worse than murder
by
Douglas Messerli
Casey
Robinson (screenplay, based on the novel The
Blood Spur by Charles Einstein), Fritz Lang (director) While the City Sleeps / 1956
If
you think Ben Hecht’s and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page portrayed a group of ruthless and often vengeful
reporters, you need to see one of the grubbiest visions of the media world in
Fritz Lang’s 1956 noirish film, While the
City Sleeps.
Based on an actual murder spree in 1946
by William Heirens, dubbed “The Lipstick Killer”
because in one
of his three murders he penned a message to the police with the victim’s
lipstick, Lang focuses not as much on the pitiable “momma’s boy” (played by John
Drew Barrymore) as on the reporters who are out to crack the case.
Media baron Amos Kyne, who lies dying in an
early scene of the work, would have liked to have willed his empire to former
reporter and now TV newsman Edward Mobley (Dana Andrews), who, a bit like
gumshoe private eye in The Big Sleep,
would rather lay back and enjoy a drink than get his pet more catfood, seems to
have little ambition except, perhaps, to bed newswire secretary Nancy Liggett
(Sally Forrest). Accordingly when Kyne dies, his kingdom goes to his detested
playboy son Walter (Vincent Price), who, similarly, would rather spend its
money than head the company.
Although he is the most likeable and
objective member of these news hounds, Mobley, so Lang insinuates, is the most
like the murderer himself, successfully seducing the only “normal” person on
the film, Nancy, and, like the murderer furtively clicking her door open so
that he might reenter at any time. In at least two of their meetings he is
drunk, and later allows himself to be seduced by Mildred, while blaming Nancy
for her suspicions. Worst of all, he uses Nancy as “bait” for the killer,
announcing his involvement with her and hinting of her location on national
television.
By the time Mobley realizes that the
murderer can kill in the daytime as well as at night, it’s almost too late; the
man keeping an eye on Nancy has left for the day. But, of course, after the
murderer attempts to kill Nancy’s
neighbor, Walter’s wife, who has rented the apartment for her affairs with
Kritzer, Mobley and the police chase down the killer in a scene that vaguely
conjures up Holly Martin’s chase after Harry Lime in The Third Man—this version filmed supposedly in the New York
subway, but actually set in the Pacific Electric Belmont trolley tunnel of Los
Angeles.
So Mitchell gets the job and Mobley the
girl. In the end these appear to be the only even slightly redeemable folks in
the entire Kayne empire, but it is difficult to see this ending as a happy one.
Mitchell will still plot day and night to keep his job, and Mobley’s and
Nancy’s marriage seems doomed from the start. It’s clear that in Lang’s world
no one is truly innocent, everyone being equally guilty just for being part of
the human race. More than any other director, Fritz Lang, it seems to me, truly
believed in original sin.
Yet, this underrated work reminded yet
again of how honest and gritty the mid-1950s films could really be: no sweet
housewives here, nor in Hitchcock’s The
Wrong Man of the same year, or Sweet
Smell of Success in the following year. Too bad that by this time, Lang had
pretty much given up on Hollywood.
Los Angeles,
January 3, 2017
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