There Go the Next Seven Years
The Blue Gardenia (1953)
directed by Fritz Lang
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Now, Fritz. Fritz knew something of the world (just look at this photo of his Berlin flat), and however far a man might get with God at the Frank Borzage family table, well - Los Angeles is different than Paris, let's say. Even a German could see it.
In 1953, I Love Lucy turned two years old. Elizabeth Short died in 1947, Lang became a naturalized US citizen in 1939, and the Polynesian Pearl Diver might never have existed at all except in this film. "We'll discuss my mistakes over those cocktails," the sleazy portrait artist intones, and so distraught does Anne Baxter find herself over her abandonment by a soldier in Korea that she takes the wolf up on his offer.
Two plucky roommates both warn and try to stop her, or at least let her know who to blame if she's raped (not him). One's a bookworm with an eye for the secret life of murders, and the other is wise, for all her flirting, to the charms of a man with a steady income. While Harry Prebble tells the waiter "don't spare the rum," Nat Cole sings the title song from a piano in a restaurant that looks like the South Pacific.
Later, when his date is nearly dead for drinking, Prebble props her on his sofa and plays a Cole recording - the same recording - on the stereo. It's oddly discordant, seeing how relevant that record proves to the plot, but mostly as distraction from a grisly, drawn-out rape attempt. Baxter's trauma, in turn, is marginalized the next morning by her suspicion that she may have killed the man, but what the public - the movie public - really wants is a mystery with meat to it, and a Hunsecker type is only too happy to play along.
Frankly, Lang seems more interested in the premise of the wrong man played by a woman than any overtly feminist sympathies, and it's the "pretty girls ask for it" patter that keeps The Blue Gardenia about as steady, thematically, as a river of lava. But you don't hire Nicholas Musuraca if you don't love women who drink in bars. The tone of Baxter's entrapment might by 180 degrees from that early, quiet encounter in Nightfall, but lovely is lovely, and the right heartless, lanky bartender a good measure of a director who probably never "got" the way that Ricky Ricardo treated his wife.
directed by Fritz Lang
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Now, Fritz. Fritz knew something of the world (just look at this photo of his Berlin flat), and however far a man might get with God at the Frank Borzage family table, well - Los Angeles is different than Paris, let's say. Even a German could see it.
In 1953, I Love Lucy turned two years old. Elizabeth Short died in 1947, Lang became a naturalized US citizen in 1939, and the Polynesian Pearl Diver might never have existed at all except in this film. "We'll discuss my mistakes over those cocktails," the sleazy portrait artist intones, and so distraught does Anne Baxter find herself over her abandonment by a soldier in Korea that she takes the wolf up on his offer.
Two plucky roommates both warn and try to stop her, or at least let her know who to blame if she's raped (not him). One's a bookworm with an eye for the secret life of murders, and the other is wise, for all her flirting, to the charms of a man with a steady income. While Harry Prebble tells the waiter "don't spare the rum," Nat Cole sings the title song from a piano in a restaurant that looks like the South Pacific.
Later, when his date is nearly dead for drinking, Prebble props her on his sofa and plays a Cole recording - the same recording - on the stereo. It's oddly discordant, seeing how relevant that record proves to the plot, but mostly as distraction from a grisly, drawn-out rape attempt. Baxter's trauma, in turn, is marginalized the next morning by her suspicion that she may have killed the man, but what the public - the movie public - really wants is a mystery with meat to it, and a Hunsecker type is only too happy to play along.
Frankly, Lang seems more interested in the premise of the wrong man played by a woman than any overtly feminist sympathies, and it's the "pretty girls ask for it" patter that keeps The Blue Gardenia about as steady, thematically, as a river of lava. But you don't hire Nicholas Musuraca if you don't love women who drink in bars. The tone of Baxter's entrapment might by 180 degrees from that early, quiet encounter in Nightfall, but lovely is lovely, and the right heartless, lanky bartender a good measure of a director who probably never "got" the way that Ricky Ricardo treated his wife.
posted by NPK at 4:30 AM
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