While the City Sleeps is a 1956 American film noir directed by Fritz Lang and starring Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Howard Duff, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, John Drew Barrymore and Ida Lupino.
Written by Casey Robinson, the newspaper drama was based on The Bloody Spur by Charles Einstein, which was inspired by the case of Chicago serial killer William Heirens (a.k.a.
Due to his lack of knowledge, and not wanting to take on all the work at the top by himself, Walter Kyne decides to create a new second-in-command position of Executive Director.
After a new murder, the two men devise a plan to set a trap by using Nancy as the bait, with Mobley taunting the Lipstick Killer on TV in order to bring him out into the open.
Through Kaufman, Mobley provides the scoop to Griffith, who makes sure to release it first in an extra-edition newspaper and only then on the Kyne wire service, but still ahead of any competitors.
The movie ends with Mobley and Nancy having married in Florida, and learning from a local paper of an unexpected shakeup in the Kyne organization.
The film was based on the Charles Einstein novel Bloody Spur, which had been optioned by the producer Bert Fiedlob.
Several props—some of which featured a large K in a circle—were recycled from Citizen Kane, which RKO had made 15 years earlier, and may have prompted the use of the name "Kyne."
He wrote: "Since it is full of sound and fury, murder, sacred and profane love and a fair quota of intramural intrigue, a viewer is left wondering if the tycoons of the giant Kyne publishing combine ever bother to cover such mundane stories as the weather.
But while this journalistic jamboree is more flamboyant than probable, a tight and sophisticated script by Casey Robinson and a clutch of professional performances make While the City Sleeps a diverting and workmanlike fiction.
"[10] Unavailable on home video for many years following a VHS release in the 1990s, in 2010 While the City Sleeps became available on DVD in the UK by Exposure Cinema.