Cinematical

An emergency room doctor steps outside the hospital to have a smoke before beginning his morning rounds. As he takes in the air, approaching footsteps are heard. He turns his head in time to see a gun pushed into his face at point-blank range and fired. Who would perform such a risky hit in broad daylight, and why? Is it mob-connected? Is there a maniac on the loose? Thanks to some basic medical training in his past, Detective Rowan (Richard Conte) is chosen by the NYPD homicide squad to get to the bottom of the case by going undercover as a medical intern at the hospital in question. That's the set-up for The Sleeping City, a tight little noir film recently screened during Film Forum's B-Noir festival. Among its credits are a lean, focused script, an appropriately creepy and sometimes hilarious villain, and noir favorite Coleen Gray, an actress with a face like a baby eagle who you never think will turn out to be rotten but sometimes does. An added bonus of The Sleeping City is that it holds our attention by offering a panoramic view of old New York, with its working automats, less than fully-erect skyline, and omnipresent smokers who don't know they will be the subject of smug giggles from a future audience of their fellow New Yorkers.

There's an issue with The Sleeping City that has to be gotten out of the way. Because it was was shot inside and around New York's actual Bellevue Hospital, and because the plot is laced with certain implications about activity involving Bellevue doctors, the picture is saddled with a wildly incongruous non-fiction introduction. Star Richard Conte, all tan and teeth, addresses the audience directly. "The film you're about to see is fiction," he explains, and then praises the wonderful men and women of the real Bellevue. Some people may be horrified enough by this to put off plans for seeing the film, but I found it more amusing than anything else. Sure, it's offensive on a couple of levels, and if it were blemishing all prints of, say, Double Indemnity, I might sign a petition saying that it should be removed from further prints of the film. But since there might not be many further prints of The Sleeping City, there's no sense in getting worked up about it. The stain is there, and there it will stay. Chalk it up to a historical curiosity. If nothing else, it certainly gives you an idea of what was and was not artistically in-bounds for the movie-going audience at the time.

The legality and/or wisdom of allowing a police detective to 'pose' as a doctor doing normal rounds in a hospital is up for debate. The film handles this ethical football only once, when the hospital's chief administrator, who is in on the undercover op, warns Rowan that he has a responsibility to abandon his cover in the event that he's called on to do any major surgery. (That's a relief) He also puts Rowan through a hilarious trial-run of his cover story, asking every question he can think of about the false background in order to slip him up. But it's a non-starter. Richard Conte, flustered? Unprepared for the task at hand? Perish the thought. Rowan is soon off and running on his assignment, looking for the killer and dodging red herrings left and right. There's the perpetually pissed-off roommate who is forever muttering about who's on and off his shit list, the beautiful but morally ambiguous nurse played by Gray, and the hospital's elevator operator, a loopy old European immigrant who runs a betting pool for the young doctors and butts into everyone's conversations. Rowan also soon comes into some unflattering information about the doctor who was popped in the film's opening moments.

Trespass no further if you insist on watching this film with a completely clean slate. Rowan eventually gets wise to a major dope ring operating inside of Bellevue, involving many of the doctors and nurses on staff. (You can see why the ruckus was raised by Bellevue's administration) It's no ordinary theft and re-sale operation, but a nervier plot with a ghoulish noir undercurrent. Medicine is actually being taken straight from the mouths of patients, who are then given watered down substitutes a la Harry Lime in The Third Man. Some of the doctors are farther along in the scheme than others. Some are hooked on "the white stuff" as the film creepily refers to dope, some are stealing the dope to pay off gambling debts, and at least one of them has become a big fish in the local drug underworld. None of them mind too much that their fellow doctors who don't play ball are prone to accidents.

Despite Bellevue's place in the popular imagination as an all-purpose animal cracker farm, the psycho ward angle doesn't figure at all into this story. If it was mentioned I missed it, and there's certainly never any sense that the patients pose a threat to the hero or the other characters. Most of the film's action takes place in well-lit doctor's dormitories, clean and crowded break rooms, surgery theaters and the little spaces near the exit where you sneak away to get some fresh air. Adding in the dark, menacing atmosphere of a dangerous psycho ward would only have cluttered the proceedings, and the picture works much better without it. Since this is noir city, it's the squares and the stiffs walking the halls every night who are the real psychos, or at least potential psychos -- the ones posing as society's most hard-working, upright citizens and hiding their mania on the inside.