George Sherman – The Sleeping City (1950)

adminSeptember 21, 2019

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Pacific Cinémathèque Pacifique writes:
The Sleeping City is a gritty, claustrophobic thriller set in a metropolitan hospital. Its jarring opening has a burned-out intern, out on a smoke break, shot point-blank in the face. Film noir fixture Richard Conte heads the “Confidential Squad” that goes undercover to investigate. Coleen Gray is the attractive head nurse with whom Conte becomes involved — and who may be mixed-up in some major medical skulduggery. The film was shot on location at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital; a prologue, added at the insistence of New York’s mayor, asserts that the film is fictional and doesn’t represent any real city or hospital. B-movie vet George Sherman (who made many a B-Western with John Wayne) directs. The tight script is by Jo Eisinger; who also wrote Jules Dassin’s Night and the City. “An especially disturbing film noir, because its plot concerns corruption within a hospital . . . The interns and nurses are shown as depressed and neurotic individuals, bitter and desperate people, [not] the noble crusaders usually associated with medical stories”