Film Preservation Blogathon: City That Never Sleeps

My best intentions to participate in this year's noir-themed Film Preservation Blogathon are being thwarted by a cascading set of deadlines and the President's Day holiday (the lack of mail on which, coupled with a lost copy at my video store, have prevented me from rewatching the film I wanted to write about). But film preservation is a cause that should interest anyone who cares about cultural history, and the proceeds from this year's event—spearheaded by The Self-Styled Siren and Chicago's own Ferdy on Films—will go to restoring The Sound of Fury (1950), directed by blacklistee Cy Enfield. If you're so inclined, donate here.

Disclaimers having been issued, let me take a moment to recelebrate the strangest noir I saw last year: John Auer's City That Never Sleeps (1953), which showed at the Music Box's Noir City: Chicago series in August. What's fascinating about the film is its combination of visual elegance and narrative gracelessness—and that's not meant pejoratively. Sometimes films that improvise their own grammar are the ones that gnaw at you, and there are moments in City That Never Sleeps that wouldn't seem out of place in Ed Wood. In possible homage to The Naked City, the film is narrated in a godlike echo by Chicago itself ("I am the city. Hub and heart of America. Melting pot of every race, creed, color and religion in humanity"); it opens with a fairly standard set of intrigues involving a corrupt attorney and the bargain he makes with a crooked cop, who agrees to abet a criminal’s flight from town.

Melding the urgency of Night and the City to the uplift of It's a Wonderful Life (from which it borrows a crucial plot device), the movie becomes weirder and more allusive as it progresses; there's the sense that its spiraling violence springs directly from the subconscious of its cop antihero (Gig Young), who begins to feel a pang of guilt about his plans to leave his wife and job for a club dancer. Over the course of the evening, he takes advice from a new, mysterious beat partner, who goads him into a sense of moral responsibility.

Is it noir if it dips below a certain level of cynicism? What’s striking about City That Never Sleeps is its sense that the city itself offers the possibility of redemption. “Chicago's the big melting pot and I got melted but good,” Young’s character’s mistress complains, but City That Never Sleeps is the rare crime drama that suggests its characters, even those who've been burned the most, are capable of reinventing themselves by listening to each other. (The ultimate tone is mystical and faintly religious.) Apparently a Scorsese favorite, the movie is notable for its superb use of Chicago locations by night; by comparison, Call Northside 777 seems touristic. In the most suspenseful sequence, a "robotic man" who works in a store window on Wabash debates whether to break character or save his hide. The climactic El chase leaves even The Fugitive in the dust—something Ed Wood never did.