raymond burr

The Blue Gardenia (1953)

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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

Bride of the Gorilla (1951)

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As monumental as the 1930s King Kong was in influencing special effects innovation in early cinema, there was a nasty undercurrent of racism that flowed from that picture & dispersed into the larger cultural pool. Many ape-themed B-pictures that followed in King Kong’s footsteps preyed on societal discomfort with interracial romance, horrifically coding their villainous primates as African or South American invaders stealing square-jawed Americans’ refined white women. It’s not a genre I tend to pay much attention to as a result, despite my bottomless appetite for schlock, unless there’s a hook like witnessing Bela Lugosi’s decline into poverty row Hell in The Ape Man. 1951’s Bride of the Gorilla is a strange exception to the rule. It’s a deeply racist picture, to be sure, but its avoidance of the usual tropes & grooves of the genre makes it a bizarre, fascinating work as an outlier. More of a melodrama than a B-grade horror and a complication of the way its villainous ape is coded as a racial Other, Bride of the Gorilla surprises & subverts in its participation in a genre that doesn’t deserve the effort. It’s a morally repugnant, but oddly compelling as a cultural artifact.

Presented as a story about “how the jungle itself took the law into its own hands”, this is a tale of adultery, guilt, and the white man’s sense of displacement in the Amazon. A rubber plantation owner’s young wife falls in love with one of his workers. The pair consummate this passion after a fight over their affections leads to the old man’s accidental death. Haunted by their own guilt and a criminal investigation from the Amazonian country’s police commissioner (?) & audience narrator (horror cheapie veteran Lon Cheney, Jr.), the new union is cursed & ultimately tragic. This is compounded by a local witch who poisons & gaslights the new husband/former employee into believing he’s turned into a gorilla. He hallucinates that his body is changing and he is losing his humanity to the jungle, where he begins to spend most of his time instead of comforting his new, wealthy bride. There isn’t a lot of gorilla action in the picture; it’s mostly colonialist melodrama. Still, the psychological horror of this transformation (which is never confirmed to be real) has interesting thematic implications & moments of dread.

Bride of the Gorilla’s thesis that white people don’t belong in the Amazonian jungle is a technically accurate conclusion derived from deeply faulty reasoning. According to the film, “White people shouldn’t live too long in the jungle,” because it “brings out their bad side.” The transformation horror at the center of the film brings into question the sexual threat of the Other that usually permeates its genre. The movie practically functions as a horror of racial transformation, where a white man loses his privilege & civility as be becomes more in tune with the “primitive” culture of the jungle. Because this is a poverty row cheapie rapidly fired off to fill out a double bill, there likely wasn’t much intentional thought put into how the film would participate in, complicate, or subvert the racist tropes of its genre, but the results are fascinatingly muddled all the same. The movie takes an unintended anti-colonialist stance and breaks down the barriers that separate its white man lead from the jungle community he fears. It even does so with an almost exclusively all-white, American cast, which makes it all the more bizarre.

For all of Bride of the Gorilla’s grotesque, Darwinist implications as a racist participation in colonialist narratives, it does have occasional moments of genuine psychological terror. Raymond Burr (of Perry Mason & Rear Window fame) sells the fear of his primitive de-evolution nicely, especially in a scene where he punches in the glass of a mirror that displays a gorilla’s reflection. Late in the film his gorilla form stalks his titular bride through the jungle and the movie takes his first-person POV. It’s a decision that’s intended to mask the truth of his transformation, but accidentally telegraphs the aesthetic of an 80s slasher in the process. Most of Bride of the Gorilla works this way. Its indulgence in prolonged melodrama is likely an effort to limit its special effects budget, but makes it an interesting B-horror outlier in the process. Its subversion & complication of racist ape movie tropes was likely a thoughtless act in the pursuit of a quick, cheap-to-shoot script, but makes for an fascinating discussion anyway. The psychological & bodily horrors of its central transformation, which likely isn’t even “real,” shines through despite the many faults holding it back. I wouldn’t normally recommend anyone explore this particular B-movie territory, but if you find yourself doing so, Bride of the Gorilla is an interesting outlier within a cursed genre.

-Brandon Ledet

Crime of Passion (1957)

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(Viewed 9/4/2015, available on Netflix)

Maybe the moral of this story is that ambitious women shouldn’t get married. Maybe the moral of this story is that ambitious women are unstable and will come to unsavory ends. Maybe the moral of this story is that forcing social roles onto people creates monsters.

Barbara Stanwyck’s Kathy goes from an ambitious journalist to a stifled housewife to a conniving and manipulative antihero. One of the reasons that I love and return to Film Noir is the presentation of flawed, but still very human characters. Viewers can identify with Kathy up until her last couple of turns. Who hasn’t been so caught up in the excitement of love that they make bad decisions? Who hasn’t been so bored by a mediocre party that they wanted to run screaming? We start losing her when she begins to manipulate the people around her, first out of “love” for her husband, and then out of the pleasure of fulfilling her own ambition, and we get to follow her dark journey towards violence and desperation.

I think that, maybe,at the time of its release, Crime of Passion was meant to convey a moral tale about learning to be happy in your station in life. Crime of Passion was made during the Hays Code era, and therefore bad behavior must be balanced with punishment. Not that Kathy should get away with her transgressions . . .

Despite the emphasis on punishing characters for behaving outside of carefully stipulated norms, I see a feminist subtext that makes the movie work for a modern viewer. I watched Crime of Passion like a tragedy about a woman trapped into a stifling life without any outlets for her own needs and wants, slowly descending into darkness.

I can recommend this movie for anyone looking for a drama or would like to see some solid acting from well-known silver screen actors. It’s a pretty accessible movie even though it comes out of a different era in movie making. Barbara Stanwyck delivers a fair performance, and Fay Wray (yes, that Fay Wray) plays a small role in the movie as well. The leading man, Sterling Hayden as Police Lieutenant Billy Doyle, comes across convincingly as a manipulatable rube. Raymond Burr (yes, that Perry Mason) does well as the hard-boiled Police Inspector that has Kathy’s number from the start.

-Erin Kinchen