While the City Sleeps

While the City Sleeps is ostensibly about a serial killer with mommy issues who overpowers his victims in their own homes, but director Fritz Lang places more focus on the corporate media executives who seem to have equally diabolical urges for power, trading their husbands, wives, and co-workers like marketable commodities in a morally bankrupt race to get to the top. Upon the death of his father, Walter Kyne (Vincent Price) takes over the Kyne media empire, immediately creating a new, second-in-command job to spark competition among his three senior-most executives played by George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, and James Craig. All three dig into the case of the Lipstick Killer (John Drew Barrymore), a serial murderer of women, after Kyne announces that scooping this case will secure them the top post. Meanwhile, television anchorman Edward Mobley (Dana Andrews) wants none of the internal politics, but, using tips from his cop pal (Howard Duff), tries to find the killer on his own. The buxom Rhonda Fleming, sweet Sally Forrest, and inimitable Ida Lupino play the women who are used as bait in various fashions. With such a variety of characters and threads, Lang deftly maintains momentum, using a downstairs pub as the preferred meeting place where characters let down their hair, while Laszlo establishes the noir atmosphere primarily through exterior night scenes, notably a suspenseful, train-dodging chase through the subway tunnels.