People are voting emotionally.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Blistering performances.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

"Anything you can tell me?" "Sure...he's dead"There is so much to like about this film that it makes me wonder how "The Sleeping City" isn't more famous. It's simply one of the best film noir pictures of the era...and that's saying a lot because I love noir and have seen many, many of these pictures.The film begins with a vicious scene, as a young hospital intern is shot in the face at point blank range. The cops, however, have no leads and the killing seems senseless...perhaps the work of a psycho. With no other real options, the boss decides to call in three special agents. These men will obtain jobs at the hospital and see if there is anything that would lead them to understand why the man was murdered...as well as who did it.The main undercover agent is Fred (Richard Conte). Because of his own background in medicine, he'll pose as one of the interns. It's a tough job, as he'll be around patients and it's pretty hard to fake it indefinitely! He's told to rely on his nurses, as they'll help him figure out what to do. And, if he has a case that's over his head, he'll just have to break cover and get a real doctor to help. However, when another intern soon ends up dead it sure looks as if some conspiracy is going on...but the viewer sure is surprised how deep this all goes and what it's all really about...and it sure isn't random!There is so much going for the film and most of it has to do with realism. Apart from Richard Conte, most of the rest of the folks in the film don't look like actors and the cops especially seem like real cops. Additionally, Conte was no pretty boy and was excellent in the film...tough but no smart-alleck or unrealistic guy! But what also really helps is the story itself...it's hard to predict, very intelligently written and amazingly good. See this film...you won't regret it and it doesn't insult the intelligence of the viewer.

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.

***SPOILERS*** Shocking film noir that takes places in one of the country's largest hospital Bellvue, called City Hospital in the movie, involving a combination bookie loan shark and drug trafficking operation under the very noses of the hospital staff running it.It's when Bellvue Hospital intern Dr. Foster, Hurbert O'Neil,is found shot to death outside after taking a smoke break that the NYPD gets involved in finding what was the reason behind Dr.Foster's murder. Foster had been acting very strange before he was blown away and one of the things that the NYPD is very interested in is what his relations with head trauma nurse Ann Sebastin, Coleen Gray, was. It was minutes before he was popped that a very troubled Dr.Foster was trying to get in touch with Nurse Sebastin as if his life depended on it!Getting undercover cop Fred Rowen, Richard Conte, into the hospital as a new intern from far off L.A he's given the name and medical background of a Dr. Fred Glibert with only his boss Insp. Gordon,John Alexander, knowing his true identity. Bunking with fellow intern Dr. Steve Anderson, Alex Nicol, Rowan notices that he's very troubled in what he's involved in which has nothing to do with medicine. Dr. Anderson is in hock playing the horses with hospital elevator operation "Doc" Ware, Richard Tober, who's always giving him sure bets that don't come in!Rowan tying to get his bunkmate Steve Anderson to quite betting with "Doc" and stick to his work at the hospital as well as pay more attention to his fiancée Kathy Hall, Peggy Dow, has just the opposite effect in him going from bad to worse. Anderson finally ends up killing himself by jumping into the East River when the pressures of being an intern who makes $50.00 a month with debts, in playing the horses, just about breaking him became too much for Anderson to handle!***SPOILERS*** Realizing that "Doc" is somehow involved in both Foster and Anderson's deaths Rowen himself starts to make book with him and ends up over his head in owing "Doc" money that he can't come up with! It's then that the cagey "Doc" plays his trump card giving Rowen the only way out he can find: Write out prescriptions for the white stuff, narcotics, that Doc and his contact in the hospital can sell on the street for as much as 100 times it's value! Rowen now has to make the pinch on the drug dealing "Doc" Ware before he gets wise to him before he himself ends up where both Foster and Anderson did! It the Bellvue Hospital morgue! But before that Rowen's got to find out who "Doc's" contact in the hospital is before he could do it to make it stick. Which can very well jeopardize not only the undercover NYPD drug operation but the person trying to crack it Det.Fred Rowen himself!Amazing performance by actor Richard Tober as the creepy manipulating hyena like "Doc" Ware. Even though he was in less then ten films, with the most notable being the taxi driver in the movie "Kiss of Death", in is more then 40 year acting and writing career Ware's performance in the movie "The Sleeping City" should have easily won him an Academy Award in the best supporting acting category.

I saw this movie once, many years ago, in NYC. It was filmed on location at Bellevue Hospital, eighty blocks south from where I did my residency training in medicine (50's-60's.) The medical attire, locations, and medical palaver are certainly dated, but that was the way it was ... many years ago. The movie's characters (Conte et al.) were grand; an atherosclerotic, aging, Bellevue Hospital was really like that, the state-of-the-art treatments, the accomodations for patients were all shockingly interesting. In this sense, it is living history of a past medical era.The Noir is also so nicely done: hospital corridors, primitive art deco elevators, and night shots of Gotham streets. (All these retro-images are based on a film once seen by me forty years ago!)If film renovators/DVD entreprenuers were to read this clip, I would recommend they consider this movie as one that many forgotten Noirs that need to be resurrected. It would be a cryptogenic discovery. Conte was a great actor, and he has a loyal following. (This movie was in his early career, and he plays a good guy!) He would be lauded later for his Godfather roles.)