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Analysis Of While The City Sleeps

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“While the City Sleeps” is a dramatic film from 1956 based on a real-life serial killer nicknamed The Lipstick Killer. The screenplay was written by Casey Robinson and loosely follows the book The Bloody Spur, written by Charles Einstein. By using gender criticism as a critical approach to analyzing, I hope to show, as authors Kennedy and Gioia state in Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, “how the images of men and women in imaginative literature”, in this case, film, “reflect the social forces that have historically kept the sexes from achieving total equality”. The book by Einstein tells the story of William George Heirens, the man accused of the murders of two women and one young girl in 1945 and 1946. He was known as the Lipstick Killer because he wrote a message with lipstick on the wall of his second victim’s apartment. He eventually confessed to the murders and spent 65 years in prison, Chicago’s longest-serving inmate. He died in 2012 at the age of 83; ill with diabetes and in a wheelchair. Years earlier he had recanted his confession and stated that he had been a victim of coercive interrogation and police brutality. There is one scene in the movie where the police are interrogating a janitor who was a suspect in the murders, who worked at the apartment of the first victim. In the movie, the police have held him for four days under constant interrogation. This scene and the real-life situation it depicts makes the viewer question whether
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