Cinema: Two of a Kind

Good melodrama succeeds in making its characters and plot believable. When they are not, one way for moviemakers to try for some credibility is to take the camera to the actual scene of the fictitious crime. Latest examples:

Union Station (Paramount) stages a police hunt for kidnapers through Los Angeles’ railroad terminal, elevated trains, stockyards and municipal tunnel. After methodically nabbing three members of the gang, the cops (William Holden, Barry Fitzgerald) undertake the ticklish job of smoking out its leader (Lyle Bettger) before he can do away with his hostage, a blind teen-age girl (Allene Roberts).

Actor Fitzgerald’s Irish whimsy leavens his role of a wise old police inspector, but the rest of the characters are cut & dried. Holden seems miscast as a railroad detective with a reputation for toughness. Since he and Heroine Nancy Olson begin to bicker almost as soon as they meet, cinemaddicts will instantly sense a case of love at first sight. Director Rudolph Mate deploys his actors and camera with workmanlike skill, and the authentic settings help to give much of the film a fair degree of suspense.

The Sleeping City (Universal-International) uses Manhattan’s vast, much-filmed Bellevue Hospital as the real background of a fanciful tale about a detective (Richard Conte) who poses as an interne. Detective Conte, who has had a couple of years of medical school and some service with the Army medics, gets permission to practice on the patients so that he can track down a killer in the hospital.

It develops that the hospital harbors not only a fake doctor and a murderer, but also a cozy illegal traffic in narcotics. To square a beef by New York City authorities, Actor Conte announces in a foreword that the story never really happened. The movie itself then makes the point perfectly clear. Though it never rises above routine crime fiction, the film gains considerable interest simply from Bellevue and the city streets and the Manhattan skyline.