THE SLEEPING CITY (George Sherman, 1950), starts off with Doctors being killed at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. What’s the cause? It turns out the poor Doctors, only being paid 50 dollars a month, are prey to a narcotics ring run from the hospital. They’re seduced into playing the horses for a quick win but quickly fall into debt and are then blackmailed into providing ‘the white stuff.’ Today’s British hospitals better watch out. The film’s title is a clear reference to Jules Dassin’s earlier THE NAKED CITY (1948), and like the earlier film, features great on-location shooting, in this case of the hospital itself and its surroundings.
Impressive on-location shooting (ending in drama) from the beginnng:
and similar, rhyming, scene at the end:
Almost exactly half-way through the film (a nurse (Coleen Gray) and a detective passing as a doctor (Richard Conte) go out to have a cigarette and the nurse says, ‘Blemishes are hid by night and every fault forgiven. The world should live by night. The dark draws people together. They can feel the need for each other. But the world gives the night to the sick. Keeps for itself daylight but lets men look into faces filled with fear and hatred. Are you filled with fear and hatred’?
The film is so potent, it’s preceded by Richard Conte as himself addressing the audience directly and telling us that what we’re about to see is fiction and that Bellevue and all its staff are upstanding citizens at the forefront of science. The film itself tells a more complicated story, hinted at by being framed by an actor playing a detective passing himself off as an intern, with all the ethical and moral dilemmas that places him in. I hadn’t really registered Coleen Gray before and she’s extraordinarily beautiful and effective here . I also loved Richard Taber as Pops Ware, the lowly, old elevator ‘boy’/ drug lord who brings a whole class dimension into the narrative.
There’s a superb drug montage:
and as you can see from these images, a wonderful noir feel to the whole narrative:
From the great Arrow box-set
José Arroyo
Jessica Jones is smart. and sexual; she’s not afraid to ask for what she wants. She can take it, she says. Jessica’s drinking way more than what’s good for her, trying to forget something terrible that’s happened which is clearly indicated as some kind of rape though what we’re shown is a mental violation — to the point of physical possession and erasure of will — and with jarring but indistinct sexual overtones. So here we have a woman, just like men in the best noir’s, trying to survive in a dangerous world, drinking to forget someone who’s bruised her beyond repair, doing her best to earn a living, and screwing with whatever looks tasty and doesn’t cause too much trouble: It saves on the drink. The opening line in the series, spoken in voice-over, is a great one: ‘New York may be a city that never sleeps but it sure does sleep around. Not that I’m complaining. Cheaters are good for business. A big part of the job is looking for the worst in people.’
Jessica seems less mentally strong than Warchowski. In fact she’s been the victim of a man’s mindfuck — he took over her mind and made her do ‘things’– and then the episode reveals, discretely, some superpowers which we don’t yet know the extent of. It has a great noir look too, at least as imaginative at that of Daredevil and is more interstingly polysexual and multiracial than the series on ‘The Man Without Fear’. The object of desire here is who will be revealed to be Luke Cage, a hunky black bartender, made to seem lusciously desirable, who we are shown to have slept with a black woman before Jessica. The series is treading carefully on the politics of representation.
Krysten Ritter has an intriguing look of crumpled intelligence. Her face seems poised in a state of smirky disappointment and can look very beautiful and also quite down-at-heel. Carrie Anne Moss appears as a two-timing lesbian corporate lawyer who sometimes throws crumbs of work Jessica’s way. The first episode moved really well, with the editing evoking a sense of a dangerous past impinging on the present, something that could be a memory but could also be a presence and in either way dangerous. It’s very sexy too, with the sex being a context for an exchange of tough-talking dares that reveal as much as they hide. I look forward to the following episodes.
