***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.

Actor Richard Conte starts this movie off by thanking Bellevue Hospital for allowing them to film in its halls. Then it's off to the story, which is about the investigation of the murder of a young doctor on the streets outside the hospital. The police can't figure out who did it, so they send Cone in undercover as a doctor to investigate. There are wacky people, a doctor who attended the same medical school as Conte is supposed to have, and one time when a nurse calls him for an emergency..... and while he can sling the lingo, he's not a doctor, despite two years of pre-med and serving as a medical corpsman.

George Sherman's mystery shows the clear influence of THE NAKED CITY, but while the older film reeks of the heat and stink of the slums in summer, this one shows the territory around Bellevue. It does it pretty well, even if the area has changed in the last seventy years. Nowadays, First Avenue has a lot of hospitals from the East Village all the way up to the Presbyterian off Sutton Place. Bellevue looks much the same from the outside.

I've seen this several times but the last was so many years ago that the memory of the movie is a little blurry. I do wish they'd release it on DVD because, while it's no masterpiece, it's a nifty noir.

Interns are being disappeared at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. (What an ugly place, then and now. Maybe all those missing interns just ran away and became artists in Bora Bora.) The police department insinuates a mole, Richard Conte, as a new guy. He's actually spent a few years in medical school, we're told. He digs into the internal dynamics of Bellevue, running into characters played by the wizened and creepy Tabor and the supernally nubile Grey.

It's a tense, exciting, and interesting flick. What I remember most is Conte, the real-life half-baked medical student, parading around in whites, ordering meds to be administered, giving orders, and looking authoritative.

That's one of the features of this movie that make it interesting. It's relatively EASY to fake being an MD. It's been done dozens of times by sociopaths and is probably being done even now, as we speak. Docs carry around such Aesculapian authority that ordinary mortals make many unspoken assumptions about the role.

I'll give one example. A doc that I know -- a close relative and lifelong friend -- is late for meetings and appointments with the public from time to time, just like the rest of us humans. We all oversleep or forget. When you and I are late, we are castigated for our lack of organization and self discipline. When a doc rushes in late, his audience APOLOGIZES to him for disrupting his busy schedule. The assumption is made that his duties in saving mankind prevented his being on time. Well -- full disclosure: I'm a sociologist.

It's marvelous to see Conte doing such a sociopathic number in the interests of justice and social control. He's rarely challenged, even when his orders are obviously a little screwy. Who's going to question the judgment of a confident young man in a white lab coat who has a stethoscope hanging around his neck and a pen light protruding from his breast pocket? These props are the equivalent of a police uniform and badge.

Forgive these observations. I now step down from the podium and return to the movie. Where was I? Oh, yes. It's a neat thriller and ends, if I remember correctly, with a chase through one of those soulless basements filled with laundries and pipes and fuse boxes and what appear to be steam-producing machines.

It would be nice to see it available on DVD.