MOVIE REVIEW: WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS (1956)

Directed by Fritz Lang

Written by Casey Robinson

From the novel The Bloody Spur by Charles Einstein

Cinematography by Ernest Lazlo

Edited by Gene Fowler, Jr.

Music by Herschel Burke Gilbert

Starring

Dana Andrews

Ida Lupino

Vincent Price

Rhonda Fleming

George Sanders

Howard Duff

Thomas Mitchell

Review by William D. Tucker.

While the City Sleeps opens with a creepy sequence in which a serial killer gains access to a woman’s apartment. We see the perpetrator full-on. This is not a whodunit. He’s a delivery man for a corner grocery in New York City. His job gives him access to people’s homes. He’s killed before, he’ll kill again. He preys on women, exclusively. We get a first person murder sequence of the woman we just met. We’re seemingly set up for a character portrait of a twisted psychopath and the hunt for him that will no doubt ensue. We get those things, more or less, but they end up being told from the perspective of the employees of a media empire who compete with each other to transform atrocity into profitable front page headlines. It’s this perspective that makes While the City Sleeps modestly intriguing.

Because it’s not a mystery. We know who the perpetrator is from the jump. This puts the emphasis on how and why questions as opposed to inquiries into who. It engages with the how a little more substantially than the why.

It’s not much of a character study of psychopathy. We quickly come to understand that the killer targets women. Sure, there’s some pop psychology prattle offered up to explain his works, but in 2024 misogyny is widely understood to be a motive force all on its own. 1956 was, I guess, a simpler time, but this movie more or less presents a predator who would make sense yesterday or today. He’s a creep. He’s dangerous. He’s also kind of a bore.

It’s not much of a police procedural. The cops are on the case, but we basically interact with them from the journalists’ side of things. So no super detective stuff. No reassuring Law and Order routines. What is interesting is how While the City Sleeps depicts the porous flow of intel from cop to reporter. Everything hinges on insider contacts. There’s an unofficial yet normalized understanding that the public desires both the reassurance that the police are on the case and the lurid come-on of true crime infotainment on a daily schedule plus extra editions when something dramatic breaks. The cops and the reporters have worked out the give and take. Some journalists get favored access, some don’t.

It’s not much of a thriller save for three key sequences-which are efficiently set up and paid off. This mostly ends up as a character drama about the employees of the media empire, and how each one chooses to chase the big scoop. There’s a not entirely convincing gimmick built around the death of the big boss of the media empire. The big boss’s wastrel son takes over and pits the division heads against one another to drive up productivity. This struck me as superfluous: a New York City media operation is already going to hit the ground running to win the scoop on a local serial killer saga. Which is what happens, anyways. The wastrel son element is, well, wasted. 

It’s not much in the visuals department. It’s not terrible. But it is directed by Fritz Lang of Metropolis and M among other masterworks. While the City Sleeps can’t compare to Metropolis in terms of city visuals, nor is its creepy killer near as memorable as Peter Lorre’s depraved predator in M. It’s certainly competent and concrete, nothing too arty or conceptual I guess, but it lacks atmosphere. 

While the City Sleeps works best in how it depicts a media machine responding to an extreme series of crimes. The true fascination here is with how the different employees of a media empire work at cross-purposes even though they’re all part of the same outfit. But this is a modest achievement at best. The story loses momentum a good ten or twelve minutes before the finish. The ending is a betrayal of all that has been established about the cutthroat gamesmanship within the media conglomerate. At the last it tries to sentimentalize what has throughout  been depicted as a hard-boiled zero sum game, thus shitcanning its last bit of credibility. While the City Sleeps is far from the worst thing ever put to film, but it's off-puttingly mediocre for the talents involved.

MANGA REVIEW: BLACK BLIZZARD (1956, 2010)

by Yoshihiro Tatsumi 

English translation by Akemi Wegmuller

Edits/Design/Lettering by Adrian Tomine

Title logo designed by Tim Hensley

Published by Drawn and Quarterly in March 2010.

Original Japanese language publication by Hinomaru Bunko in 1956. 

. . .

"If you ask me, the only way we're getting apart is if one of us loses his hand."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Black Blizzard is a film noir on paper. Full stop. It's not an homage. It's not a pastiche. It's not neo-noir. It is full noir. It was created in 1956. It has the melodrama, the psychodrama, the romanticism, the haunted pasts, the moral gray areas, and the (except for the opening pages) black and white visual scheme. Get Seijun Suzuki on the horn and have him shoot it in Nikkatsu Scope. It's ready to go. 

Black Blizzard is, actually, a manga. A comic book. 128 pages all from the mind and hands and sweat of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who would go on to have a long and influential career in Japanese comics. But in 1956 he was in his twenties, just in the first act of his career. All by himself he crafted a feature length crime thriller worthy of anything produced by Nikkatsu or by the various Hollywood studios that fits between two covers. That's the power of a manga writer/artist firing on all cylinders. Writer, director, actors, crew all in one furiously scribbling man. How about that? It's kinda neat.

Much like the genre crime films of yore, Black Blizzard uses crime and criminality most interestingly as a way of exploring moral confusion within people through various melodramatic situations. This isn't about strict realism so much as a hard-boiled sort of romanticism. Doom can be averted only by proving oneself before the eyes of fate. To this end, we have two men-one a young musician recently convicted of murder, the other a middle aged career crook facing a life sentence-handcuffed to each other as they are transported by train to prison. An avalanche derails the train, and our handcuffed pair escape the wreckage to go on the lam. The musician is trying to hold on to his old identity as a respectable young man with a future. The career crook is on a defiant death trip, seeking nothing more than to evade the law for as long as possible, perhaps visit his daughter one last time, and then die in a shootout with the cops. It occurs to the career crook that one of them will probably have to cut off the other guy's hand if they are both truly going to be free. The musician is appalled by this idea, and keeps fighting for a way to break the chain without either of them losing a hand. 

The conflict resolves itself in an unexpected manner which some may find a bit over the top, especially for those who are more familiar with Tatsumi's later, more sophisticated character studies like The Push Man or Abandon the Old in Tokyo. Black Blizzard has two protagonists who seem to represent different aspects of one person, whereas later Tatsumi works would follow singular characters roiling with inner strife and loneliness. Tatsumi started here under the heavy influence of the melodramatic variety of film noir and would later be writing stories comparable to Taxi Driver-but this is a very crude comparison. Tatsumi has his own voice to be sure. Also, I think Black Blizzard stands on its own as a legitimate expression of genre crime fiction. It's fun and stylish in the way those old timey black and white crime flicks could be, even if the ride is more fun than the eventual destination. The plot is a framework for the tormented characters to struggle with existential dilemmas and the burdens of the past. 

Tatsumi's art is stripped down, propulsive, with lots of slashing lines. When we dive into bitter memories from the past those are just as sharp; no dreaminess to these flashbacks, no easy escape. There's even a jolting nightmare sequence evoking the fatalism of noir crime fiction. 

Black Blizzard could, if followed exactly, be a ready to go blueprint for a new cult classic film noir. It also stands on its own as a comic book. 

MOVIE REVIEW: INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956)

Starring
Kevin McCarthy
Dana Wynter

Directed by Don Siegel
Screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring and Richard Manning
From the novel by Jack Finney
Executive Produced by Walter Mirisch
Cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks
Edited by Robert S. Eisen
Production Design by Ted Haworth
Special Effects by Milt Rice and Don Post

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Widescreen, black and white, a man in hysterics is brought under police escort before a doctor and a psychiatrist at an emergency room. He has a whale of a tale to tell: a saga of alien invaders taking over human bodies and minds. Much like the 1950 film noir D.O.A., we get the grim story in flashback:

A doctor returns from a conference to find his hometown transforming before his eyes.

The community seems to be suffering from some sort of mass hysteria. People are claiming their loved ones have stopped being who they once were-a mother is no longer a mother, a father is no longer a father. Oh, sure, Dad looks exactly the same as always, same face, same eyes, same nose, the voice is the same-in other words there's no chance that it's some stranger attempting a bold impersonation. But something is different about Dad. Something subtle, yet huge. The emotions are not quite right. This new father, or new mother, has less emotion than before, and the whole thing is inexplicable. It's the kind of thing you notice about someone you've known all your life, but that maybe wouldn't be so obvious to someone outside of the family. A crucial detail has been erased giving the lie to this . . . duplication.

You try to call the police, or a psychiatrist, maybe your general practitioner-you try to get someone to believe you when you say that this person you've known all your life is no longer that very same person. And all you get is a blank stare, a condescending smile, and a recommendation to lay off the sauce. The especially understanding doctor in this movie, Dr. Bennell (played by the great Kevin McCarthy), might give you some pills to help you relax. Help you sleep.

Dr. Bennell doesn't know it at first, but that's when they get you. When you're asleep. Seed pods from outer space. They duplicate you, mind, body, and maybe even soul, if you want to go there.

We're talking about the world famous Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a stark example of weird horror built out of paranoia, insomnia, film noir lighting dialed down a few notches, and the fear of the total loss of one's individual humanity. Director Don Siegel, more known for his hard-boiled crime thrillers The Killers, Coogan's Bluff, and Dirty Harry, among others, keeps the pace tight, and parcels out some effectively gruesome, yet mysterious, moments of gooey shock. Quite a bit is left unexplained. The ending is ambiguous, but cautiously hopeful. We in the audience are either witnessing the end of the human race or a very close call.

One big thing that is left mysterious is the exact mechanism by which the alien seed pods duplicate people. When you watch this film, ask yourself: do individual pods bond with individual human targets? Is some sort of psionic power involved in order to scan and duplicate the mind? Is this same psionic facility, if that's what we're dealing with here, the same method by which certain parts of the original person's personality are excised? Or are we dealing with imperfections in the duplication process? Maybe when a person is duplicated by the alien seed pods some elements of the person's mind and personality are accidentally eliminated. So the changes in the duplicated person may not be sinister or malign in any intentional way. The alterations are just by-products of the aliens' natural survival functions.

Will the process of duplication ever improve? If this duplication process could ever be perfected, then what would the difference be between an original and a perfect copy? Why all the fuss? I mean, if the pods win, no one would care. We'd each be a duplication, and we'd get on with business as usual. Especially if the aliens get better at duplicating people. But even if they don't, well . . . people get used to things. You know?

As Dr. Bennell investigates this eerie situation he comes to see himself as a lone agent pitted against an overwhelming force that's seeking to erase the essence of the human spirit. Dr. Bennell offers this rather stirring speech:

"In my practice, I've seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn't seem to mind . . . All of us, a little bit, we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear."

Dr. Bennell later confronts one of these pod people accusing it of wanting to erase love, passion, desire, and ambition from the hearts of men. The duplication calmly tells him that all these things aren't really necessary, that love and passion inevitably fade, and he'll wake up the next day feeling much better with no more worries and concerns. And besides, the duplication says, "You don't have a choice." That doesn't go over too well with the fiercely individualistic Dr. Bennell.

I find it funny that a horror story could be built around the idea of how awful it is to be a conformist. People want to conform. People want to belong to a group, to a family, to a tribe, to a nation; or maybe just root for the home team. Humans love to gather at political rallies or places of religious worship, or college football stadiums and respond in socially approved ways to ritualistic speeches and spectacles. Sure, horrific things grow out of such activities-genocide, war, greed, racism, homophobia, misogyny, ultra-nationalism, imperialism, religious corruption of secular government and education, beer guts-but that's just human nature going back thousands of years. We don't need aliens to give us such atrocities. Maybe the pod people, with their dialed back passions, and their hyper-logical outlook on existence, are really an improvement on the old model of humanity.

We'll never know unless we give the pod people a chance.