While the City Sleeps (1956) - full review!
Directed by Fritz Lang, with a screenplay by Casey Robinson (Captain Blood (1935)), this slightly above average crime drama, behind the scenes media expose features an all star cast that includes Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Howard Duff, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, James Craig, Ida Lupino, and Robert Warwick, among others. It's interesting to see how the media and police worked together in the mid-50's vs. at cross purposes (it seems) these days. More relevant to today is the storyline about different media branches within the same news organization (print, television, & wire) competing against each other to be first with the story, or for exclusives. This film is probably ripe for a remake given the explosion of the Internet. Also, the criminal profiling that Andrews’s & Duff's characters do, though not seminal, is interesting even if it is taken to incredible extremes late in the movie.
Amos Kyne (Warwick), the head of a media conglomerate, dies, leaving his spoiled, almost maniacal son Walter (Price) in charge of it. Walter decides it would be a good idea to establish an executive position to run things for him; he'll pick one of the heads of the organization's main departments for the job. This means news-wire head Mark Loving (Sanders), newspaper head John Day Griffith (Mitchell), and news pictures chief Harry Kritzer (Craig) must compete for it. Edward Mobley (Andrews), the Pulitzer Prize winning author who heads television news, refuses to participate. Walter has a chip on his shoulder about Mobley anyway since his father had been grooming him for the job even though Mobley lacked the ambition and/or didn't want the responsibility. As luck would have it, just before Kyne’s death, a major story broke - a murder of an attractive young woman was committed whereby the killer wrote "ask mother" in lipstick on the wall of her apartment. Walter makes it clear that solving this crime will be a major feather in the cap of the man that does, as far as this new executive position is concerned.
All this is happening at the same time that Mobley has finally popped the question to Loving’s secretary Nancy Liggett (Sally Forrest). Both Loving and Griffith vie for assistance from Mobley, who has good contacts within the police department like Lieutenant Burt Kaufman (Duff), while ‘honest’ (?) Harry plans to lie low and use Kyne’s wife Dorothy (Fleming), with whom he's having an affair, as his inside track to the job. Loving is willing to stoop pretty low himself, using his main squeeze, female reporter Mildred Donner (Lupino), to seduce Mobley into helping him. Ralph Peters appears as one of Griffith's reporters; Joe Devlin (uncredited) as another on his staff. Meanwhile, we see the murderer, dubbed the lipstick killer (John Drew Barrymore; yes, John Barrymore Jr.) fits the profile description Mobley reads on the air - a 20 year old "boy" with perverse ideas about male-female relationships that still lives with his "unloving" mother (Mae Marsh).
Unfortunately, a few too many coincidences (like the fact that Kritzer’s apartment is across the hall from Liggett’s), the suddenly razor sharp analysis & too conveniently timed second Mobley-Kaufman profiling luncheon followed by a fairly lame chase, the sub-par Mobley-Liggett "romance" plot-line (esp. the off-key comic relief elements) detract from what would otherwise be an above average film. Of course, a modern viewer has to be careful not to be jaded by the more current crime films "he's" seen, else his enjoyment of this one would be even less.
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