Club Paradise (1945)

Club Paradise is a 1945 Monogram B-movie, and while their movies are often regarded with disdain I have a bit of soft spot for 1940s B-movies made by Poverty Row studios. This one is definitely worth a look.

The Rogers family is one of those poor-but-honest families that seemed to many to be a natural embodiment of virtue but underneath the façade they present to the world all is not well. The father of the family is bitter, and the husband of daughter Katie hasn’t worked for a long long time. He’s turned to drink and self-pity. The other daughter, Julie (Doris Merrick), is looking for a way out.



She at first thinks she’s found that escape in likeable trumpet player Ray (Eddie Quillan). Ray wants to put together a real band and play in up-market nightclubs but he needs money to get him started. His scheme to make the money by gambling goes badly awry when the illegal gambling joint he’s chosen gets raided by the police. Both Ray and Julie get sentenced to a fine of $30 or 30 days in jail. Her father pays Julie’s fine but then kicks her out.

Julie now turns to a man she met in the notorious Club Paradise for help. Danny is a smooth-talking no-good loser who is always trying to make a big score in some crooked deal or other and is always having to be bailed out by one of the women he’s picked up along the way. Only Danny has skipped town, and Julie would have ended up sleeping on the streets if she hadn’t been taken in by Danny’s ex-girlfriend. Danny’s ex runs the Paradise Club, and pretty soon Julie is working there as a dancer.



Julie is hopelessly in love with Danny, and she’s about to find out what that entails in practice. Danny owes a lot of money to some very nasty people. They want their money now, and Danny doesn’t have it. He’s getting seriously menaced by a very heavy customer, but he finds a solution. He can’t offer this guy the money he owes him, but he can offer him Julie. Not as an outright sale but just on a loan basis.

This changes Julie’s outlook rather drastically. She still loves Danny, but now she realises that the Paradise Club is her ultimate destiny. She’s damaged goods and can never aspire to any kind of respectable life. When Ray finally gets his big break at the swank Continental Club he offers Julie a job as vocalist with his band, but Julie turns it down. The Continental Club is a classy joint, and she belongs in low dives like the Paradise Club.



Of course Danny hasn’t yet finished making a mess of Julie’s life and he’s started wrecking her friend Helen’s life as well. This story is clearly not going to end well, and it doesn’t.

The Poverty Row studios like Monogram labored under many disadvantages, but they had their advantages as well. Although they were members of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and thereby bound by the Production Code the truth is that the Production Code Authority regarded the movies of Poverty Row studios as being of little importance and they could sometimes get away with a level of sleaze that would not have been tolerated from a major studio. They also had the advantage of not having to care very much about their public image!



Their other advantage was that the miserly budgets they had to work with could actually work in their favour, adding a extra level of seediness to sordid tales such as this one. When a major studio wanted a nightclub scene they’d build an elaborate set and the result would look like a classy joint. When a studio like Monogram wanted a nightclub scene there’d be no fancy set and the result would look like a cheap dive. Which could often work wonderfully well.

The script is rough around the edges, the direction is basic and the acting is terrible. But this movie has a cheap tacky sleazy glamour that is very film noir. You can smell the stale beer and the despair and desperation. The obvious comparison is to Edgar G. Ulmer’s bleak noir masterpiece Detour, made in the same year, and like Detour this is a story of people that you just know are not going to make anything of their lives.



It’s a public domain movie and while the picture quality of most available versions is pretty dubious it can be picked up for almost nothing, or downloaded legally for absolutely nothing. It’s a movie that is not terribly well known to film noir fans but is certainly worth watching as long as you’re prepared to make allowances for its Poverty Row cheapness.

Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924)

Fritz Lang’s 1924 two-part film of Die Nibelungen was conceived as an attempt to escape from the prevailing Wagnerian interpretation of the German epic. With a screenplay by his wife Thea von Harbou it is often regarded as reflecting the very different perspectives of Lang and von Harbou.

It was originally released in two parts, Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge, but it’s best considered as a single film. This was, like all of Lang’s silent films, a very big-budget and quite spectacular production.

The inexorable working of destiny dominates the movie. The characters appear to have very little in the way of free will.



The hero Siegfried slays the dragon Fafnir and goes on to gain possession of the treasure of the Nibelungs from the dwarf Alberich. He then sets off for the fabulous court of Burgundy to woo Kriemhild, sister of King Gunther. Gunther agrees to the match on condition that Siegfried render him a service. He seeks to marry the Queen of Iceland, Brunhild (in Wagner’s operatic version she was one of the Valkyries), but to gain Brunhild’s hand he must defeat her in three tests of strength and courage. Gunther knows he is not equal to the challenge, but if Siegfried will agree to stand in for him secretly then Siegfried can marry Kriemhild. Siegfried has a magic cap that he won from the Nibelungs that allows the wearer to be invisible or to take on any shape he chooses.

The marriages of Gunther to Brunhild, and Siegfried to Kriemhild, set up fateful tensions. Both women believe that only a hero would be a suitable husband for them, and it is soon obvious that Siegfried is a true hero while Gunther is a counterfeit. Most fatefully of all, on their wedding night Gunther had to ask Siegfried to again stand in for him using his magic cap. As you might imagine, when Brunhild discovers this deception she is enraged beyond endurance. With both women believing that only Siegfried would have made them a worthy husband there is bound to be trouble and the sinister Hagen Tronje will be the instrument for Brunhild’s revenge.



Siegfried’s death at the hands of Hagen will in the fullness of time trigger off a bloodbath. Kriemhild marries King Attila, on the condition that he agrees to avenge Siegfried. Kriemhild’s brothers and various retainers of the Burgundian court are summoned to Attila’s court as guests, and the tragedy moves to its inevitable conclusion.

Every step on the road to this tragedy has been inevitable. Even early on, when the hero Siegfried slays the dragon Fafnir, we see that his destiny is already settled. By bathing in the blood of the dragon Siegfried makes himself invulnerable to wounding. Except for one small patch of skin on his back where a dying flicker of the dragon’s tail caused a leaf from a linden tree to fall onto his back, so that his invulnerability is not quite complete. Lang films the scene in such a way that we have not the slightest doubt that Siegfried’s fate is settled, that he is destined to die from a spear thrust in that one patch of skin.



While Lang’s film is sometimes seen as a modernist interpretation of a medieval epic it’s surprising just how medieval the story remains. The Nibelungs will meet their inevitable fate because their belief in absolute unswerving loyalty to one another means that no power on heaven or earth will induce them to do the one thing that would save them - to surrender Hagen. Even though they are fully aware of his guilt, and fully aware of the justice of Kriemhild’s quest for revenge.

Kriemhild is equally powerless to alter her fate. She has no desire to see innocent men die, but she cannot renounce her quest for vengeance. Siegfried has no male heirs to avenge him, and as a result the duty falls to his widow. The idea of failing to avenge him, the idea that perhaps she has a choice, never even crosses her mind. Siegfried’s death sealed her own destiny absolutely.



Lang saw the film as representing four different worlds. The first is the forest world in which the young Siegfried serves his apprenticeship to the blacksmith Mime, a word of magic The second is the world of ice and fire of Brunhild’s caste. The third is the over-civilised rather decadent world of the Burgundian court. And lastly there is the savage world of Attila’s court. All are depicted in equally artificial styles. Lang at this stage of his career generally preferred the control that shooting in a studio gave him. While the obviously artificial trees in the forest realm seem off-putting at first it becomes clear that Lang was perfectly correct in his approach.

The acting is artificial but this also suits the subject matter. Margarete Schön is extraordinary as Kriemhild and at times the way she is filmed reminds me of a Klimt painting. Hans Adalbert Schlettow as Hagen, like Kriemhild, often seems more like a loving statue than a flesh-and-blood human.



An extraordinary achievement by a master film-maker.

Kino’s DVD presentation is acceptable given the fact that the surviving source materials for most silent films are in less than ideal condition.

Call Northside 777 (1948)

The late 1940s saw the rise of what later became known as the noir docu-drama. It’s a sub-genre I have mixed feelings about but Call Northside 777 shows that it could be done fairly effectively.

The idea was to do movies based on true stories, filmed as much as possible in the actual locations where they occurred and with an attempt to achieve a documentary feel. They may have been influenced to some degree by Italian neo-realism. Jules Dassin’s The Naked City is usually thought of as the first major example of this new trend.

The Naked City is a disappointing and rather dull idea. So why does Call Northside 777 work so much more successfully?



The main reason is that Dassin used a large number of non-actors. Henry Hathaway, the director of Call Northside 777, did not make the same mistake. If you want good acting, you hire a professional actor. Bad acting from non-professionals does not make a movie more realistic although countless film-makers over the years have allowed themselves to be persuaded that it does. Hathaway uses a handful of non-actors but mostly he relies on seasoned professional actors and as a result his film is a good deal more entertaining.

The use of location shooting in Call Northside 777 doesn’t feel like a gimmick. Hathaway and his screenwriters also never lose sight of the fact that their objective is to make an entertaining commercial film, rather than an exercise in film theory. They’re also happy to play fast and loose with the fact of the real case in order to make the movie work better as a movie.



The plot is based, loosely, on a real-life case.

Two Polish-American are convicted in 1932 of the murder of a cop in a speakeasy in Chicago’s Polish district. They are each sentenced to 99 years in prison. Eleven years later an ad appears in the Chicago Times offering a $5000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the real killers. The ad was placed by the mother of Frank Wiecek, one of the convicted men, a woman who has spent years scrubbing floors to earn enough money to offer the reward. The city editor (Lee J. Cobb) knows a good story when he sees one and sends reporter P. J. McNeal to look into the case.

McNeal is a cynical ambitious newspaperman and he is convinced the men are guilty. As the story starts to achieve a momentum of its own in the paper, and as he gets to know Frank Wiecek, he slowly starts to change his mind. So does his editor. Gradually it becomes more than a story for them. They might be hardbitten and cynical but they’re real newspapermen and they can’t let go of this story.



Finding any actual evidence that would serve to clear the two men proves to be quite a challenge. Those who might have helped are either dead or they’ve disappeared. Most notably the key witness, Wanda Skutnik, has vanished into the seedy world of the dregs of the criminal underworld.

James Stewart was starting the process of reinventing himself as an actor, taking on much darker and more complex roles, and this movie marks an important step in that process. McNeal, for most of the movie, is a rather unsympathetic character. He’s cynical about his job and about human nature. He thinks the two imprisoned men are guilty and he’s only interested in their story insofar as it’s a good story. When the story seems to be running out of steam he’s quite happy to walk away from it.

What changes McNeal is Frank Wiecek. Wiecek has a quiet dignity, a willingness to sacrifice himself for his family, an inner strength and an uncompromising integrity. These things are somewhat out of McNeal’s experience, and they don’t fit with his view of Wiecek as a vicious cop killer. In spite of himself he not only comes to believe that there’s been a miscarriage of justice, he also comes to realise that sometimes you can’t walk away.



McNeal achieves a kind of redemption. Not that he was a particularly bad person, but he was kind of empty. He didn’t really believe in anything. And he finds that he needs to believe in something. Stewart was perfect for the role and he’s terrific.

Richard Conte is even more impressive, in a more difficult role. His character could come across as phony or self-righteous or annoying but Conte has a sure touch and he’s perfectly convincing and sympathetic.



It’s perhaps not one of the great noirs but it’s a very solid and entertaining film and well worth a watch.

The DVD includes a commentary track by Alain Silver and James Ursini. I’ve never been overly impressed by the commentary tracks they’ve done but they do have some interesting things to say about the real-life case on which the movie was based.

Ring of Fear (1954)

Ring of Fear is a circus murder mystery thriller, and that’s a combination I certainly can’t resist.

It was made by John Wayne’s production company which was responsible for some of the more interesting thrillers of the 50s. Wayne had somehow managed to convince himself that his days as a star were numbered and that he should reinvent himself as a producer. In fact of course he remained a huge box-office draw right up until his final film in 1976 but the move into production proved to be quite fruitful as well.

Ring of Fear has been criticised for having a corny melodramatic contrived plot. Those who see these things as a weakness have missed the point. This is a circus movie. It’s supposed to be outrageous and over-the-top and melodramatic. That’s what circus movies are all about.



The circus in question is the Clyde Beatty Circus. Beatty was one of the most famous of real-life animal trainers and as quite a celebrity, and the Clyde Beatty Circus was a real circus. Beatty plays himself in this movie.

The circus is being dogged by bad luck. Animals mysteriously escape. Trapeze artists are injured when equipment breaks even though these artists are thorough professionals who don’t make mistakes like that. Beatty himself is almost killed when a training rope restraining a tiger breaks. It’s starting to become obvious that all this is more than bad luck.



What do you do in a situation like this? So you call in the cops? Of corse not. You call in a a famous crime novelist. In this case Beatty calls in Mickey Spillane, played in the movie by famous crime novelist Mickey Spillane. Spillane soon picks a likely suspect. Dublin O’Malley (Sean McClory) is a colourful larger-than-life character. He used to be the circus’s ring director. He’d disappeared for several years but now he’s back, and he’s the ringmaster again.

What the movie audience knows, and what the other characters in the movie don’t know, is that when Dublin O’Malley disappeared from circulation for a few years he was in fact in a hospital for the criminally insane. That’s not a spoiler - that information is revealed right at the very start of the movie. The movies uses the classic thriller technique of creating suspense by revealing information rather than concealing it.



Dublin was in love with beautiful trapeze artist Valerie who married another man. The husband-and-wife team now works for the Clyde Beatty Circus. But has Dublin come to terms with the fact that Valerie chose someone else?

Dublin has an ally, a clown called Twitchy. Dublin has a major hold over Twitchy. We’re never told the precise details but it’s implied that Twitchy committed a sex murder years earlier. Whatever it was, it’s apparently enough to guarantee Twitchy the death sentence if Dublin were ever to make a phone call to the cops.



Mickey Spillane will have to work fast if he’s to prevent further tragedies.

It’s all very melodramatic but it’s great fun. Clyde Beatty can’t act but he has a certain presence. Mickey Spillane has lots of presence and he’s surprisingly very effective, and very entertaining. The movie has thrills and spills and lots of excitement. This might be, when judged in conventional terms, a bad movie but it’s an immensely enjoyable romp and I thoroughly recommend it. Especially if, like me, you’re a sucker for circus movies.

Fallen Angel (1945)

The success of Laura in 1944 established producer-director Otto Preminger’s Hollywood reputation. 20th Century-Fox had high hopes that Fallen Angel, made the following year, would repeat this success. Fallen Angel has never enjoyed the critical adulation of Laura but in its own way it’s just as interesting. Preminger used more or less the same crew as on the earlier film and also the same male lead, Dana Andrews (Andrews eventually made five films for Preminger).

This time Andrews is a drifter named Eric Stanton who is kicked off a bus when he doesn’t have the money to pay his fare. He was heading for San Francisco but now he’s stuck in a sleepy seaside town a hundred miles short of his destination, and penniless. Stanton had been a successful publicist before gambling and love gone wrong caused him to hit the skids. But he still has a talent for selling people and when he discovers that the celebrated psychic Professor Madley (John Carradine) is about to hit town he sees a chance to make enough money to get him to San Francisco. He’ll drum up plenty of publicity and they can split the profits.

But fate has decreed that Eric will not be leaving town after all. Fate, in the form of a woman. And what a woman. Eric is having a quiet cup of coffee in Pop’s Diner when Linda Darnell as Stella makes her spectacular entrance. She’s the kind of woman men notice. And men are instantly reduced to the status of helpless worshippers at the feet of this goddess of sex.

Every man in town wants Stella. But while Stella likes men well enough she’s not the kind of gal who jumps into bed with any good-looking guy who comes along. She makes it very clear that if a man wants to sleep with her he’d better be prepared to put a wedding ring on her finger. And until she has the ring he’s not even going to get to first base. And he’ll need more than just the dough for a ring - Stella wants a house and she wants nice things and she knows that with her looks she can get them.

Given that Eric’s entire fortune amounts to the princely sum of one dollar Stella is not inclined to take him too seriously as a suitor. But Eric convinces her that he knows how to lay his hands on money, big money, and if she will just wait a week or so he’ll be able go give her everything she dreams of.

How is Eric going to get his hands on this bankroll? That’s where June Mills (Alice Faye) comes in. June and her sister Clara have a great deal of money. June is a very respectable woman. She plays the organ in the local church, she doesn’t smoke or drink, and her experience of men is non-existent. She’s just what Eric is looking for - a repressed wealthy spinster. He will turn on his very considerable charm and the rest will be easy.

But of course it isn’t so easy. Sweeping June off her feet is no problem, and getting her to the altar also presents no difficulties, but before Eric has a chance to put the rest of his plan into operation he finds himself a murder suspect. A dead woman, a very shaky alibi, a suspicious cop who dislikes him, it all adds up to a sticky situation for Eric. The fact that he arrived in town as a penniless drifter isn’t likely to help his case either.

This is, like all of Preminger’s noirs, a complex movie that gets more complex the more you think about it. All of Preminger’s noirs repay repeated viewings. In this case we have three lead characters none of whom are simple villains, victims or heroes.

Even where we seem to have a straightforward contrast between darkness and light it turns out that what we really have are shades of grey. At first glance the dark-haired sexy bad girl (Stella) and the blonde virginal good girl (June) seem like a very old Hollywood cliché. But Preminger presents this cliché in an ironic manner. Is Stella really a bad girl? She won’t have sex with a man until he marries her, she won’t go out with married men. And she never lies to men. She tells them the score right from the start. She might be somewhat mercenary, but that could just as easily be seen as being sensible. Stella knows that money is no guarantee of a happy marriage, but she has no doubt that it sure does help. It’s difficult to disagree with her. Stella has a face and a body that make men do crazy things, but if a moth gets burned by a candle is that the candle’s fault?

Even more interesting is the way June is presented. As Eddie Muller points out in his commentary track, Preminger and his cinematographer Joseph LaShelle always show us June bathed in light, rather like a saint. Again Preminger’s intentions are undoubtedly at least partly ironic. If Stella’s problem is too much sexuality, June’s problem is that her sexuality is unhealthily underdeveloped. If Stella could use some of June’s virtue there’s no question that June could use some of Stella’s wickedness. And June comes to realise this.

Eric is a multi-layered character as well. He’s cynical and ruthless on the surface but underneath he’s really basically a decent man who has lost his way. Dana Andrews always gave fine performances for Preminger and this is no exception.

Alice Faye was bitterly disappointed in this film and there are many who see her as the weak link in the acting department. She probably should have read the script more carefully - playing the good girl is always a thankless task and when you’re playing opposite a bad girl who is a decade younger than you and as smoking hot as Linda Darnell you’re bound to get overshadowed. In fact her performance works well within the context of the film but of course it wasn’t going to do much for her career. She didn’t make another film for sixteen years. Linda Darnell is pure sex but she also proves herself to be a capable actress. It’s just that she’s so sexy it’s difficult to concentrate on her acting.

Preminger is in top form, giving full rein to his fondness for long takes and for elaborate tracking shots. These techniques are never intrusive. Preminger’s genius was to be stylish without calling attention to the fact. The Region 1 DVD includes an entertaining commentary track by Eddie Muller and Dana Andrews’ daughter. As is the case with other Fox Film Noir DVD release the picture quality is superb. An underrated movie and definitely one to buy. This is a movie you’ll want to watch more than once.

Madame de... (1953)

German-born Max Ophüls had spent a decade in the United States, making a handful of masterpieces, before returning to France to make another handful of masterpieces including Madame de... (released in the US as The Earrings of Madame de... which is arguably a better title).

Earlier in his career he’d made movies in Germany and Italy as well. He seemed to be able to adapt to any film industry. His US movies, particularly The Reckless Moment and Caught, had a film noir flavour. When he returned to France he concentrated on costume dramas. But his central preoccupations remained unchanged - women and love, or more specifically women and their relationship to love.

Circularity was always a bit of an obsession for Ophüls, often as a visual device, but in this movie it’s the key to the plot. The unnamed Madame de has a pair of earrings that change hands a bewildering number of times, but always in a kind of circular motion.



The earrings were a wedding gift to the unnamed protagonist (played by Danielle Darrieux) from her husband. Her marriage has been a success of sorts. The General, her husband (Charles Boyer), is successful and respectable. He has affairs, but they are conducted with exquisite discretion. His wife has clearly had affairs as well, and until now we assume she has been similarly discreet.

Unfortunately she is rather extravagant in her lifestyle, and finds herself financially embarrassed. She will need to sell something, and decides that the earrings her husband gave her would be the least painful sacrifice. It’s not that she dislikes her husband particularly, but they are not teenagers and they are beyond silly romantic attachments to such trifles.



Madame de is however about to commit a major social faux pas. She is going to fall in love with one of her lovers. The Baron Donati (Vittorio de Sica) is a handsome Italian diplomat. Their affair starts the way all her romantic liaisons start. Her husband is not displeased. The baron is a gentleman and a man of the world and his discretion can be relied upon. The important thing is to avoid scandal and to avoid messy emotional entanglements, and both the General and the Baron understand the rules by which such sexual games are played.



As Madame de gets drawn further and further into a romance she had never intended, her earrings start to assume a strange importance. In their strange circular journey the have become associated with her love for the Baron Danati. They have perhaps become a symbol in her eyes for love itself. This obsession with both love and with these earrings will create a situation in which the General will feel he must act, with possibly fatal consequences, but for whom?

Madame de has always regarded love as a mere amusement, but now she finds that love is a passion that cannot be controlled. For someone as superficial as her this is a very disturbing discovery.



The plot is in some ways as superficial as the characters, but Ophüls’ genius transforms this very slight story into an oddly moving and engaging movie. And perhaps it only seems superficial because of our ingrained prejudices about the kinds of movies that are important. We’re inclined to dismiss movies that are about love as being of little consequence when compared to movies about gangsters, crime and politics. But really aren’t these things much less important than love? At one point the General remarks to his wife that their marriage is only superficially superficial and this observation could certainly be applied to this movie and to Ophüls’ films in general.

Danielle Darrieux gives a flawless performance as Madame de. Charles Boyer as her husband and Vittorio de Sica as her lover are equally good. Boyer in particular is superb. He has what is arguably the most difficult but also the most challenging role. All three characters in this romantic triangle start out believing they’re playing a charming but harmless game and all three will find out that love is far from harmless.



The Region 4 Director’s Suite DVD comes with one of the worst commentary tracks I’ve ever encountered. The fact that the guy responsible for it is both an academic and writes for an online journal called Rouge should of course immediately ring alarm bells that we’re about to be treated to a doctrinaire marxist feminist interpretation of the movie, and sure enough before very long he’s quoting Engels and assuring us that this is an example of pure marxist cinema. Absolute rubbish.

The good news is that the transfer is extremely good and the movie looks terrific. A great movie, highly recommended.

I Wake Up Screaming (1941)

I Wake Up Screaming is a very important (although often overlooked) landmark in the history of film noir. It’s also a fun movie in its own right.

While High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon are usually thought of as the earliest examples of American film noir I Wake Up Screaming has in some ways a better claim to that honour. It’s certainly the first movie in which the full-blown noir visual style can be seen, much more so than in either of those other early noirs.

What’s truly remarkable about I Wake Up Screaming is that it doesn’t just have elements of the noir style, or pointers towards it. It has the whole gamut of noir visual iconography. It’s all there, and superbly done.



Director H. Bruce Humberstone and cinematographer Edward Cronjager don’t get too much ink in most histories of film noir, but they really did invent most of the archetypal noir images.

While this movie is unquestionably noir in its visual style, in other areas it’s more of a transitional movie. We’ll get to that later.

As for the plot, we start with a murder. Vicky Lynn was a model-actress just starting to hit the big time. When she’s found dead the police focus on Frankie Christopher (Victor Mature) as their prime suspect.



Frankie is a promoter. He’ll promote just about anything if there’s a buck in it. Mostly he handles prize fighters but he has plenty of connections in Tinsel Town and in the worlds of modelling and the theatre. Frankie has connections everywhere. Now we get our first flashback, to the time when Frankie met Vicky. Vicky was a waitress, and she seemed destined to spend her life serving out burgers and coffee. But Frankie could see something special in Vicky. Not class, because she had no class at all, but she still had something. Something that he could use to turn her from a nobody into a somebody.

Frankie’s friends took an interest in Vicky as well. Faded actors and newspaper columnists on the make, they all wanted to know Vicky, to be seen with her. And they’re all potential suspects, but the police are only interested in Frankie.



The police in this case are represented by Inspector Ed Cornell (Laird Cregar). He doesn’t even consider an alternative suspect.

Frankie does have one ally though, and that’s Vicky’s sister Jill (Betty Grable). The fact that Jill has fallen for Frankie certainly helps. She turns out to be a pretty useful ally. She’s a nice girl but when she thinks someone is threatening the man she loves she gets pretty mad. Between them Frankie and Jill are determined to prove Frankie’s innocence.



The content is definite film noir material. Where this movie becomes slightly confused is in the tone. The gritty cynical crime movie that was later to be labelled as film noir had not yet made a serious appearance in Hollywood. Shooting was already well underway on I Wake Up Screaming before The Maltese Falcon was released. It’s obvious that no-one at Fox had any clear idea what kind of movie they were making. Victor Mature and Betty Grable were both rising stars but were both considered to be So I Wake Up Screaming veers wildly between hardboiled grittiness and fluffy romantic comedy.

Betty Grable is fun in this film, but she plays it totally as romantic comedy. Since that’s the sort of actress she was she can hardly be blamed for that. Victor Mature and Laird Cregar give much darker, more authentically film noir, performances. They’re both extremely effective.



The movie not only uses the classic noir device of the flashback, it uses it extensively and imaginatively, employing multiple flashbacks from different characters’ points of view. It’s another example of the film’s impressive film noir credentials.

It was based on the novel I Wake Up Screaming by Steve Fisher but Fox changed the title to Hot Spot (more in keeping with Betty Grable movie). After the initial screenings the cast and crew persuaded Fox to change the title back to I Wake Up Screaming.



Overall a very mixed bag. It could easily be dismissed as being of historical interest only but that would be unjust. It’s very very stylish and the performances of both Victor Mature and Laird Cregar lift it well above the pack. Definitely worth seeing, and Fox’s DVD release includes an enthusiastic and entertaining commentary track by Eddie Muller.