While New York Sleeps (20th Century-Fox, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night when my husband Charles returned home from work, I ran him a movie on YouTube that turned out to be one of the most useless films we’ve ever watched together. It came up in a link from the page where we’d watched The Fat Man. It was a 1938 20th Century-Fox (alleged) mystery called While New York Sleeps – a great title that deserved a much better movie – and was the second in a series of three “B”’s in a series called “The Roving Reporters.” At the time 20th Century-Fox was in a bit of a pickle with their “B” detective series since Warner Oland had just died, putting the Charlie Chan films on hiatus (they wouldn’t restart the series with Sidney Toler until 1939). They drew on John P. Marquand’s Mr. Moto books for a series with Peter Lorre as the star (so to replace a Swede playing a Chinese, they got a Hungarian to play a Japanese), and they also concocted this preposterously inept one about reporter Barney Callahan (Michael Whalen, an actor I’ve actually liked in other roles) and photographer “Snapper” Doolan (Chick Chandler), who work for the fictitious New York Chronicle. Barney is a devoté of practical jokes – in one of the few genuinely funny lines in an otherwise lame committee-written script (not-bad writers Frank Fenton and Lynn Root got credit for the “original” story and Frances Hyland and Albert Ray fleshed it out into an actual screenplay), one of Barney’s acquaintances protests that he never dares to shake Barney’s hand lest it have a “joy buzzer” in it to give him an electric shock, nor does he ever accept a cigar from Barney because he knows it’s going to blow up in his face. (This reminded me of the anecdote told by a friend about Syd Barrett, the founder of Pink Floyd who burned out on LSD and other substances a year into the band’s tenure. He said that when you went to Barrett’s home, so many of the drinks on offer were spiked you didn’t drink anything unless you’d poured it yourself from the tap.)

The mystery, in case you cared, revolved around a series of murders of couriers carrying bonds – apparently these were movie bonds, meaning that you could cash them in at any time without having to prove that you actually had legal title to them. Five of these murders have happened before Barney and “Snapper” clash with the New York Police Department, in the person of Inspector Cliff Collins (Cliff Clark), over the death of insurance investigator Steve Martin, who was on the trail of the bond-stealing gang. The police are convinced Martin committed suicide, but Barney and “Snapper” are equally convinced he was murdered. To advance the case and force an inquest, they bribe a Black janitor (played with his usual aplomb by Eddie “Rochester” Anderson) to testify that he mailed three letters, including a payment for an annuity Martin had taken out (which was actually paid by Barney, as we learn when his editor sees a reference to it on a sheet listing his expenses for which he wants to be reimbursed). Much of the action, such as it is, revolves around a nightclub owned by Joe Marco (Harold Huber), one of whose assistants, “Red,” is played by the marvelous character actor William Demarest considerably younger than we’re used to seeing him. Marco puts on floor shows featuring singer Nora Parker (Joan Woodbury), whom Barney has the hots for but whose true love is a guy from her old home town, Johnstown, Pennsylvania (most famous then, as now, for the great flood that occurred there in 1889), named Malcolm “Mal” Hunt (Robert Kellard). At one point Nora writes Barney a note breaking up with him, but Barney intercepts it, changes the addressee’s name from “Barney” to “Mal,” and gets it to him. Mal immediately responds with a long note saying he’s O.K. if she wants to break up with him but she could have been nicer about it.

Another performer at Marco’s club is Judy King (Jean Rogers), whom Marco inveigles into shooting him with a blank-loaded gun so Barney and “Snapper” will falsely report him dead and the New York Chronicle will publish an account of his demise before he turns up alive and well. Only just when you’re thinking, “Oh, no, they aren’t going to have someone really kill Marco,” they have someone really kill Marco. The someone turns out to be Martin’s boss at the insurance company, who masterminded the thefts of the bonds (ya remember the bonds?). The stolen bonds were in the possession of Judy King, who was in on the whole deal all the time, though “Red” gets sent off to Judy’s apartment to retrieve them, only it takes him so long to figure out where they are that both our Roving Reporters and the cops have the chance to move in and bust them. Along the way we get to hear two reasonably good songs, “I’ll Never Change” and “Ain’t He Good Lookin’,” sung by Joan Woodbury (or maybe a voice double, though they sounded like her to me), as well as a swing arrangement of “The Sailor’s Hornpipe” played on the dance floor at Marco’s and the Chick Webb/Benny Goodman hit “Stompin’ at the Savoy” (actually written by Edgar Sampson, though both Webb and Goodman got cut-in “composer” credits for recording the song) artfully used as the accompaniment for Marco’s mock “murder.” While New York Sleeps ends with a scene in which Barney boasts he’s going to marry Nora Parker, only at the end she ends up embracing Mal Hunt. It’s one of the typical late-1930’s comedy-mysteries that were blown off the screen by the 1941 The Maltese Falcon and the film noir cycle it inspired, and though some of those films at least had interesting “sleuth” characters like The Saint and The Falcon, or held up as great movies through their own audacity (like James Whale’s 1935 masterpiece Remember Last Night?), While New York Sleeps is just an hour-long time-waster.