While the City Sleeps

Fritz Lang’s nihilistic late noir — the director’s "most underrated movie" (Time Out) — has three ambitious newspapermen cynically exploiting a series of sex murders, committed by a so-called "Lipstick Killer," as they compete with one another for a major promotion. While the City Sleeps eschews whodunit thrills and high-style formal affectation for a simple, precise, pitiless depiction of an infected noir universe in which there is little to choose between "normal" society’s upstanding citizens and the underworld’s sickest misfits. Each of the three competing journalists is willing to exploit, and possibly endanger, the woman in his life in an effort to get ahead; the film’s most sympathetic character, in fact, is its serial killer, who at least has the moral sense to plead "Catch me before I kill again." "Superbly constructed and multilayered...A twisted, dog-eat-dog journey into the underworld...Lang’s interest is not in the killer’s motivations and methods, but in the journalists’ ruthless, morally guilty minds....Lang’s finest film since The Big Heat and his last great success" (James Monaco). B&W, 35mm. 100 mins.