While the City Sleeps (1956)

Film: While the City Sleeps (1956)
Stars: Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Howard Duff, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, Sally Forrest, John Drew Barrymore, James Craig, Ida Lupino
Director: Fritz Lang
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We continue on with our look at the career of Rhonda Fleming with a second noir film for RKO.  By this point in her career, Fleming's fame had largely passed, or at least was nearing its tail-end.  She'd continue to headline films for the rest of the 1950's, and we'll get to one of the final films that she starred in next week, but after several years as the Queen of 3-D, she was no longer at Paramount and RKO wasn't putting her in gigantic epics.  You can see that here when, rather than being the main character (or at least his love interest, as the billing order suggests), she's largely sixth or seventh in terms of actual screen credit, and doesn't even share the screen with the film's proper star, Dana Andrews.  Still, though, While the City Sleeps is an impressive and rather frank look at serial killers in the 1950's, focusing on a fictionalized version of the real "Lipstick Killer" William Heirens.

(Spoilers Ahead) After the death of his father, spoiled media heir Walter Kyne (Price) is pitting three key figures in his dad's news organization (Jon Day Griffith (Mitchell), Mark Loving (Sanders), & Harry Kritzer (Craig)) against each other for essentially the job of "CEO" of the organization while Kyne enjoys all of the wealth and privilege of being the titular head of the conglomerate.  Essentially he's using a recent string of murders of young women perpetrated by an unknown assailant (whom the audience knows from witnessing one of the crimes in the opening scene to be Barrymore's Robert Manners) as a proxy fight to see who is worthy enough of snagging the story and getting Kyne more sales.  Each of these men have a key asset in their fight: Griffith has Edward Mobley (Andrews), a savvy former crime beat journalist who now hosts an Edward R. Murrow-style nightly news program and recently has become engaged to Nancy (Forrest), Loving has Mildred Donner (Lupino) a lascivious and ambitious newspaper columnist, and Kritzer has Kyne's own wife Dorothy (Fleming) with whom he's having an affair.

The film progresses with each of these men and their allies duking it out, all-the-while trying to suss out Barrymore's killer.  The film is very much an ensemble piece (though Andrews is decidedly the lead), and this makes it easy to compare and contrast the different performances.  By far the best one is Lupino, playing up her sexuality to the hilt (she flirts with anyone that moves, particularly Mobley, getting him to kiss her while he's engaged to Nancy), and getting all of the best lines.  Barrymore is, well, not great as a mama's boy killer who seems to have no real reason other than his own adoption to hate the world and the women in it.  But the film keeps humming with us genuinely guessing who might end up on top in the newspaper fight, and watching Thomas Mitchell of all people try (unsuccessfully) to be corrupt when he's really just a good guy (as are all of Mitchell's characters).

Fleming's role is small (she's in more of the back half than the front half, but regardless she's got a relatively small part, especially compared to Forrest or Lupino).  She's good in it though-Fleming got her start as a character actress, and makes the most of the work she does here.  There's that great scene where she instinctively puts on her sunglasses to not give away any tells that she's lying, or the way that she speaks to Lupino's Mildred with the confidence of a woman who knows she'll never really be caught as long as she's beautiful.  It's not really a lead performance at all, but it's solid work, and she does a great job in the ensemble, even if Lupino is the one stealing the film.