Friedlob and Lang's Tabloid Thrillers --- Part Two

While The City Sleeps got no chance to build momentum, let alone gain sleeper status, which under better distribution circumstance, might have come. Key openings were spread way apart --- New York in May (1956), Los Angeles in August, and finally Chicago in September. RKO saturated mass circulation magazines from May 24 in LIFE to July 8 in Movie Time, but what good were full-page ads with playdates so delayed as Los Angeles and Chicago? Was there showman resistance to booking While The City Sleeps? Here may have been another of those shows to suffer for theatres no longer being affiliated with production/distribution, as picking and choosing exhibs weren't rushing to play While The City Sleeps.

Gotham's two-week stand followed seven weeks of The Conqueror at the Criterion, receipts for While The City Sleeps called "fair" by Variety. At $16,000 for its opening frame, Friedlob and Lang's thriller at least beat up-the-street The Killing's initial week by $4,000, which illustrates how pics we now celebrate barely eked out house nuts on first-run, even in largest bergs where you'd figure savvy viewers were aplenty to support them. Pittsburgh's Stanley Theatre also had While The City Sleeps in May among a "string of clucks," that jinx broken by arrival of The Man Who Knew Too Much and $18,000 for its first week. Just preceding While The City Sleeps took a measly $8,000, especially punk for a 3,800 seat venue, and was gratefully swept out with "recent duds" to make way for Hitchcock's Paramount hit.

LA saw "dull" receipts for While The City Sleeps upon August arrival and two weeks play with RKO-reissued Flying Leathernecks. Whatever interest magazine ads generated may well have dissipated by this late booking. Certainly that was true of Chicago and September's late arrival of While The City Sleeps. In fact, it played as a second feature to Republic's Lisbon, starring Ray Milland, the tandem earning a "fair" $26,000 at the massive Chicago Theatre (3,900 seats). Beyond A Reasonable Doubt had by this time opened in New York at Loew's State, where it performed "below hopes" with $13,500 on a first week. A second would be cut short to bring in MGM's The Power and The Prize. Reasonable Doubt was sold as a thriller with a "trick" ending. Maybe it wasn't tricky enough. Reviews would not be so generous as for While The City Sleeps. LA saw Reasonable Doubt with another RKO retread, The Big Sky, two weeks again the limit with lackluster turnout.

Maybe the trouble for both While The City Sleeps and Beyond A Reasonable Doubt was a distributor on last legs and patronage done with commonplace product. Movies by 1956 had to be special to pull customers away from television. Youth might support hot rod and monster fests, but adults, to whom Friedlob and Lang aspired, wouldn't pay babysitting and car park fees to watch stuff barely distinguishable from freebies at home. While The City Sleeps had a good concept, maybe even ahead of its time, but all the cast, save Dana Andrews, had done TV --- Ida Lupino was more associated with that medium than with movies by Spring '56 when Sleeps sought admissions to watch her emote. Failure to sync up expensive national advertising with key playdates for the film were ruinous as well, but this was symptomatic of an industry having lost that essential wheel of theatres owned by and standing ready to play off merchandise when and where distribs dictated. A show like While The City Sleeps had to do without smooth machinery that would have pushed it through ten years earlier, but was too broken down now to be of much help.



A Limping RKO Tenders It's Product for 1956's Autumn Season




RKO Hoped The Stripper Lure Would Cinch
Patrons for Beyond A Reasonable Doubt

 Sex, or the promise of it, even if an empty one, was still a bedrock to selling. Both Sleeps and Doubt had hooks exploitable --- the former and lipstick killings, the latter with strip-tease backdrop to much of its narrative. Knowing patrons saw ads for the tease they were. Whatever impurities were promised, there was still a Production Code to scrub clean releases via US companies. This was how foreign pix, not subject to the Code, made inroads after the war. Beyond A Reasonable Doubt based much of a campaign on its "Hush-Hush" ending, a device used before (1950's In A Lonely Place had been billed as The Bogart Suspense Picture With The Surprise Finish). Risk for Reasonable Doubt was letting down patrons with a fade they did see coming. As it seems not to have taken off ticket-wise, we can assume the ending didn't surprise, or that customers couldn't be bothered one way or the other.

Beyond A Reasonable Doubt Goes New York's
Second-Run Saturation Route as a Support Feature

Beyond A Reasonable Doubt posits Dana Andrews as a man who frames himself for an unsolved murder in order to show how anyone can be sentenced wrongly to death, therefore making the case against capital punishment. There was reluctance to go the distance, however, with regard politics such a theme invited. The film's writer, Douglas Morrow, gave assurance that Doubt's story "does not take sides." His twist ending neatly got 'round thornier issues by putting Doubt square in melodrama/exploitation's column. While The City Sleeps and Beyond A Reasonable Doubt were for years available only in full-frame edition. Warner Archives now offers both in wide screen, in Sleeps' case, a little  too wide, as SuperScope's 2.1 ratio tightens the (likely) designed for 1.85 frame too snugly. Doubt's a more comfortable fit, being spared SuperScope retro-fit, and neatly cut to 1.85 measurement. Wider presentation enables the two to entertain better than was the case over a past fifty-five years. With interest in Fritz Lang on continual rise, these should be welcome arrivals on DVD.