With the spooky season having come to a close (as much as it does for year-round horror sickos such as we), it’s officially Noir-vember in my house, and to my delight, Criterion recently added a collection of some underseen ones. Scrolling through, none of the directors’ names jumped out at me initially, until suddenly the name “Fritz Lang” appeared, and the decision was made. The Blue Gardenia comes rather late in the storied director’s prolific career; after this one, he would only release a half dozen more films, one of which saw him returning to the Dr. Mabuse well. Based on a novella by Vera Caspary (who had previously written the novel Laura), the film features a screenplay by Charles Hoffman, who spent no small part of the last decade of his life writing 22 episodes of the Adam West Batman series, not that any of that series’ tone is present here. There’s a certain sense of lightness for a story that revolves around something so depraved, but it’s not campy, and is a true noir through and through. And it’s got a special appearance from Nat King Cole playing the title tune! 

Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter, three years after her star-making role as the title character in All About Eve) is a switchboard operator who’s been saving the latest letter from her fiancé, a soldier in the Korean War, to read it on the night of her birthday, so she can pretend that he’s really there. Earlier in the day, she watches as Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr), an advertising artist who specializes in pastels of women for pin-up calendars, semi-successfully flirts with Norah’s roommate Crystal (Anne Sothern), getting her phone number. Crystal’s in an on-again, off-again relationship with her ex-husband Homer (Ray Walker), and their third flatmate Sally (Jeff Donnell) runs down to the store when the latest trashy dime-store novel from a Mickey Spillane-style writer, so Norah has the apartment to herself when she reads her fiancé’s letter … in which he tells her that he’s fallen in love with a nurse he met while recovering in a Japanese hospital. Hurt, she receives a call from Prebble, who’s looking to meet up with Crystal; he doesn’t give her the chance to explain that he’s mistaken and decides, in her vulnerable state, to meet him at the Blue Gardenia restaurant. There, he plies her with several Pearl Diver cocktails and, once she’s good and drunk, he takes her to his place, where he spikes the coffee, she requests with something else. Confused and thinking that she’s in the company of her lost fiancé, she initially returns his kisses, but when she attempts to reject his overtures once she realizes herself, he becomes aggressive and attempts to assault her. She fends him off with a fireplace poker and, fearing that she’s killed him, runs home without her shoes, in the rain. 

When Norah awakes the next morning, she hears about the incident and, having no memory of what happened after the first round of drinks, fears that she is the murderer. This is where the film gets a little fuzzy, narratively. We in the audience have no reason to believe that she’s not the killer, and we also have no reason not to want her to “get away with it,” even if what she’d be getting away with is a pretty clear-cut case of self-defense. As we see her turn to more and more desperate methods to try and ensure that she’s never caught, we’re entirely sympathetic to her plight; the scene in which she burns her dress after hours and is caught by a policeman who merely gives her a warning about using her incinerator during hours outside those permitted by law is particularly fraught. She’s wracked by intense and escalating feelings of guilt as she watches her co-workers be called in for questioning by the police while ignoring her, since she and Prebble have no connection that anyone knows of, and he wasn’t even trying to contact her when he called her shared apartment. Eventually, she calls a tip line set up by seemingly sympathetic (but ultimately sensationalistic) journalist Casey Mayo (Richard Conte), and even meets him in person while claiming she’s doing so “for [her] friend,” whom the press—specifically Casey—has dubbed the Blue Gardenia Murderess. She’s ultimately arrested, but Conte discovers a contradiction that might set her free.

As a mystery, I found this one a little underwhelming. I always prefer when a crime picture like this one gives the audience the chance to solve the mystery alone with the characters; I am a devoted fan of Murder, She Wrote, after all. I expressed to my viewing companions this disappointment in this aspect of the film in our post-screening debrief and it’s worth noting that although the real killer is identified at the end and confesses (because, unexpectedly, Norah didn’t kill him), none of us recognized them. As it turns out, they did appear in an earlier scene, but it came so close to the beginning that the character was unrecognizable when reappearing at the end, and if I had seen this in isolation and missed that clue I would accept it as a personal failure to pay sufficient attention, but that this missed in triplicate tells me that this is a problem of the film, not of my attentiveness. That having been said, that the film needs someone other than Norah to be the killer is, for lack of a better term, perfunctory. We know she’s not a murderer, and I was never convinced that the police were ever really going to catch her; it was more of a matter of when her roommates would put two and two together regarding Norah’s skittishness and defensiveness. I expected them to figure it out earlier and help Norah cover it up, and that would have been a perfectly acceptable noir concept, but instead we have a bit of a forced romance between Norah and Casey, one which ultimately feels kind of insulting to her (after she’s discharged, she glares at and rebuffs him for his part in her initial arrest, but this is merely a ploy to seem hard to get). 

The most fun parts of the film are when we get to see the three women roommates interact with one another, and it’s a rare look into a slice of life of a bygone era, of domesticity between three single(ish) women sharing a tiny apartment. On the night after her birthday, Norah is awakened by Crystal as the mother hen of their little group. As her alarm goes off, she refers to it as “the mine whistle” to the other women, and sends Sally off to make the orange juice (condensed and out of a can — yeesh) while she gets the bathroom first that morning, as she directs the understandable groggy Norah to coffee and toast duty. Crystal is the most delightful character overall, and learning that Ann Sothern, whom I had only previously seen in Lady in a Cage, starred in a ten-film series as an underworked show girl named Maisie inspired me to track down those films for a future marathon (they were only available on the Russian equivalent of YouTube, uploaded from VHS rips from TCM, so pray for me). It’s too bad that her ultimate role in the story (as well as Sally’s) is pretty minor, since she’s full of quips and various other character choices that give the film a lot of life. 

Not necessarily the most interesting noir that I’ve ever seen, but with great performances from Sothern and Baxter and an effectively menacing villain in Burr, this one is worth checking out if you’ve got a noir itch and you’ve already seen all the classics. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond