Watch The Sleeping City For Free

Sorry, this movie sucks

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Within New York City's Bellevue Hospital in post-World War Two America there is a drug racket, the interns are supplying "the white stuff" -- heroin -- to an intermediary who's selling it illegally, with the help of the head nurse. The interns get suckered into the racket but the head nurse and the bad guy villain do it for the dough. Great dialogue. Superbly dark setting. Fine, competent acting with a semi-documentary feel to their simple, profound human weaknesses and strengths. All of which is caped by the physical-psychological setting. The hospital is where patients are asleep with their illness and the weak may be manipulated by the strong. Or is it America itself which is "the sleeping city"? "The Sleeping City" is film as a visionary reading of the corruptions inherent both in a medical system where people are overworked and underpaid, stressed to their breaking point and hence easily manipulated -- and where the single, myopic solution for all problems is money. Almost.For into this mix comes Detective Fred Rowan, aka Richard Conte, in an under cover sting operation. Conte acts his grim, good-Judas role beautifully, tough as a slowly sniffing, plodding bull; secretive as a spider. In the end, Rowan's/Conte's tactics solve the immediate problem. Not without irony. For this story wisely offers no long-term strategy to the sleeping sickness of corruption at work in the vast hospital complex and in America's medical system. Good men and women, ordinary folk, are lost in a vast concrete moral maze. The world is far more grey than black and white. People die but are not redeemed. Doctors are lost and not replaced. All of society suffers, although a few of the guilty are punished.Finally, the dialogue is superb. With give and take like: (-) "How is he doc?" (+) "Breathing from memory." And "Don't ever argue with a cop, son. Just answer his questions." And the ending rises out on a beautiful, urban long shot, dark and double-edged as a pleasing sunset with no rain, peace without quiet, and reminiscent of the city finalés of King Vidor's "The Crowd "(1928), Mike Nichols' "Working Girl" (1988) and other films which use the city setting for perfect enhancement of trenchant storytelling.

I've seen this several times but the last was so many years ago that the memory of the movie is a little blurry. I do wish they'd release it on DVD because, while it's no masterpiece, it's a nifty noir.Interns are being disappeared at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. (What an ugly place, then and now. Maybe all those missing interns just ran away and became artists in Bora Bora.) The police department insinuates a mole, Richard Conte, as a new guy. He's actually spent a few years in medical school, we're told. He digs into the internal dynamics of Bellevue, running into characters played by the wizened and creepy Tabor and the supernally nubile Grey.It's a tense, exciting, and interesting flick. What I remember most is Conte, the real-life half-baked medical student, parading around in whites, ordering meds to be administered, giving orders, and looking authoritative.That's one of the features of this movie that make it interesting. It's relatively EASY to fake being an MD. It's been done dozens of times by sociopaths and is probably being done even now, as we speak. Docs carry around such Aesculapian authority that ordinary mortals make many unspoken assumptions about the role.I'll give one example. A doc that I know -- a close relative and lifelong friend -- is late for meetings and appointments with the public from time to time, just like the rest of us humans. We all oversleep or forget. When you and I are late, we are castigated for our lack of organization and self discipline. When a doc rushes in late, his audience APOLOGIZES to him for disrupting his busy schedule. The assumption is made that his duties in saving mankind prevented his being on time. Well -- full disclosure: I'm a sociologist.It's marvelous to see Conte doing such a sociopathic number in the interests of justice and social control. He's rarely challenged, even when his orders are obviously a little screwy. Who's going to question the judgment of a confident young man in a white lab coat who has a stethoscope hanging around his neck and a pen light protruding from his breast pocket? These props are the equivalent of a police uniform and badge.Forgive these observations. I now step down from the podium and return to the movie. Where was I? Oh, yes. It's a neat thriller and ends, if I remember correctly, with a chase through one of those soulless basements filled with laundries and pipes and fuse boxes and what appear to be steam-producing machines.It would be nice to see it available on DVD.

A detective (Richard Conte) goes undercover, posing as an intern at New York's Bellevue Hospital, in order to solve the murder of another intern. What he discovers is a rather sophisticated operation of gambling and drug dealing. Desperate interns, a seductive and crooked ward nurse played by Colleen Grey, and a rather demented hospital maintenance man (Pops) played by Richard Tabor, together call into question the very integrity of the famous hospital. Conte works his way through to solve the murder and to learn the circumstances around it in some unusual film noir settings amidst darkened hospital wards and empty hallways.

Two well-known titles in the noir cycle are The City That Never Sleeps (1953) and While The City Sleeps (1956). Before them, there was the less familiar The Sleeping City. In this last (or first), what seems asleep is not so much New York as a city-within-a-city – the huge old fortress of Bellevue Hospital, where, at night in its wards and among its staff, skulduggery is afoot. Bellvue opened its doors to the film's cast and crew, perhaps not wholly grasping that the resulting portrait might be less than reassuring to prospective patients. But it's not a story, at least explicitly, about malpractice. A jumpy, distracted intern on his break goes outside to grab a smoke. He ends up with a bullet through his brain. Since the murder appears to be an inside job, an undercover department of the city police plants a detective (Richard Conte) in the hospital among the interns. He's had some medical training in the army and so should pass casual muster. Taking lodging in the building and going on rounds, he makes acquaintances. Among them are his bitter roommate, Alex Nichol, nursing some resentments about not being rich, either by birth or through wedlock; ward nurse Coleen Gray, raising a young son from an unhappy first marriage; and chummy elevator operator Richard Taber, who bunks down off the boiler room – where he runs a book where the cash-strapped interns can play the ponies. What Conte's after is not just the killer but the source of an infectious but non-microbial malaise that will claim Nichol, too, the night before he was to marry. Conte finds himself the prime suspect in his roommate's death and comes close to blowing his cover before his own superiors intervene. But Conte's suspicions about Taber's bookmaking operation aren't quite on the mark; it turns out that a 'white-stuff job' is the real racket....Light and portable equipment developed during World War II made location shooting finally feasible, and the low-budget second-features in the post-war years pioneered its use. The Sleeping City affects a pseudo-documentary style that also came into vogue as a complement to the new cinema-verité look (a chase through the bowels of the massive institution stays particularly sinister). Despite a nifty shot of the new interns descending an endless stairwell en masse, the vast hospital looks underpopulated, especially during the graveyard shift. But the claustrophobia (the whole picture is shot in and around the hospital) pays off. The main characters aren't many, but not so few that they can't deliver a final twist.