Looking Back: While the City Sleeps

Loving old movies can create some moral conflicts for those of us struggling with generations of white male privilege. Let's face it: some classics seem positively antediluvian in light of contemporary advances in human rights. I may have been thrilled by Gone With the Wind (1939) when I first saw it as a teenager (and it's still something of a technical wonder), but the aging progressive in me is as appalled at its glorification of racism and rape as the theatre artist is embarrassed at Vivien Leigh's dated performance (yes, it's dated and now seems phony, and somebody had to say it). I'm moved by the butterfly-coming-out-of-its cocoon story and the mother-daughter conflict in Now, Voyager (1942) but can't get over the feeling that Bette Davis' Charlotte Vale could do a lot better than Paul Henreid's spineless Jerry, both romantically and artistically. One remedy for this, of course, is to search for signs of enlightenment in unlikely places — the unconscious feminism of the working women movies of the 1930s, the rare depictions of African-Americans as dimensional human beings in films like Alice Adams (1935) and In This Our Life (1942) and the coded commentary on sexual repression in pictures like Cat People (1942) or Rebecca (1940), for example. For the rest, we sometimes tie ourselves into ideological pretzels trying to justify our enjoyment of films that seem to be designed to perpetuate antiquated power structures.

The women of While the City Sleeps: Rhonda Fleming, Sally Forrest and Ida Lupino, the bad, the good and the in-between.

  Fritz Lang's next-to-last U.S. film, While the City Sleeps (1956), combines a 1950s view of sexual politics and women's roles with Lang's heady combination of cynicism and humanism. The picture is a strange study for fans of his work. While the script he co-wrote (without credit) with Casey Robinson echoes two of his major themes (the pervasiveness of corruption and the devastating consequences of compulsive behavior), because of its low budget it doesn't have the look of most of his other films. There's little of the high-contrast lighting that dominates film noirs like The Big Heat (1953) and Human Desire (1954) or proto-noirs like his best film, M (1931). Nor does it put you into the disturbed mind of a character like Rotwang in Metropolis (1927), Hans Beckert in M or even Lee Marvin's Vince Stone in The Big Heat. The only brief peek into the thinking of the serial killer played by John Drew Barrymore (billed as John Barrymore, Jr. at the time) is the opening sequence.

That opener is one of the film's most effective scenes, suggesting another Langian theme, the inevitability of fate. Barrymore, clad entirely in black leather (this was two years after Marlon Brando made the look both sexy and threatening in The Wild One), delivers a package to the apartment of a young woman we don't see at first. We only hear her as the janitor (Vladimir Sokoloff) accepts the delivery. When Sokoloff leaves, Barrymore returns, claiming to have delivered the wrong package. As the woman turns to check her delivery, there are a few quick cuts following Barrymore's line of vision as he notices the door has a pushbutton lock and fixes it so he can slip in later. The camera then follows the woman as she fills the bathtub. We hear the door open. She turns and screams, caught in the web of fate we've seen woven around her.  Without changing shots, Lang has transformed the omniscient camera into the killer's point of view. It's an unsettling effect, in a film full of destabilizing moments.

The film's focus isn't on the killer, however, but rather on the staff of Kyne, Inc., a major news organization covering the case. Early on the CEO (Robert Warwick) dies, leaving the company to his playboy son (Vincent Price). Price spent most of the '40s and '50s on the brink of stardom, with solid supporting performances in A movies and starring roles in B pictures (this film is sort of a B+, packaged for United Artists, but released through RKO years after it was a major studio). In his first scene, as he prepares to meet with the heads of the company's major divisions, Price plays layers within layers. His Walter Kyne is dealing with paternal rejection, feelings of inadequacy over not knowing the business, a grudging respect for some of the department heads, contempt for others and admiration for his best friend, "Honest" Harry Kritzer (James Craig), the head of the photo service. Freed from the responsibilities of playing the romantic lead, Price can project the character's immaturity and even a feminine side that makes Walter one of the picture's most compelling characters.

Walter decides he needs to create a management position to run things for him. In a childlike move, he makes the men compete for the job. It will go to the person who finds out who the serial killer is. It's a fascinating contrast to M, in which the serial killer is hunted down at the command of a powerful and very capable crime lord because the police hunt for the psychopath is interfering with business. Here the hunt is spearheaded by a boy man appealing to the greed and ambition of his underlings — a parting shot at American culture before Lang's return to Europe, perhaps.

The competition is the device that brings the women into the plot. Since the picture was made in the 1950s, it's not surprising that there are no women up for the job. Instead, each of the three men tries to use one of the top-billed female characters to win.

"Honest" Harry doesn't really care about finding the killer. He's having an affair with Walter's wife, Dorothy (Rhonda Fleming), and wants to use the connection to advance his case. Fleming — who usually played heroines, most notably in Technicolor films that took advantage of her red hair — is the complete trophy wife. She's got Price wrapped and wants to get Craig the job so she'll be in control of both men at the top. Lang doesn't have time to create a lengthy backstory to motivate this. His world is simpler, more brutal than that. Dorothy is a woman whose sole asset is her beauty. She trades on being something men want to possess, and becoming the quiet power behind the scenes at Kyne is her way of making the two men in her life pay for the privilege. At times, her husband doesn't even seem to care about her. In one scene, she works out in a leotard while he ignores her to practice his golf swing. When Harry calls to ask for an afternoon assignation, she has no trouble fobbing her husband off with a transparent lie so she can meet her lover. Fleming plays all this with great relish, as if it were a relief to cross over to the wrong side of the moral compass for a change.

The newspaper's editor, Jon Day Griffith (Thomas Mitchell), is older and has a wife at home who's barely seen. But he enlists the TV network's chief news commentator, Ed Mobley (Dana Andrews), for help. Mobley has a pretty young fiancée, Nancy (Sally Forrest), who also works at Kyne, as a secretary of course. Though she's accepted Mobley's proposal, she's made it clear that she doesn't intend to hop into bed until they're married. In fact, the proposal comes at the end of a prolonged courtship scene in which Mobley tries to get her into bed with no luck. So of course they set her up as bait for the killer. It's as if the woman Mobley loves has to be punished for her independence, which offers an interesting parallel to the killer's victims, who also live alone, suggesting a self-reliance that's a threat to the mother-fixated psychopath.

Although Nancy can hold her own in banter with the men working at the paper, she's still clearly a sex object. Her boss (George Sanders) thinks nothing of invading her personal space while they're working, and Mobley is constantly calling her for a little sexual banter while he watches her through the glass walls at the office (the open office space at Kyne is one of the film's more unsettling elements; everybody is always on display, always being watched and judged). It doesn't help that Forrest is the weakest of the film's three leading ladies. She had done some strong work under Ida Lupino's mentorship in films like Not Wanted (1949) and Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951), but in this picture she's a little too arch. Her attempts at witty badinage with Andrews fall flat and rob the character of what little power she has.

In the moral world of Lang, Forrest is the almost totally good woman, which makes her dispensable (like Glen Ford's poor wife in The Big Heat), and Fleming is the bad woman who must be punished (like the judge's wife in the same film). But Lang also depicts another type of woman, the good-bad woman, someone who's morally suspect yet ends up doing the right thing. That's not necessarily a guarantee of survival. Characters like Joan Bennett's in Man Hunt (1941) and Gloria Grahame's in The Big Sleep may be valorized in their pictures, but they don't make it to the final credits alive.

The good-bad woman here is Lupino, as Mildred Donner, the paper's sole female journalist. Mildred does nothing to hide the secret of her success. She parades around the newsroom in a mink coat everybody knows she didn't buy for herself. In the competition for the management job, she works with her current mentor, Mark Loving (Sanders), who runs the company's wire service. Loving may be an oily chauvinist, a role Sanders played perfectly in dozens of films, but he's not about to risk losing Mildred to the killer. Instead, he enlists her to spy on and distract Mobley.

Lupino was pretty independent on her own. After putting in time as an ingénue, mostly at Paramount Pictures, she struck out for meatier roles with an intense performance as a cockney slattern in William A Wellman's The Light That Failed (1939). It was the kind of breakout role that had established Bette Davis as a major dramatic actress in Of Human Bondage (1934), which led to Lupino's being signed by Davis' studio, Warner Bros. There she delivered a series of fine, neglected performances, often in films turned down by Davis (all of the studios kept actors on hand as threats to their major stars). After seven years of that, Lupino went independent, even setting up a production company with then-husband William Dozier. There she stumbled into directing, taking over when the director of their first film, 1949's Not Wanted, had a heart attack and couldn't finish the film.

At the time she started directing, Lupino was the only woman in the Director's Guild. Her work is a fascinating combination of toughness and subtlety, characteristics of her work as an actress. In addition, she pioneered in dealing with social issues like illegitimate pregnancy (Not Wanted) and rape (1950's Outrage). Her low-budget films made money, but in the era when television was rapidly replacing low-budget filmmaking, she naturally moved into television, where she proved a major asset to series like Have Gun Will Travel and Thriller.

She also kept acting, thank God. Like Price, she seems to have fun bringing layers to her character. When Mildred sets out to seduce Mobley, she plays a combination of opportunism, lust and loneliness that makes the scene more fun than Andrews' more conventional love scenes with Forrest. The two have the easy rapport of pros at the top of their game, and you may wish he'd dump his treacly girlfriend for the woman with more of an edge. They just seem like a perfect pair.

By the film's end, Lang has given each of his leading ladies the fate he seems to think they deserve. Although Andrews has set Barrymore up to stalk Forrest, she manages to elude him and ends up marrying Andrews, who's assured of a bright future at the paper. Fleming's character is punished. First, she's attacked by Barrymore (in one of those coincidences that only exist in the movies, her love nest with Craig is across the hall from Nancy's apartment, and when Barrymore can't get at Forrest, he goes after Fleming). Nancy saves her from that (she may be boring, but she can muster up pluck when needed). But that ultimately exposes the affair and leads to her being cuckqueaned (that's the female form of "cuckold"; look it up on Wikipedia). When Mobley and Day learn Forrest has saved a potential victim, they send Mildred to interview her, and Mildred recognizes Dorothy as the boss's wife. She uses that info to maneuvers herself into a position as Walter's personal assistant and, it's implied, his mistress as well. Mildred has graduated from reporting the news to helping run the news service and from minks to just about anything she wants.

In 1950s terms, that's a victory (and certainly better than the fates of most of Lang's good-bad women). By contemporary standards, of course, it all seems a little sour. Mildred is too good at what she does to have to put out for the boss to get ahead. But then, the whole film, even down to the happy endings, has a certain smarminess. Maybe that's intentional. Lang seems to be drawing parallels between the killer's compulsions and the compulsions of the men at Kyne. He may be driven to kill, but these guys never met a drink they couldn't turn down. And their competitiveness sometimes seems as unhinged as his violence. They also seem to share his misogyny, which in his case is painted as a sign of arrested emotional development.

When first we see Barrymore, he looks great in his leather outfit, and he moves with a dancer's ease. When the film picks him up again, watching an on-air editorial in which Andrews baits him, Barrymore has to act…with lines…which turns out not to be such a good idea. His mother (silent great Mae Marsh) comes in and starts giving him a hard time. The contrast in their acting styles reinforces the meanings. Marsh had become a star working for D.W. Griffith. With sound, she moved into supporting roles, becoming a member of John Ford's unofficial stock company. She clearly knows her way around a role and plays the concerned mother with quiet dignity. Meanwhile, Barrymore tries to act all over the place. He doesn't stand a chance. The killings aren't just a psychosexual attack on his mother' they're a form of artistic revenge because mommy can out-act him so easily.

He's hardly the only man motivated by his hatred of women. Day and Mobley's manipulation of Sally, Loving's pimping out Mildred and Walter's casual neglect of Dorothy all reflect the same basic hostility toward women. Is Lang reporting this, supporting it or condemning it? It's always hard to tell when we bring our own contemporary values to older films.  Lang is such a masterful filmmaker we'd like to place him on the side of the 2018 angels in all things. Certainly his social conscience — which led him to tackle topics like the exploitation of labor, lynching, capital punishment and political corruption — suggests an awareness of basic human rights. But that has to be placed within the context of his period, when the patriarchy and white primacy seemed the natural order.

As an artist of some considerable accomplishment, however, his work eschews any two-dimensional parroting of the dominant paradigms of his day. He gravitates toward fully developed characters, which creates the greater potential for their being interpreted through a variety of lenses. A director who could humanize the child killer in M and, in his final moments, even lend him a degree of sympathy, isn't going to fill his movies with cookie-cutter characters of either gender. Although his most virtuous women tend to seem a bit underdeveloped (like the morality that shaped them?), his aptitude for presenting flawed, very human women in search of a moral compass seems almost revolutionary compared to the depictions of women in other works of his era.