My favorite part of While the City Sleeps, that queer amalgam of jolly Hollywood banter and Fritz Lang creepiness, is a shot of the murderer peering up a staircase, up toward the camera, while his prey goes all unawares into her apartment. His head appears off-center, the framing just off-kilter enough as to be entirely psychologically satisfying. There is something dreamlike about it; it bears something of the silent film's strange grace. The murderer's grimace is something from a nightmare.
The first time I saw it (I missed the credits) I did not know the name of the young actor. In fact, he was the only actor in the thing I DIDN'T know: Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, Vincent Price, George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, Ida Lupino; this is one stellar cast. And then there's this strange-faced young man, pudgier than you expect from an actor of that period and far less handsome, even for a villain. And there's something else missing: a certain vanity. There are moments when he fails, and his style is often embarrassingly hamfisted, but there are other moments which feel truly experienced in that shocking way that Dean and Brando and Clift were teaching us to know and love. In the first moment we see the killer, a delivery boy, experience the rush of bloodlust that will lead to a murder, Barrymore lets his face go slack-jawed, his eyes go blank and devoid of humanity. In a single moment we have seen him turn from a graceless teenager into a killing machine, and there is no question of compunction or self-doubt or second thoughts. We know for a fact that he will work tirelessly until this lust is sated, and we know it without any dialogue.
It's a strange performance in a strange movie, and I thought little more of the actor until I found myself amazed by a Gunsmoke episode, "One Killer On Ice", in which a charming and hard-drinking bounty hunter rides into Dodge and convinces Matt to accompany him in transporting an infamous prisoner. Like most serials of the time, the regular cast is frozen into two dimensions by the very demands of the series: Festus must always be silly, Miss Kitty's heart must always be golden, Matt must never show sign of weakness, Doc must never tire. It's the guests who have the chance to shine, and Barrymore does just that. The hour-long format gives good, relaxed opportunity for character development, and Barrymore's bounty-hunter gets layers of subtle shading. He's the easy lover of women and speaks in an engaging Southern drawl, a man who seems virtuous and fun-loving in the first half hour and becomes increasingly complex as it continues, until Matt has to take him out. It is an utterly self-assured performance; his choices are strong and fascinating. What won me absolutely were the odd and intriguing moments where he chose to laugh, never where you'd expect. This is the performance that has convinced me, in spite of most of the rest of his resume, that he might have been an important actor.
The trouble is, it never seems to have come fully manifest. After Gunsmoke, I punched up Netflix and found some four or five other entries, none of them promising. Barrymore, it is said, was difficult. Originally slated to play the double-character of Lazarus in Star Trek's quirky first-season ep "The Alternative Factor", he failed to show up for shooting and was replaced by Robert Brown. This was apparently not unusual, and while he did a lot of television throughout the fifties, as well as playing roles like the BMOC/drug-pusher in High School Confidential, he fled during the sixties to Italy to make shlock like Rome Against Rome, an ultra-cut-rate zombie flick in which he plays a one-eyed-goddess-worshipping priest who talks in that strange old pseudo-British studio-speak: "terrible" becomes "teddible", "power" becomes "pahr" and "happen" becomes "heppen".
But then there's this curious little entry in his resume: did you know they remade Winchester '73? It's true. For television, starring Tom Tryon in the white hat and John Saxon in the black. Over the years we've seen a slew of cringeworthy television "further adventures" remakes like the Warren Oates/Mariette Hartley African Queen, or the Timothy Dalton/Joanne Whalley Scarlett, but this is a rough duplicate of the classic Anthony Mann/Jimmy Stewart classic, and so possibly ranks among the most superfluous and ill-advised ventures of all time. Even so, the most misguided projects have happy accidents at their edges and corners, and this one has Barrymore playing one of Saxon's henchmen: gruff-voiced, full-bearded, black-clad and spider-like, he's a preacher sprung from jail. He's also easily the most interesting part of the movie, and has some of the best lines.
But back to While the City Sleeps: perhaps, in retrospect, his most important film. It does not rank among my favorite noirs. Its focus is too scattered, its tone too muddled, and Dana Andrews is certainly not at his shining best in the lead. The parts which do shine are the the parts when Lang can play with the camera: any time there's a staircase, he has a grand time with subtleties of angle and perspective. In the first murder scene, he's put a creak in the landing right outside the victim's door, a small detail, a thing I didn't notice on first viewing, but a lovely one, a builder of subconscious tension. He also knows exactly what to do in the subway: a subway is like a banquet of shadow and light for the likes of him. And for all Barrymore's flaws I know why he was cast: because his crazed expressions are effective pieces of nightmare when suddenly illuminated, and because there's something about his graceful awkwardness of stance which lends itself to Lang's strange angles.
I have a sense, in watching him, that his most important work went into his life and was never captured by a camera. He feels to me like an important actor who never found his important role, or maybe was too drunk or depressed to turn up onset for it.
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