BORN TO KILL / THE BLUE GARDENIA

Dir. Robert Wise US 1947

Dir. Fritz Lang US 1953

"If a girl killed every guy who got fresh with her, how much of the male population do you think would be left?"

It's been a while since I watched anything old, so I poked around in the film noir section of Netflix and found these two gems, the first of which I got on the strength of the title and the second of which because I'd seen a scene from it in a Fritz Lang class I took and wanted to check out the whole thing. They're both great entry points for anyone who's never seen a noir or has only seen some of the major ones and wants to branch out a bit more.

Born To Kill is far and away the darker of the two films, starring a jarringly young Lawrence Tierney (who most people in my age demographic know as Joe Cabot from Reservoir Dogs) and the lovely Claire Trevor (who is pretty much the quintessential femme fatale, although I remember her best as the tragic, drunken moll from Key Largo). Trevor stars as Helen Brent, a newly minted divorcee who is preparing to move from Reno to San Francisco. On the night she is to leave, she returns home to find her promiscuous roommate and her one-night stand murdered. She flees without informing the police and meets Lawrence Tierney's character, Sam Wilde, on the train to San Francisco. Helen finds herself attracted to Sam's blunt manner and air of danger, unaware that he is not only a violently psychotic career criminal, but the perpetrator of the murder she discovered earlier. On his way to lay low in San Francisco, Sam develops a fixation on Helen and ingratiates himself into the lives of her, her fiance and her beautiful step-sister, an heiress to a newspaper fortune. Despite the increasing havoc Sam wreaks on her life, Helen finds herself further unable to stay away.

So people are rarely nice in film noirs, but in 1947, there must have been a collective decision to take it to another level. Tierney's Sam Wilde is cut from the same cloth as Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo, who famously pushed an wheelchair-bound elderly woman down a flight of stairs in his film debut, Kiss Of Death, released a few short months after Born To Kill. With no discernible virtues, Sam makes for a challenging protagonist, a paranoid, chauvinistic brute who takes what he wants and lays waste to anything that gets in his way. You could draw a pretty clear line from Tierney's Sam to Robert DeNiro's portrayal of Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. One could certainly argue that Helen is the protagonist, but in many ways she proves to be no better than Sam. At the beginning of the film she exhibits morally grey indifference, not wanting to get involved in a murder investigation. By the end, her twisted relationship with Sam uncovers her dark side; manipulative and viciously jealous of her sister's wealth and kindness. Many would say that the two deserve each other, but I found myself sympathizing with Helen, even at the end of the film when everything comes crashing down around her.

With some strong supporting performances by Elisha Cook Jr. as Sam's long suffering partner and Walter Slezak as a sleazy, philosophy-spouting private eye, the film makes the most of what ends up being a fairly straightforward story. I didn't recognize Robert Wise's name initially, but imdb revealed him to be the director of West Side Story, The Day The Earth Stood Still and The Sound Of Music. Apparently he was quite the studio workhorse when compared with other more focused, auteur directors, but there's no arguing with results.

The Blue Gardenia was the first new Fritz Lang film I've watched since I took a Fritz Lang/Luis Bunuel comparison seminar in my senior year of college (so many weird sexual quirks in those two filmographies, let me tell you). Fritz Lang cemented his status as one of the cinema greats during Weimar-era Germany with Expressionist classics like M, Metropolis and the Dr. Mabuse films. Fleeing Germany in the 1930's (goddamn dirty Nazis) Lang emigrated to America and became a cog in the Hollywood system, averaging one film a year between the years 1936 and 1957. His work ranged from westerns to socially aware dramas to film noirs. Perhaps his most famous American film is The Big Heat, the 1953 classic that was immediately preceded by The Blue Gardenia.

The Blue Gardenia brings many of Lang's tropes to the table, most notably the wrongly accused (or is she?) protagonist. The film stars the uber-cute Anne Baxter as Nora Larkin, a young woman who spends her days working as an operater at a phone company and her nights pining for her boyfriend, serving overseas in Korea. When she gets an inverse Dear John letter, Nora becomes distraught and impulsively accepts a date from a playboy newspaper cartoonist Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr, rocking the same creep factor he displayed in Rear Window). She proceeds to get adorably drunk and accompanies him back to his apartment where he tries to take things a little to far. She struggles, blacks out and wakes up later that night, fleeing the apartment in a panic. That morning the newspapers announce that Harry Prebble was beaten to death with a fire poker and a woman matching Nora's description was seen fleeing the scene. Oh. Snap.

The Blue Gardenia is very much the kind of movie Alfred Hitchcock would have made (hot blonde protagonist, someone wrongfully accused of murder, etc.). But where Hitchcock would have gone for action and cheeky humor (and probably Anne Baxter hanging off the edge of some national landmark at the climax), Lang goes for a more low-bubbling tension as Nora tries to duck the police (and a tenacious reporter played by Richard Conte, aka Don Barzini from The Godfather) while trying to come to grips with the fact that she may have actually killed a man. Baxter plays Nora with refreshing realism, especially for a film from this era. She's sweet without being too sappy, frightened without being pathetic (although people did not know how to mask their guilt in old movies; every time someone brings up the murders in front of Nora, she proceeds to completely freak out). On the subject of naturalism, Nora acts as the straight man to her two roommates, the bookish, mystery novel-obssessed Sally (played by the unfortunately named Jeff Donnell) and the brassy, motherly Crystal (played by the always badass Ann Sothern). The interaction between the three women always felt genuine and smart, to the point that I found myself wishing that this was a comedy during there scenes together.

It's nice to be reviewing older stuff again. If anyone's ever interested in checking out some old film noir, both of these would be good places to start. Coming soon I'll have reviews of Inception (holy shit it ruled) and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (surprisingly hilarious).