Twentieth Century-Fox didn’t do much in the way of noir. Betty Grable wasn’t much of a one for straight roles. So 1941’s I Wake Up Screaming is unusual for two reasons, not to mention a title making no sense at all.
It’s a whodunit about people who are off their turf, so those deviations from the norm chime with what’s happening on screen, a murder mystery with a few wayward contenders for the killer of Vicky Lyn (Carole Landis), a girl from the wrong side of the tracks.
The man who obviously didn’t do it is Frankie Christopher (Victor Mature), who we meet being sweated by the cops for the young woman’s murder. In flashback we get Frankie’s story, of how he, a sports promoter, and a couple of his mates, ageing actor Robin (Alan Mowbray) and celebrity columnist Larry (Allyn Joslyn), had a Pygmalion-style bet – could Frankie turn this blond and vivacious hashslinger into a society dame just by introducing her to the right crowd?
He does, just like that, so that’s clearly not the focus of this story. Instead Vicky starts getting ahead of herself, starts fancying herself as a somebody, a Hollywood actress maybe, but certainly too good for the likes of the people she has known up until now. And then, just like that, someone has killed her, for crimes against knowing thy place it would seem.
This is a strange and strained story about people who will not stay in their lane. Frankie, released by the cops too easily, ends up playing detective with the dead girl’s sister, played by Grable. Jill, the straight sibling with her feet on the ground, isn’t the sort you’d expect to pal about with a man suspected of murdering the sister she loved, but there you are.
Also acting bizarrely are the cop on the case and the doorman in the building where Vicky lived with Jill. Laird Cregar lumbers menacingly, mouthbreathing the entire time, as detective Ed Cornell. Cornell had a bit of a thing about Vicky when she was a waitress and was possibly stalking her. Elisha Cook Jr does his psycho whites-around-the-eyes routine (none better) as the doorman also overstepping the mark. He goes into the sisters’ place while no one is there and packs up the dead woman’s things, though no one has asked him to. From a tiny but brilliant scene between Cook Jr and Grable we are given to understand that this involved palping the dead woman’s underwear. And what to make of good-guy Frankie, who was romancing the dead sister and is now doing the same with the living one?
Director H Bruce Humberstone does some swishy stuff with the camera now and again, cutting out of a scene by swinging across to another set on the same sound stage as if this were a theatre piece, or zooming in dramatically. Cinematographer Edward Cronjager aids and abets with stark theatrical lighting, which is often very directional. Cyril J Mockridge provides a score that’s often Gershwin-esque when it’s not boilerplate noir but references Somewhere Over the Rainbow several times, a song about hopes and dreams unfulfilled – “why oh why can’t I?”
It’s an efficient film in many ways and Mature comes out of it OK – I say this as someone who grew up in a household where Mature’s appearance in a film on TV was always greeted with outright mockery. It fits, in many ways, his template-acting style. Everyone is a type, but all these types are slightly in the wrong place. There is a pleasing wonkiness to it all, a skew-whiff psychology, that makes it all a bit of a puzzle.
More of Carol Landis, as the dead woman, would have been nice. She’s the femme fatale of this piece, the one whose insistence on doing the wrong thing is the film’s motor. And it would also be good to know who, exactly, woke up screaming.
I Wake Up Screaming – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
