- Based on a novel by Charles Einstein, While the City Sleeps is easily one of director Fritz Lang's most purely entertaining films. After the death of a newspaper tycoon (Robert Warwick), his senseless son (Vincent Price) immediately pits the company's three news division editors (Thomas Mitchell, George Sanders, James Craig) against one another. Their competition revolves primarily around news of a serial murderer nicknamed "The Lipstick Killer" (John Drew Barrymore), who has been killing single women and leaving taunting clues. Reporter Edward Mobley (Dana Andrews) would prefer to stay out of the fray, but how can he resist helping a friend and investigating murders at the same time?
- Movies stereotypically rely on love triangles, but the romantic geometry in While the City Sleeps is distinctly more complicated. For starters, the new newspaper owner's wife (Rhonda Fleming) is canoodling with one of the editors. A playfully wicked columnist (Ida Lupino) is nominally attached to another editor but has her eyes on Mobley. In the meantime, secretary Nancy Liggett (Sally Forrest) gets engaged to Mobley and even agrees to help him by acting as bait for The Lipstick Killer with the full support of the desperate police chief (Howard Duff). After watching this and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt in the same week, I have to hand it to Dana Andrews and Fritz Lang for their wacky crime-related schemes.
- If you can get past the fact that the killer in While the City Sleeps stumbles upon not one but two important characters in the same random NYC apartment building, you are likely to enjoy the mix of comedy, drama, and suspense contained within this film. You might also appreciate its many strong acting performances, notably including those by Lupino, Sanders, Mitchell, and Price, the latter of whom is impossible to upstage. While this single example is hardly reason enough to reevaluate Lang as a comedic director (particularly considering the film's running sexual innuendos about exploring and hunting licenses, which surely must have been translated from German), I am impressed that the director still had a few new tricks up his sleeve 40 years into his prodigious career.
- Apparently the film's many "K" symbols were leftovers from Citizen Kane.
