Fritz on Fridays: While the City Sleeps

On the first Friday of every month, this column by critic Joshua Polanski will feature a short review or essay on a film directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976), the great Austrian “Master of Darkness.” Occasionally (but not too occasionally), Fritz on Fridays will also feature interviews and conversations with relevant critics, scholars and filmmakers about Lang’s influence and filmography.

“If it bleeds, it leads.” Every journalist or former journalist knows the phrase. A testament to the symbiotic relationship of violence and media, it’s a fact that violence makes for good news business. While the City Sleeps, Fritz Lang’s adaptation of The Bloody Spur by Charles Einstein, is a complicated web of a film from the “Master of Darkness” that lives up to the old adage. In between boring love triangles and strangely un-thrilling murders, Lang exposes the vampiric and mercantile nature of capitalistic newsrooms and leaves them out to dry.

Layers of deceit, love affairs and old-fashioned workplace manipulation are features and not bugs in Kyne Inc.’s office, a media conglomerate made up of a television station, a weekly paper and a news wire. At least, that’s how things go after the business patriarch Amos Kyne (Robert Warwick) dies and, failing to set up a better succession plan, Amos’s son, Walter Kyne (Vincent Price), takes things over. A killer leaves a trail of dead women and strangely placed clues behind him, captivating Amos in his last days. Taking advantage of the serial killer on the loose, based on the real “lipstick killer,” Walter creates a new Executive Director position to help him run the company and promises the position to the first man to identify the killer.

Continue reading at the Midwest Film Journal.