WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS: you'll believe a Redwood can act

WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS features more B-grade stars than you can shake a stick at. Just start shaking while I reel off the names - Dana Andrews, Vincent Price, Thomas Mitchell, Ida Lupino, George Sanders, Rhonda Fleming, and Howard Duff. I bet your arm got tired before I finished.
Some of them were never big enough to carry a film on their own, while the others were no longer big enough by 1956 to pull an audience on their own. I'm talking about you Dana Andrews.
But package them all together in a thriller directed by the great Fritz Lang and you've got something that's worth watching. Or, at least, that's the theory.

Andrews heads the ensemble as talented newspaper journalist Edward Mobley who finds himself caught up in an increasingly vicious power struggle between three senior executives at his New York City paper following the death of its longtime publisher, Amos Kyne.
Kyne's successor is his ineffectual and embittered son Walter (Price) who attempts to assert his authority by offering the newly created position of Executive Director to whichever of the three is the first to solve the "Lipstick killings" currently gripping the city. Mobley finds his experience as an investigative reporter suddenly in demand but his real interest lies in persuading longtime fiancee Nancy to marry him. 
It's Andrews as Mobley who waters down what should be a heady brew of politics and passion. Never the most expressive of actors, by middle age he had hardened into a piece of wood more solid than a giant Californian Redwood. Clearly this unflappable dependability was seen as an asset by the studios which continued to cast him in leading man roles for two decades, but he comes across as dull and bloodless.
There's no sense of genuine passion behind his constant professions of love and (shock, horror!) lust for young Nancy and one wonders what on earth she sees in this dull middle aged man. Surely she can foresee the boring life of fetching his pipe and slippers that stretches ahead of her should she yield to his entreaties.  
Andrews plodding style sucks much of the life and sparkle out of the story and out of his fellow actors' enthusiasm for their parts. They turn in perfectly adequate performances but none of them give the film anything close to everything they've got. It's a B-list effort from Lang as well whose penultimate Hollywood film this was.
I stuck with WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS out of affection for Lang's previous work, and he succeeded in  holding my attention but at the end of it all I was left thinking of what could have been.