The Sleeping City

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ChiO
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The Sleeping City

Post by ChiO »

George Sherman is not a well-known director, having made primarily B-Westerns from the late'30s to late-'50s and a few TV episodes in the '60s (including Rawhide, The Naked City, and Route 66). But the noirs he directed that I've seen (including two that Dewey showed last spring, THE SECRET OF THE WHISTLER (1946) and the incredible THE LADY AND THE MONSTER (1944)) drew me to this one from 1950.

An undercover cop, Fred (Richard Conte), poses as an intern at Bellevue Hospital to solve the murder of an intern. He rooms with the intern that the murdered intern also bunked with. The first hour of the movie introduces us to police procedure, the hospital's characters and the most hard-boiled and cynical cops this side of Raymond Chandler. Sample:

As the police arrive on the murder scene and the coroner is kneeling over the body --

Detective: What can you tell me about him?
Coroner: He's dead.

Although a couple of odd characters are around, the investigation appears to be headed nowhere. Fred is falling for his ward's head nurse, Ann (Coleen Gray) (who happened to be the murdered intern's friend and the source sole of funds for her disabled sister), the other interns are constantly whining about a lack of money, and Pop, the senior citizen elevator operator, provides the comic relief and occasional loans to the interns, often for bets on horse races that Pop places with a bookie. Then, at about the 1 hour mark, Fred's roommate, who has just announced that he's leaving medicine to get married, is found dead. Suicide or murder? Fred is the prime suspect for the murder, if that's what it is.

Fred decides that Pop may be the angle -- that the dead men were into the bookie too deep -- so he runs up a debt with Pop. Soon Pop comes to him begging for money, claiming that he's so debt with the bookie that he needs Fred to pay his debt now or he'll end up like the dead interns. Aha! The bookie has Mob connections! But no! Pop lets Fred know that the debt may be forgiven in exchange for "the white stuff." Just write the prescription and the ward's head nurse will cooperate and fill it. This is no bookie operation! This is a narcotics ring! And Ann is involved! And Pop is Mister Big! Chase and shoot-out ensue wherein Pop is popped. Ann, truly in love with Fred (and vice versa), will likely skate by -- after all, she did it only to get money for her sister.

That Sherman is able to keep a viewer's attention for the first 60 minutes of an 85 minute movie with minimal action is a tribute to his capability as a director. Shadows and claustrophobic sets abound, as well as wet streets at night. And, once again, Richard Conte demonstrates why he should be along side of Bogart, Mitchum and Ryan as a male noir icon.

Fortunately, as Conte informs the audience in a prologue that New York City officials insisted be added, the story and characters depicted are fictional and the Bellevue medical staff consists of the salt of the earth.
Everyday people...that's what's wrong with the world. -- Morgan Morgan
I love movies. But don't get me wrong. I hate Hollywood. -- Orson Welles
Movies can only go forward in spite of the motion picture industry. -- Orson Welles
Mr. Arkadin
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Re: The Sleeping City

Post by Mr. Arkadin »

Did this one play on TCM awhile back, or do you have another source for these offbeat gems?
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ChiO
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Re: The Sleeping City

Post by ChiO »

It is from "another source". And there is less snow than in THE PROWLER. Purely a function of locale, no doubt.
Everyday people...that's what's wrong with the world. -- Morgan Morgan
I love movies. But don't get me wrong. I hate Hollywood. -- Orson Welles
Movies can only go forward in spite of the motion picture industry. -- Orson Welles
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moira finnie
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Re: The Sleeping City

Post by moira finnie »

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I wanted to like The Sleeping City (1950) too, and was drawn to it by my childhood memories of this movie, the presence of Conte and Gray as well as the script by Jo Eisinger. While it didn't quite live up to my first viewing, the atmospheric settings and supporting players were real stand-outs in this movie for me.
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However, after the first, unexpected scene at the beginning of the movie with the tired intern trying to grab a smoke, (love those docs with feet of clay), it seemed to promise more than it could deliver, as the Universal film explored some of the same scenes capturing the loneliness and the anonymity of a massive modern city as The Naked City (1948) had done so successfully, helped by Jules Dassin and Mark Hellinger's guiding hands behind the camera.
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I felt that Richard Conte, an interesting actor almost all of the time, gave a rather flat performance as an over-age medical man (though the mention of the war was a handy explanation for his maturity). Unfortunately, Conte had little chance to display a little of the brio and anger he is capable of expressing, though he did convey the anxious bone-tiredness of a working intern well. Colleen Gray as a nurse that Conte is drawn to in the film, demonstrated little of the tender fieriness in Nightmare Alley that made her so memorable, though her numbness throughout much of the film suggested a woman with more back story than the movie was willing to explore more fully.

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The best parts of the movie for me were the bleak real life settings on the streets of New York and the cavernous Bellevue Hospital, the well done debut performance of Alex Nicol, who was quite good as another young doctor nearing the end of his tether, and for some of his scenes, actor Richard Taber, as the aggressively avuncular Pop Ware, part-time elevator operator and full time bookie. Taber was a fixture for fifty years on Broadway and was the co-author with character actor James Gleason of one of the '20s biggest theatrical hits, "Is Zat So?"

Other than a few silents, an obscure early talkie and some television, Taber had appeared in an uncredited role as a cabbie in Kiss of Death (1948) and one other film noir, the interesting Under the Gun (1951), again with Richard Conte.
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