What does a Dancer, an Actor, a Magician and a Disenchanted Cop Have in Common? They All Meet in a “City that Never Sleeps”

Marie Windsor, Gig Young, Chill Wills, "City That Never Sleeps" (1953).

A cloud of failure hangs over a handful of Chicagoans whose dreary lives are about to become a lot more dramatic. In “City That Never Sleeps” a would-be ballerina, reduced to dancing in a burlesque house; an out of work actor, his face painted silver, poses as a mechanical man in the burlesque theater’s front window;  and an unemployed magician who uses his sleight of hand skills to pick pockets and commit robberies all figure into the story. 

Thwarted dreams and bitter resignations to less than ideal lifestyles drive the younger generation’s general sense of dissatisfaction. But it’s not just the frustrated show biz types who have a beef with the system. 

Wally Cassell, Mala Powers.

At the center of this tale of woe is Johnny Kelly (Gig Young), a young Chicago cop who’s having an affair with the burlesque dancer, Angel Face (Mala Powers), and plans to resign from the force the following day. The idea is to leave his wife, Kathy (Paula Raymond), and run off with the paramour. But his last graveyard shift turns out to be a doozie and Johnny begins to rethink every wrong footed step he’s set to take.

But before he has any revelations, the otherwise straight arrow law officer decides to get his hands dirty in order to finance his split from his wife and his job. He accepts an offer from a crooked lawyer, Penrod Biddel (Edward Arnold), to kidnap the equally crooked magician, Hayes Stewart (William Talman), and bring him over state lines where he’s a wanted man. Stewart has been getting in Biddel’s hair, and the shady attorney aims to put the pesky prestidigitator on ice.

In a marvelous scene that tells us almost all we need to know about the relationship between the two, Biddel plucks an invisible hair or some other morsel of debris from the sleeve of Stewart’s sport coat and dismissively blows it free from his fingers. Their interactions all go downhill from there.

Gig Young, Ron Hagerthy, William Talman,
"City That Never Sleeps."

The tension between Biddel and Stewart is just the tip of the iceberg. Johnny’s life becomes more complicated by the minute. If his extramarital affair and plans to vacate his wedding vows weren’t vexing enough, Johnny’s family members become entangled in the goings that unfold on this absurdly crazy night: his dad, Johnny Kelly Sr., (Otto Hulett), is also one of Chicago’s finest, and Johnny’s delinquency-curious kid brother, Stubby (Ron Hagerthy), is also on the scene. The senior Kelly’s presence plays a significant and tragic role in the film’s final scenes. 

Yes, there are a stunning number of coincidences in this story — way too many to be at all credible. On this evening, not only is Stubby out aiding and abetting the villainous Stewart, but John Kelly Sr. is also on the beat, patrolling the same mean streets of “Chi Town,” as his son.

Adding to the strangeness of this remarkable confluence of Kelly family members is Johnny Jr.’s patrol car partner on this nerve shattering evening, a sergeant who will only identify himself as Joe (Chill Wills). His voice sounds remarkably like the one that narrates the film’s opening scenes, which is meant to be the voice of Chicago — a rather strange device if there ever was one. 

As they drive together, Joe gives Johnny sound advice about life and codes of conduct, none of which the younger patrolman is in the mood to hear. Might he have listened more closely if he realized it was the city itself offering sage advice? Probably not.

Marie Windsor

A network of love triangles help this heated pot of soup boil over: Biddel learns that Stewart is having an affair with his wife, Lydia (Marie Windsor); robotic man Gregg Warren (Wally Cassell) is smitten with Angel Face, who is in love with Johnny; meanwhile, dancer Agnes DuBois (Bunny Kacher) is sweet on Gregg, but he hardly knows she’s alive.

We learn that the source of Johnny’s turmoil is two-fold: he became a police officer to please his father and he dislikes the job; he wants more money, not because he’s particularly materialistic, but because his wife earns more than he does and that hurts his pride. Successful women in the workplace were a threat to 1950s American men, it seems, and Johnny’s ego is wounded deeply enough to make him want to pull up stakes and head for the hills.

Meanwhile, over the course of his last shift, Johnny delivers a baby and busts up a rigged craps game, returning money to the swindled gamblers. He realizes, with the help of Joe’s words of wisdom, that he’s playing a useful role in the community and that it’s essential that he salvage his marriage before it’s too late.

That’s not the harbinger of doom that many would demand of noir. Some will say it’s not noir, but so what? As Sara Smith suggested in her thought provoking book, “In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City,” noir can be evaluated by the noir elements it contains, much like the way alcohol is rated by proof. Not all noirs contain all of the elements associated with the genre, and some are more noir than others. Noir or not, call “City that Never Sleeps” what you want; it’s an entertaining crime story.

Now, it’s time to talk about two silly little points from this movie that jump out at me.

First, it’s New York, not Chicago that’s known as the “city that never sleeps,” but I suppose “The Windy City” isn’t a very noir title.  

Secondly, toward the end of the film someone gets shot in a very public space, a hotel room. We’ve all seen this in films and TV shows, old and new. The shooter never seems to expect that anyone will hear the very loud gunfire and call the cops, and in the movies and TV they usually don’t. In “City that Never Sleeps” a shooter reasons that people will probably think it’s just a car backfiring (right, that’s always my first thought). 

I’m not a firearms expert, but I suspect that discharging a weapon inside a public building would attract attention — a whole lot of attention — like firing a cannon or riding a horse through the lobby.

It’s just another one of those “only in the movies” moments that just seems to wash over us without making a dent in the conscious mind. Sure, it’s strange, but I’m willing to give the shooter a pass on this one.

When Noir Got Into the True Crime Game — Docudramas: How True Were They?

Ted de Corsia, "The Naked City" (1948) — just one of the 8 million stories.

By Paul Parcellin

Maybe it was the rigors of World War II that whet the public’s appetite for true crime stories in the 1940s. Returning soldiers, who saw real blood and guts on the battlefield, were less than inspired by movies based on fictional stories, or so the legend goes. They wanted a realistic view of life that matched the bleakness of their combat experiences and the changing peacetime world. 

Movie audiences, accustomed to the realism of wartime newsreels, liked the immediacy and authenticity of short films featuring real troops engaged in combat and other current events. 

At home, urban crime was on the rise and cities were deteriorating. The spate of semi-documentaries, which at first glance appeared to be as credible as legitimate news sources, validated the public’s worst fears about the decline of urban life while usually offering an upbeat message of hope.

Some of the films of that era that mimicked the look of documentaries include “The House on 92nd Street” (1945), “Boomerang!” (1947), “T-Men” (1947), “Highway 301” (1950) and “The Hitch-Hiker” (1953), to name just a handful. 

Some were merely inspired by true events while others stuck closer to the facts. Often, they were composites of different true cases blended into a single storyline. Most featured voice over narration in some form and they sometimes shot scenes in the exact locations where the real events took place. 

Tom Pedi, Nicholas Joy, Barry Fitzgerald,
David Opatoshu, Howard Duff at police headquarters.

One such composite movie is “The Naked City” (1948), the film that inspired a successful TV series, “Naked City” from 1958 to 1963. In the film, Barry Fitzgerald plays Det. Lt. Dan Muldoon, lead investigator of a homicide division. Short in stature (for a homicide lieutenant, that is; TV’s Columbo being perhaps his lone peer), his eyes gleam with excitement when a clue is unearthed in the case dubbed the Bathtub Murder. His Irish brogue and ironically sharp repartee that accents each scene he’s in is the voice of a Gaelic storyteller more so than that of the jaded New York City cop we’ve seen so many times. In fact, his upbeat manner belies the fact that he’s investigating a hideous crime, the drugging and deliberate drowning of a young woman. 

As the investigation wears on and leads begin to fizzle he’s undeterred and pursues promising angles with zest. It’s as if he has an unshakeable confidence that the perpetrators are bound to fall out of one of the trees he’s shaking. His self-assuredness and lack of cynicism is hard to figure considering the tough environment he’s in and the hardened criminals he’s after.

His counterpart, the young, green homicide detective Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor) is assigned every shoe leather task that needs doing. He’s resigned himself to a life of diving into haystacks in search of elusive needles, for the time being, anyway. Theirs is a dynamic we’ve seen replayed in countless films and TV shows, but back then it must have had a fresher feel.

Robert H. Harris, Don Taylor as Det. Jimmy Halloran,
doing his shoe leather work.

If you’d guess that the rookie will eventually face off against the story’s arch villain, Willie Garzah (Ted de Corsia), the baddest of bad guys  (at one point, Garzah shoots a blind man’s guide dog), you’d be right. Garzah will outsmart and trap the young detective, putting his life in jeopardy while jacking up the tension in the film’s final moments. It’s, of course, a manipulative  and probably fictional device, but we’re glad to go along for the ride. In fact, it’s one of the film’s more effective sequences.

Voiceover narration by the film’s producer Mark Hellinger, the stuff of documentary-style storytelling, works sometimes. But too often he reaches for comic relief and stumbles, and just plain talks too much. Never mind, the movie looks great and proceeds at a fast enough clip.

Arthur Fellig, A.K.A. Weegee

The title is borrowed from the book by tabloid news photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, who, from the 1920s to the ’60s, prowled New York City streets by night and snapped thousands of crime pictures, including the aftermath of many a murder (he also has a cameo in the film). 

Obviously, director Jules Dassin wanted the film to deliver the grubby truth as seen in the lurid photos and screaming headlines of tabloid journalism. We occasionally see visual touches that remind us of Weegee’s work, such as kids cooling off in the spray of an open hydrant. We also get a touch of his signature gallows humor when other youngsters dive off the East River dock only to find a corpse afloat there — innocence of youth, meet the grim reality of big city criminal culture.

Retaining the Weegee aesthetic, the film’s lensman, William Daniels, captures New York City’s tight, claustrophobic niches as well as its sweeping skyline and the odd vignettes of ordinary folks on the street in mock cinema verite fashion. 

A master of black and white photography, Daniels shot 21 films starring Greta Garbo between 1926 and 1939, including “Mata Hari” (1931), “Grand Hotel” (1932), “Queen Christina” (1933), “Anna Karenina” (1935), “Camille” (1936) and “Ninotchka” (1939). In “The Naked City” he somehow makes the gritty urban landscape of 1940s Manhattan lushly beautiful, transforming the grimy sprawl of Manhattan’s underside into a character in its own right. Had the producer dropped a good deal of the film’s voice over and simply let the pictures tell the story the film would be stronger for it. 

Voice over doesn’t get in the way of actors’ performances so much. The film presents Garzah, for instance, as a criminal without redeeming qualities. He places little value on human life and would just as soon pull a trigger or pitch a drunken man into the drink when he feels threatened. His ethos of survival at any cost comes to a head at the film’s climax, being chased by the cops he climbs the Williamsburg Bridge’s steel supporting structure. It’s a setup for the cinematic takedown of a big man, a la James Cagney’s fireball of a final scene in “White Heat” (1949), when the hunter becomes the prey and the prey gets flambéed. Garzah’s end is a good deal less flamboyant, however.  

Ted de Corsia as Garzah
on the Williamsburg Bridge.

It would be a stretch to shoehorn an action sequence like that into a film that’s supposed to be a documentary, of course. Here, it’s OK. It’s what puts the “semi” in semi-documentary. We’re never really sure where and when non-fiction morphs into fiction and vice-versa. We simply must enjoy the film for its entertainment value. Despite its use of documentary film’s look and feel it makes no promises about the reliability of the supposed facts it presents.   

What seems utterly credible, however, is the primitive crime fighting technology we see. Halloran, the man in the field, needs to find a pay phone to call the precinct with critical information about the man he’s tracking down. The desperately inadequate communications system he’s got to work with is responsible for a disconnect that puts the young law officer in trouble. Before attempting to singlehandedly bust the bad guy, Halloran leaves a phone message — yes, a phone message — for Muldoon who is out of the office. The police department desk jockey almost forgets to pass the crucial information on to the lieutenant, so when the junior detective lands in hot water there’s no cavalry there to pull him out. 

Things eventually work out, but that caused me consider this: In pre-cell phone days, screenwriters must have had an easier time whipping up dramatic tension. With tracking and cell phone towers, a law officer is probably less likely to become isolated and in jeopardy. How many plot twists can hinge on depleted batteries and lack of signal? A lot, apparently. Things were just simpler in the old days, but I digress.

As 1940s docudramas go, “The Naked City” is a solid piece of construction with a few creaky floorboards. See it on a big screen if you can — it’s a paean to a New York that has largely been lost to time.