Screaming Mimi (1958)

Screaming Mimi, directed by Gerd Oswald, is a 1958 crime thriller based on Fredric Brown's 1949 novel The Screaming Mimi.

The movie opens with a blonde almost getting sliced up by a guy with a knife. The guy gets shot. The blonde ends up holding the knife. Nobody thinks the blonde is anything other than an innocent victim but she has a major crack-up and ends up in a mental hospital, under the care of Dr Greenwood (Harry Townes). The blonde is Virginia Wilson (Anita Ekberg). Dr Greenwood takes a very close personal interest in her case. Very close. He tells her that as soon as she’s cured they will go away together, but she has to trust him and everything he tells her to do.

Six months later Virginia has become a successful nightclub entertainer, using the stage name Yolanda Lang. Her manager is Bill Green, who is in fact none other than Dr Greenwood.

There’s a slasher murderer (dubbed the Ripper) loose in the city and Yolanda almost becomes the latest victim. She is saved by her faithful dog Devil. He’s a mean crazy dog but he adores his mistress and he would die to save her.

Reporter Bill Sweeney (Philip Carey) gets mixed up in the case. He thinks there’s a good story here. He’s also rather taken with the glamorous Yolanda.

What convinces him that there’s a great story here is the Screaming Mimi herself. The Screaming Mimi is a statuette of a half-naked terrified girl. Only a handful of these statuettes were ever made. Yolanda had one. And one was found by the body of the Ripper’s first victim. Add to this that the first victim, Lola Lake, was like Yolanda a beautiful blonde dancer and any reporter would sense that this is a story.

This is a movie that doesn’t cheat. When the solution is revealed it’s perfectly consistent with everything that has come before. The clues were there. They were subtle, but they were there.

We, the audience, know something very important that the protagonists don’t know. We know this thing, but we don’t know what it means. It could have several different entirely plausible explanations.

One difficulty for this film is that Yolanda’s act has to be super-sexy. The poster after all describes her as a stripper. But this was 1958 so she can’t possibly take her clothes off. She can’t take any of her clothes off. The problem is solved by adding some fetishism, with Yolanda dancing in shackles and chains (this is just a wild guess but there could be some symbolism here folks).

Overall this works. The movie has a subtly perverse feel which is totally consistent with the story.

What’s cool is that this is a Hollywood psychiatry movie. I just love psychiatry movies. And being the 50s you know there’ll be at least some half-baked Freudianism in there somewhere. I love these movies for the same reason I love voodoo movies - they involve a weird crazy belief system that makes no rational sense but it’s huge amounts of fun.

This one is particularly cool because right from the start we can see that the psychiatrist seems at least as crazy as his patient. And the psychiatry stuff is pleasingly loopy.

The movie’s biggest strength is Anita Ekberg’s performance which at first seems stiff but eventually you realise that Miss Ekberg knew exactly what she was doing. She nails the character perfectly. Her dance routines are a highlight as well.

There are those who are going to insist that this movie is film noir. I don’t think it is, although it has noirish touches. I think it’s more accurate to see it as an anticipation of the later giallo genre. It’s no coincidence that Dario Argento’s landmark 1970 giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) is also a loose adaptation of Fredric Brown’s novel The Screaming Mimi.

Screaming Mimi is a very underrated movie. Highly recommended.