While the City Sleeps

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day, and while this film is certainly "trashy," it's sophisticatedly multi-layered.

While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956) 

"I wonder what the nice people are doing tonight?" asks esteemed writer-author-journalist-TV personality Walter Mobley (Dana Andrews).

Well he should ask, because there are few nice people in his circle of work, which happens to be some form of multi-headed Hydra of journalism, known as Kyne Enterprises. The head of Kyne has just died and the heir-apparent Walter Kyne (Vincent Price) is now in charge, but is a bit feckless and knows nothing of the news business, nor, apparently is he willing to have anybody tell him about it as he decides to delegate. He's going to create a new Executive Director position that will answer to him without having to know all the details. But who is it going to be?

There're many to choose from, besides Mobley, an Edward R. Murrow-type: there's also the urbane head of the wire-service Mark Loving (George Sanders); crusty newspaper head John Day Griffith (Thomas Mitchell); and there's television head "Honest" Harry Kritzer (James Craig). They all want the job and will stoop to any advantage to get it. But Walter has other ideas. He's going to make the contenders fight for it in a "Hunger Games" kind of run-off—winner take-all, and the losers...well, they extend to more than Kyne Headquarters.

It just so happens they're in the news business and New York has a big news story: there's a serial killer in town breaking into apartments and attacking women and has been labeled "The Lipstick Killer"—that would be the ironically-named Robert Manners (John Drew Barrymore), a nervous, slimy type dressed in leathers. It's okay that we know who it is—Lang starts the film out with him carrying out one of his strangulations—as the director is more interested in the power struggle of the media elites eating each other to get the job of "Top Toady."

Meanwhile, as they connive, deceive, and block each other from finding whodunnit, the City sleeps, albeit not very peacefully.

This is territory Lang has worked with before, as early as his silent films for UFA in Germany. In his films Metropolis, Spies, the "Mabuse" features, authority figures wrangle in power struggles completely ignoring the plights of the ordinary citizens who might fall victim as a result. But, those films involve cat-and-mouse games between authorities and criminal masterminds. In Where the City Sleeps, the field of play is publishing/broadcasting, and the criminal is not mastermind, but a craven nobody like the child-murderer of Lang's M. While the department-heads wring their hands worrying about advantage, he's in the streets looking for opportunity.

Lang's film has enough layers that one might even miss that his film is lumping the newsmongers in with the serial killer in more ways than mutual benefit. For instance, how do they maneuver and manipulate the "contest" to their advantage? By throwing women under the bus, of course: Loving uses writer Mildred Donner (Ida Lupino) to seduce Mobley in order to get any inside info from the anchor (it doesn't matter that Mobley is engaged to Loving's secretary, Nancy Liggett, played by Sally Forrest); Kritzer is having an affair with Kyne's wife (Rhonda Fleming) in order to use her as a mole for scoops and news oh his standing in the contest and so she can talk up her lover—they've even set up a rendezvous apartment, which happens to be close to Liggett's, as well; and finally, Mobley hatches a scheme with the police lieutenant working the case (Howard Duff) to set up the "Lipstick Killer" using his fiancée as bait. "Nice!"

Mobley's little scheme is to go on the air, using inside knowledge of the investigation and taunt the Killer into targeting his fiancée as an act of revenge. Then, it should be an easy thing to just keep tabs on her until the killer makes his move. Easier said than done, and things get dicey enough that it gives these paragons of the public trust a little taste of terror in the midst of stabbing each other in the back for a single rung up the power ladder.  

The cast is great; everybody's a character actor who can milk their scenes for all they're worth and rattle off movie lines like they're still stuck in the 40's. The only thorn among roses is Barrymore, who seems to have gotten directions from Lang that might have been more effective in the silent era. He's all slack-jawed, hooded-eye malice who could only look like more of a pervert if he had the letter "M" chalked on his leather jacket.

Still, that's the only glaring misstep from one of the masters of German cinema, still employing the old tricks and getting away with it (because the tricks were novel and original when he invented them). One still sees the high-contrast shadows—even though the film is mostly a daylight picture, it's still considered "noir"—the surprises just out of frame, the window-partitioned world, and décor that reflects character. Lang even gets to use his old trick of having his actors facing the camera and delivering their lines directly to the audience, challenging them—in the age of television, it happens all the time!

I first saw While the City Sleeps—one of the last films Lang made in America—about a year ago, and I notice it's becoming a staple of movie channels, especially those that feature packages of "noir films." It's becoming more and more available and makes for entertaining viewing.

Brute Force (1947)

Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947) Westgate Penitentiary, in the middle on nowhere identifiable—Its "gates only open three times: when you come in, when you've served your time, and when you're dead!" One of the latter is going out now, a 62 year old prisoner forced to work in the prison's most dangerous area, what they call "the drainpipe." His cellmates in Cell R17 crowd around the the barred window of their too-small enclosure to watch. They are Stack (Jeff Corey), Spencer (John Hoyt)-in for gambling and grifting, Kid Coy (John Overman)-ex-boxer in for assault just moved, in taking the place of the guy who died, Becker "the Soldier" (Howard Duff)-in for murder (he took the rap for his lover), Lister (Whit Bissell)-in for embezzlement. Their main interest is because one of their own is coming back: mobster Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) is coming out of solitary after 10 days after a stool pigeon planted a knife on him. The Chief Guard Munsey (Hume Cronyn) talks briefly to him, telling him he needs to show respect, to not be so hard, and to cooperate. Collins tells him what he wants to hear and he goes back to his cell.

The others crowd around him and give him a dry cigarette and a light and updates on the situation, including their plans for taking care of the stoolie who ratted him out (without going into specifics) and tell him that everything is okay. Collins spits out his response (in just the way you can hear Lancaster doing it): "Everything's okay? What's okay? Nothing's okay. It never was, and it never will be. Not till we're out. You get that? Out."

Brute Force may be the Citizen Kane of prison movies. Or at least a "Grand Gray-Bar Hotel." Produced by Mark Hellinger in the same hard-bitten style of his previous movie The Killers and written by a young up-and-coming script-writer named Richard Brooks.* Brute Force is a prison movie on the surface and a life-metaphor once you get below around drainpipe level. And, except for some motivational flashback sequences demanded by Hellinger so he could throw some female exploitation into the mix, it's directed by Jules Dassin with a noir attitude so bleak it approaches hysteria...then burns right through it. At the time, it was remarked for its violence, but it's not so much the violence—there are patches that are arresting—it's the vehemence, the hot and cold anger behind it, that is truly remarkable.

"Ya know, I was just thinkin'. An insurance company could go flat broke in this prison." Beyond the casual cruelty of the guards, the first outbreak of violence is the one that settles all matters about Collins' framing: in the prison work-room, that stoolie (James O'Rear) begins to suspect that a diversionary fight clearing the area of guards is a trap; it is, as he's cornered by Coy, Spencer, and Stack triangulating him with acetylene torches until he backs into a working industrial press. Nobody knows anything. Nobody saw anything. Just bad luck, "falling" into that press.

This makes a bad situation worse for the warden (Roman Bohnen); he's already been called on the carpet by some lackey of the governor threatening the man with his job if there are any more violent incidents; the guy's just a mouth-piece—he doesn't have any more answers than anybody else in the room does. But, threatening the warden with his job stings. He's been doing the job so long he doesn't know what else he would do without it. He's in a similar situation as the prison doctor (Art Smith), who's doing a job he hates (and self-medicates to get through it), but he's too old to do anything else. Everybody at Westgate has their own flavor of prison, it seems.

Except Munsey. The Chief Guard sits back during that bitch-fest with the governor's man and the warden and the doctor and just listens, biding his time, feigning concern, and solicitously acting as a go-between and interpreter ("I think what the doctor is saying..."), but not revealing his hand. That's because he's a spider, waiting for the prey to be weakened before he takes them out. The prison is his web and he has full control of it, pushing the guards, brutalizing the men, using all the methods at his disposal to have absolute power over the facility and anyone unlucky enough to enter its gates. He's not above any torture, physical or psychological, to maintain his control—at one point, he'll even beat information out of a prisoner (Sam Levene) while listening to Wagner on the phonograph (as if the ties to fascism weren't obvious enough)

That's the situation the prisoners of R17 are in. But there's added urgency: Collins is told by his lawyer that the girl who's waiting for him on the outside (Ann Blyth) needs an operation for cancer, but she won't unless Collins is with her. She doesn't know he's in prison and the lawyer is under strict instructions not to tell her. Collins has to work the angles, but his plan is to escape and never look back, and with ideas from his cell-mates, he hatches an idea—but it will mean being assigned to the very duty that killed the prisoner at the beginning of the movie—working "the drainpipe."

It's mean, it's tough, and it's violent and sometimes a little florid in its prison-yard dialog, but the part the filmmakers weren't crazy about (except the producer) was the insistence on interrupting the story with flash-backs involving the women in their lives. Producer Hellinger wanted female appeal and so the characters played by Hoyt, Bissell, Duff, and Lancaster briefly escape the prison walls (cinematiclly, of course) for scenes with the women in their pasts (played by Anita Colby, Ella Raines, Yvonne De Carlo and Blyth). The scenes don't do much as far as back-story—Hoyt's is even done without dialog and simply his voice-over—and the effect is jarring and removes suspense, pacing, and an ever-increasing feeling of doom that permeates the entire movie. Director Dassin had a substitute in mind—a surreal portrait ripped from a magazine in the cell that reminds all of them of "the girl outside." That was as sentimental as they wanted to get. 

When the escape attempt comes, it is filmed with all the energy, desperation, and hopelessness that can be bled out of the material, both visually and viscerally, like an amped-up war movie—the attempt is based on an attack strategy seen by Duff's "Soldier" during the second world war—and it all seems a bit like a suicide mission that quickly turns from gaining freedom to merely getting revenge and taking out as many guards as possible.

It is dark, but once the smoke clears, the fires are put out, and the dead carried through those implacable doors—ultimately, they make it out, ironically, only when they're dead—the film gets even darker, equating life itself with a prison. Jules Dassin was a master of the film-noir—a genre he wasn't that crazy about—but, he was interested in social justice and in making statements—and his turgid prison/war movie is one of the darkest of the type. It's no wonder tough guys in film-noirs wanted to avoid prison—Brute Force shows a world bleaker than bleak.

"Nobody escapes. Nobody ever really escapes."

* Yeah, if you know anything about movies, the name will be familiar: Brooks would go on to direct, starting with 1950's Cary Grant picture Crisis, work with Bogart on Deadline U.S.A. and Battle Circus, break the rock and roll barrier with Blackboard Jungle, and then veer from programmers (Take the High Ground!, The Last Hunt, The Professionals) to high profile prestige pictures (Lord Jim, the Brothers Karamazov, Elmer Gantry, Sweet Bird of Youth), to exploitation films (In Cold Blood, Looking for Mr. Goodbar). His last film was Fever Pitch in 1985.

The Naked City

The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948) It started with Weegee. The homunculous photographer of New York's gritty, seemy side had published a book of his night-time photos of back-alley rendezvous, police-work, wet and dry, and New York's underbelly (fleas and all) bathed in the harsh glow of neon or Weegee's harsher strobe-flash. The book had the provocative title "Naked City," so, of course, it became a best-seller.

Producer Mark Hellinger bought the rights to make a movie of it with the intention of making a pot-boiler with the city of New York as the focal point and star. No big stars, just character actors would appear in it, and it would reflect Weegee's photography with the story of a police investigation of a lurid murder amid real New York locations. He hired screenwriters Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald for the screenplay, and to direct he brought in director Jules Dassin, whose prison drama Brute Force showed he had an unsentimental flair for that material.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, the motion picture you are about to see is called 'The Naked City.' My name is Mark Hellinger. I was in charge of its production. But I may as well tell you frankly that it's a bit different from most films you've ever seen. It was written by Albert Maltz and Alvin Wald, photographed by William Daniels and directed by Jules Dassin. As you see, you're flying over an island. A city. A particular city. And this is the story of a number of people. A story, also, of the city itself. It was not photographed in a studio. Quite the contrary, Barry Fitzgerald our star, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don Taylor, Ted deCorsia and the other actors played out their roles in the streets, in the apartment houses, in the sky-scrapers of New York itself. And along with them a great many thousand New Yorkers played out their roles, also. This is the city as it is. Hot city pavements. Children at play. The building in its naked stone. People without make-up."

And for the most part, they succeeded.

Dassin can be quite "arty" in his direction, but restricted to real locations in the New York area in the middle of the day, he sometimes had to get what shot he could any way he could—hiding the camera in trucks, newsstands, anything that would keep from drawing a sizable crowd. A gawking clutch of citizenry would ruin the effect of a real story being played out. With the exception of a couple of process shots inside cars, the film pretty much keeps its promise.

But there is a disconnect. Despite the verisimilitude of the staging, the actors are still very much acting. The script, especially in its dialogue, is a bit too clever, and follows the conventions of Hollywood story construction exactly to code. This type of film had been done before with The House on 92nd Street directed by Henry Hathaway, during the noir/cost-cutting days of the studios, and would be done again with Panic in the Streets, directed by Elia Kazan. The city may be New York in 1948, but the story takes place somewhere between reality and artifice.

Hellinger, who also narrates the film (in a grand-standing display of ego that would only be equalled by Cecil B. DeMille, and less so, by John Huston and Orson Welles), succumbed to a heart attack when the film was being previewed, at the age of 44, ending a colorful career as newspaperman, screenwriter, producer, film executive, and New York gad-about. Despite the number of classic films with his name attached, Hellinger may be best remembered for the last line of his last film, which has endured and entered the pop culture.

"It is one o'clock in the morning again and this is the city. And these are the lights a child born to the name of Petori hungered for. Her passion has been played out now. Her name, her face, her history were worth five cents a day for six days. Tomorrow, a new case will hit the headlines. Yet some will remember Jean Dexter. She won't be entirely forgotten. Not entirely. Not altogether. There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them."

In 2007, The Naked City was chosen by the Library of Congress to be a part of the National Film Registry.

There are 700 movies in the Film Registry.* The Naked City is one of them.

Keeping tabs on the Naked City filming are Weegee and a pal,
a young photographer for Look magazine named Stanley Kubrick.

* They're listed here. This year's films will be announced at the end of the year.