A young woman whose soldier boyfriend has just dumped her goes out for a drink with a known “wolf”. Drunk and vulnerable, she then heads back to his place, where, he tells her, there’s a party going down, only to discover that the party consists of just her and him.
The next morning the very handsy Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr) is dead, beaten to death with a poker. Did sweet Norah (Anne Baxter) do it? Of course she didn’t – we know how these things go. But for the rest of this underwhelming thriller’s 85-minute running time we watch and wait for energetic journalist Casey Mayo and lacklustre cop Sam Haynes to arrive at the same conclusion.
Fritz Lang directs with a notable lack of pizzazz, though the occasional zooming crane shot tips us the wink that it’s him. He’d later apologise for the movie, reckoning that “the McCarthy business” had unsettled him, and that 20 days just wasn’t enough time to do a good job.
It’s the first of Lang’s “newspaper trilogy”. The much better While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt would follow and the sour picture it paints of both women (nothing without a man) and men (everyone has a notches-on-the-bedpost personality, it seems) make this a swerve for lovers of crime dramas in which there’s at least one white knight.
Although reporter Mayo comes pretty close, and Richard Conte is good as the sort of shoe-leather journalist who is chatty, nervy and smart and can work two telephones simultaneously. Mayo has people skills and that’s why he’s a good newspaperman, we get that from Conte’s lively performance. It helps power the film to its dénouement, which comes right out of left field. You might feel cheated but then this isn’t really a whodunit so much as a who didn’t do it.
So we’ve got a story that’s not really that interesting. Fairly dull characters. A director who isn’t bringing his A game. Apart from the occasional burst of very noirish lighting by the great Nicholas Musuraca (Cat People, The Hitch-Hiker) it’s not that remarkable to look at either.
There’s really just the actors to focus on, who are all better than the material they are working with. Apart from Conte, this means Anne Baxter, who is good at tearful, fraught and highly strung, and is as plausible as a woman who’s just been dumped as she is as a woman who believes she is guilty of murder.
The cop is played by George Reeves, who was Superman on TV at this time, and was possibly cast for that reason, because Sam Haynes doesn’t do a whole lot of police work of any sort, leaving that sort of thing up to Mayo.
Also on the periphery as Norah’s roommates, both blond, like her. Jeff (birth name Jean) Donnell plays squeaky, silly Sally. Ann Sothern plays older, man-hungry, wise-cracking Crystal. They’re good, if wasted, with Sothern getting the best of it.
The title is a half-hearted attempt to tie the film to the case of the Black Dahlia murder (a woman cut in two) of six years earlier, or the much better film The Blue Dahlia, which inspired the press’s name for the murder. As a story The Blue Gardenia‘s is a strangely thin one, considering it’s by Vera Caspary, who’d hit paydirt with her novel, Laura, which became the film of the same name.
Laura swam in murky psychological waters – a man obsessed with a dead woman – The Blue Gardenia cannot reach those heights/depths. But Nat King Cole is in it, everybody, singing the film’s title song, which isn’t much of a song either. Oh well, you win some, you lose some…
The Blue Gardenia – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
