The movie I watched tonight while mostly avoiding exercise was Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps (1956), a melodrama about newspapermen, and the women who sort love them sometimes, during the hunt for a serial killer. I was hoping for a shot of noir-dark espresso, but it turned out to be a thin brew overfull of non-dairy whitener and too much sugar—not bad, but mostly pretty weak stuff for the guy who made M (1931).
Dana (Daner) Andrews played the unlikeable-but-not-in-an-interesting-way lead, a drunk and lazy columnist/TV personality that somehow everyone thinks is a big deal. Vincent Price has an interesting turn as the effete, cuckolded heir of a publishing empire, and good work is done by Ida Lupino as a mercenary and merciless newswriter, George Sanders as the mellifluously treacherous head of a newswire service, and Thomas Michell as the beleaguered but unbowed editor of the New York Sentinel.
The serial-killer storyline verges on something interesting, especially when the oily hero engages in some of the sneaky, criminal behavior that we’ve seen the oily murderer commit. Then the movie backpedals the parallel: the hero is supposed to be very good and clever, whereas the murderer is a “mama’s boy”. (There may be some latent homophobia here; apparently he wears cologne LIKE A COMMON WOMAN OF THE STREETS NOT A REAL MAN.) Also: the murderer reads comic books. (The excited squeaking sound you hear in the background comes from Dr. Fredric Wertham as he fondles himself.)
The movie has another story about the jostling for power in a multimedia empire; it works a little better. And when the soap-operatic elements of that story cross the serial-killer plot, they both become more entertaining (at the price of a little plausibility). The serial killer only attacks single women, but the publisher’s wife has taken an apartment in town where she can engage in assignations with one of her husband’s underlings. Living as a single woman, she catches the killer’s attention… already drawn to that apartment house, because the hero’s fianceé lives across the hall. (You see what I mean about plausibility. The movie’s NYC is much smaller than the real one.)
The parts are greater than the whole, but (all snarking aside) this is a watchable story about newspaper people knifing each other to publish the truth at all costs, which in a way is kind of inspiring.
While the City Sleeps also features Howard Duff as a police detective; you’ll remember he made his screen debut in the Star Trek movie Brute Force (1947). But even I wouldn’t have the impudence to suggest that this movie, too, is a piece of the Star Trek universe.
Just kidding. Of course #EverythingIsSTARTREK.
Above left: we see a young(ish) T’Pau officiating the mortal combat between Shere Khan of the Jungle Book and Uncle Billy from It’s a Wonderful Life. I hadn’t been aware that they were Vulcans, subject to the plak tow, the blood fever, but we can’t ignore the evidence of our own eyes.
In the unrelated photo to the right, Celia Lovsky explains to Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner that they must fight to the death for the love of the Great Bird of the Galaxy.
It may be beating a dead horse or space warp at this point. But the Lipstick Killer was played by “John Barrymore jr” who later rebranded himself as John Drew Barrymore. Under that _nom de guerre_ he later contracted to play Lazarus in what is almost certainly the worst Star Trek episode from any series, “The Alternative Factor”. Barrymore never showed up for work, which some attribute to his well known substance abuse problems, and other people attribute to him having actually read the script. The producers recast the part hastily, and Robert Brown (worthy of a better fate) got to scream Lazurus’ incoherent lines through a fake beard that changed mysteriously in every scene. (The story of this doomed episode is well told by Marc Cushman in volume one of his These Are the Voyages.)
[I originally posted this on Facebook on July 14, 2018, but I’m trying to move my more substantial posts over here, since the Facebots are trying to make that place ever more evil.]
