Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

"I Wake Up Screaming" is a great lurid title. The movie isn't bad, either. It is not a slasher movie or a horror show. The VHS was in a Betty Grable series; the DVD is in the Fox Noir series. Made in the year that cinéma noir was supposedly invented (1941), it meets only two (1 and 4) of the six characteristics that I think make a film a noir plus two of the three nondefining ones (7 and 8).

It is much more in the Hitchcock tradition of a man falsely accused of a murder on the run and trying to find the real murderer, often with the aid of a blonde (who is not a femme fatale). As Jill Lynn, Betty Grable is a particularly white-bread (apple-pie?) accomplice after the fact. In the police interrogations with which the movie begins, she is a suspect in the murder of her sister Vicky (Carole Landis with a heart of rock candy and none of Grable's pertness) either by herself or complicit with agent/operator Frankie Christopher (Victor Mature). Frankie discovered Vicky, showed her off in the right places, and introduced her to the right people to launch a career.

She had jumped his ship to go to Hollywood for a screen test, but was killed before she got out of town. Vicky knew what Jill did not, that Jill was smitten by the oily Frankie. Once Vicky is out of the way, Jill and Frankie become an item, which does not exactly decrease suspicions that they killed Vicky to be together.

The police—in particular, Inspector Ed Cornell (the sinister Laird Cregan, a very unjolly fat man, like Raymond Burr in the late-1940s and early-1950s)—have no evidence of either conspiracy to commit murder or that either of the lovers killed Vicky. Eventually, he gets some incriminating evidence and is confident that he has Frankie on a fast train to execution.

There are some surprises. The last third (of the movie that only runs 8 minutes) is more fast-paced and more noirish than the first two thirds, and includes one of those carefully composed shadow shots (Victor Mature with cross-hatch shadows). Cinematographer Edward Cronjager (Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, Heaven Can Wait) also provided some alarming shots of Cregan. The harsh lighting of the opening interrogations was influential (it had a very practical function in maintaining mystery, as noir historian Eddie Muller explains on the commentary track).

The one in which Frankie wakes up in his stylish bachelor apartment to find Detective Cornell sitting there in the dark seems coded (in 1940s code) to indicate that Frankie is homosexual and that Cornell has some twisted passion for him. (Also note the exchange I quote in lieu of a "bottom line.") It would be plot-spoiling to reveal whether this is a red herring or not. But I will reveal that Frankie does not wake up screaming—not does anyone else in the movie. (The working title for the movie was "Hot Spot." I think that referenced the El Chico, the nightclub to which Frankie took both Lynns.)

I don't think that Grable does anything that hundreds of other actresses could not have done at least as well. Landis makes more of an impression—entirely in flashbacks, since she is dead at the start of the movie. Mature acts in addition to looking the part of a dandyish operator. The obsessive one is usually the most arresting one in noirs and thrillers, and Laird Cregan provides that in this movie. Elishu Cook, Jr., who was also in the supposed first noir ("The Maltese Falcon," directed by John Huston, whose hundredth birthday is today) is excellent.

The director, Bruce Humberstone, directed a number of 1930s Charlie Chan movies with Warner Oland (who had kept drunk during shooting), directed Grable in "Pin-Up Girl" (1944), and worked in television during the 1950s.

Landis and Grable were both musical stars. The DVD includes a deleted somewhat racy (especially for the 1940s) Grable song , "Daddy." No one is credited for a music score. Astonishingly, the score is almost entirely instrumental versions of Harold Arlen''s "Somewhere, Over the Rainbow." Surely, this was as noticeable in 1941, two years after MGM's "The Wizard of Oz." The rest is one of the many recyclings of music from "Street Scene" (Alfred Newman's score; that movie was released by United Artists, but must have been licensed to Fox, since it pops up in many Fox movies of the 1940s (I just heard it on another Fox noir release: Where the Sidewalk Ends); Humerstone was an assistant director on "Street Scene").

I also have to mention the ludicrousness of Jill cooking breakfast in high heels, but taking off her shoes in the movie theater and putting her feet up on the seat in front of her.


©2006, Stephen O. Murray


Recommended: Yes