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.

CLASH BY NIGHT: powerhouse performances by stand-out stars

Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan in a drama directed by Fritz Lang! 
It doesn't get much better than this.
1952's CLASH BY NIGHT plays to the strengths of both stars' screen persona while also confounding our expectations.

Stanwyck is Mae Doyle, a cynical, hard-boiled middle-aged dame, selfish and embittered from life's experiences who returns to her impoverished working-class hometown and turns its' menfolk upside down.
Ryan is Earl Pfeiffer, one of those menfolk. Unhappily married to a permanently absent wife, he's similarly cynical about human nature, and irresistibly drawn to Mae. She however is fighting with fate and rejects Earl's advances, choosing instead to marry his kindhearted but weak-willed friend, Jerry D'Amato (Paul Douglas). She hopes it'll turn her into the domesticated and loyal housewife she believes she must become if she's to have any chance of finding happiness.
Earl's ardor is not to be dampened by  trifles like marriage or a baby, setting the stage for a clash of wills that is totally enthralling. Stanwyck and Ryan work magnificently together, trading barbs and looks of illicit lust without ever attempting to upstage one another. One can only imagine how much professional pleasure both experienced from working with someone so equally matched in talent and yet so completely lacking in ego. 
Their generosity extends to the rest of the cast. In many ways it's Douglas's character who is at the centre of this story because without him you've just got two unpleasant people who deserve the unhappiness they inevitably bring to their relationship. A pre-glamour superstar Marilyn Monroe works surprisingly well in the part of Peggy, a young Cannery Row worker frustrated with the limitations of her life and fully possessing the potential to become another Mae.
The odd line of overblown dialogue occasionally belies CLASH BY NIGHT's  theatrical origins (the film's based on the play by Clifford Odets) but it's to credit of veteran director Lang that these don't detract from the cinematic experience. This is very much a film, not a filmed play with a couple of outdoor scenes thrown in to open out the action.
This film is wrongly identified as film noir on several reputable movie websites that should know better. CLASH BY NIGHT is a drama and a damn fine one too. Watch it and enjoy!

MINISTRY OF FEAR: the benefit of being a blank actor

It's rather difficult today to understand the appeal of Ray Milland as a star actor. He's undeniably charming and handsome in a bland kind of way but hardly memorable, yet for 20 years he was a bona fide Hollywood film star. Between 1935 and 1955 he made more than 60 movies working with some of the biggest names on both sides of the camera.
He started out in the 30s as a suave and slightly stiff leading man in romantic comedies and expanded his range in the 40s to include an assortment of morally unscrupulous and mentally fragile characters.
Perhaps it was his lack of a discernible screen persona which allowed him to enjoy such a long career. It allowed him to maintain credibility as he switched between roles because he never became associated in the mind of the cinema-going public with one particular type.
These were the thoughts swirling through my mind as I watched - and thoroughly enjoyed - Milland in action in the 1944 thriller MINISTRY OF FEAR. Set mostly in a rubble-strewn London under devastating nightly attack by Hitler's Luftwaffe, he plays Stephen Neale, a man who's grasp on reality is in doubt following his release after two years in a mental asylum. Making his way back to the bomb-damaged capital he finds himself caught up in a Nazi spy ring and forced to go on the run after being framed for murder.
The seeds of doubt over Neale's mental state are sown in the story's opening moments then copiously watered and encouraged to sprout by the events that follow. Milland's relatively anonymous screen persona is a great advantage here because it's difficult for us to predict whether he will ultimately succeed or fail. He has no predetermined type to inform with confidence our guesswork about his fate. Whatever travails Milland's contemporaries Cary Grant or Ronald Colman (for example) endured during the course of a movie one could be pretty sure they'd wind up on top at the conclusion with the girl at their side. There's far less certainty with Milland and that keeps the tension going almost until the finale.
However, the film's effectiveness is not due to Milland alone. MINISTRY OF FEAR is based on the novel by Graham Greene and directed by the great Fritz Lang who creates a wonderfully atmospheric studio-bound version of London peopled by all manner of strange characters who may or may not be what they seem.
Milland went on to pick up the best actor Oscar in 1946 for his performance in "The Lost Weekend." and it's interesting to speculate whether his portrayal of an alcoholic writer on a bender would have been as effective without his having first accumulated a little emotional baggage as the tormented Stephen Neale in MINISTRY OF FEAR.