narcotics, that Doc and his contact in the hospital can sell on the street for as much as 100 times it's value! Rowen now has to make the pinch on the drug dealing "Doc" Ware before he gets wise to him before he himself ends up where both Foster and Anderson did! It the Bellvue Hospital morgue! But before that Rowen's got to find out who "Doc's" contact in the hospital is before he could do it to make it stick. Which can very well jeopardize not only the undercover NYPD drug operation but the person trying to crack it Det.Fred Rowen himself!Amazing performance by actor Richard Tober as the creepy manipulating hyena like "Doc" Ware. Even though he was in less then ten films, with the most notable being the taxi driver in the movie "Kiss of Death", in is more then 40 year acting and writing career Ware's performance in the movie "The Sleeping City" should have easily won him an Academy Award in the best supporting acting category.

A detective (Richard Conte) goes undercover, posing as an intern at New York's Bellevue Hospital, in order to solve the murder of another intern. What he discovers is a rather sophisticated operation of gambling and drug dealing. Desperate interns, a seductive and crooked ward nurse played by Colleen Grey, and a rather demented hospital maintenance man (Pops) played by Richard Tabor, together call into question the very integrity of the famous hospital. Conte works his way through to solve the murder and to learn the circumstances around it in some unusual film noir settings amidst darkened hospital wards and empty hallways.

Two well-known titles in the noir cycle are The City That Never Sleeps (1953) and While The City Sleeps (1956). Before them, there was the less familiar The Sleeping City. In this last (or first), what seems asleep is not so much New York as a city-within-a-city – the huge old fortress of Bellevue Hospital, where, at night in its wards and among its staff, skulduggery is afoot. Bellvue opened its doors to the film's cast and crew, perhaps not wholly grasping that the resulting portrait might be less than reassuring to prospective patients. But it's not a story, at least explicitly, about malpractice. A jumpy, distracted intern on his break goes outside to grab a smoke. He ends up with a bullet through his brain. Since the murder appears to be an inside job, an undercover department of the city police plants a detective (Richard Conte) in the hospital among the interns. He's had some medical training in the army and so should pass casual muster. Taking lodging in the building and going on rounds, he makes acquaintances. Among them are his bitter roommate, Alex Nichol, nursing some resentments about not being rich, either by birth or through wedlock; ward nurse Coleen Gray, raising a young son from an unhappy first marriage; and chummy elevator operator Richard Taber, who bunks down off the boiler room – where he runs a book where the cash-strapped interns can play the ponies. What Conte's after is not just the killer but the source of an infectious but non-microbial malaise that will claim Nichol, too, the night before he was to marry. Conte finds himself the prime suspect in his roommate's death and comes close to blowing his cover before his own superiors intervene. But Conte's suspicions about Taber's bookmaking operation aren't quite on the mark; it turns out that a 'white-stuff job' is the real racket....Light and portable equipment developed during World War II made location shooting finally feasible, and the low-budget second-features in the post-war years pioneered its use. The Sleeping City affects a pseudo-documentary style that also came into vogue as a complement to the new cinema-verité look (a chase through the bowels of the massive institution stays particularly sinister). Despite a nifty shot of the new interns descending an endless stairwell en masse, the vast hospital looks underpopulated, especially during the graveyard shift. But the claustrophobia (the whole picture is shot in and around the hospital) pays off. The main characters aren't many, but not so few that they can't deliver a final twist.

A bleak, atmospheric movie, filmed entirely on location at New York's Bellevue Hospital. Fine performances by Conte, Gray, Alexander and a slew of New York stage actors. Note the brief but significant appearance, at the beginning of the movie, by Hugh Reilly, who went on to star in the Lassie TV series.