TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia (1953) with Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, Raymond Burr, Jeff Donnell and George Reeves

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia (1953) with Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, Raymond Burr, Jeff Donnell and George Reeves.

By David in TN
Friday, June 18, 2021 at 9:45:00 P.M. EDT

Film Noir Guide: “Commercial artist Burr thinks he died and went to Heaven (he turns out to be half-right, anyway) when a pretty switchboard operator (Baxter), depressed after receiving a ‘Dear Jane’ letter from her G.I. boyfriend in Korea, accepts his invitation for dinner and drinks at the Blue Gardenia Restaurant.

“After plying Baxter with Polynesian Pearl Divers all evening, he takes her to his apartment, where he attempts to seduce her. When she drunkenly responds, thinking that he’s her boyfriend, Burr becomes emboldened to go further. When she regains her senses, however, he learns the hard way that no means no--she beans him with a fireplace poker, before passing out.

“Later, she manages to make it home to the apartment she shares with two co-workers (Sothern and Donnell, who provide the comedy relief).

“The next morning, homicide detective Reeves (TV’s Superman) shows up at the telephone company asking questions.

“Suffering from booze-induced amnesia, Baxter eventually learns that Burr has been bludgeoned to death with a fireplace poker and that the cops are searching for the blonde he was seen with at the Blue Gardenia.

“Ace reporter Conte, smelling a scoop, writes a column asking ‘the Blue Gardenia Murderess’ to surrender to him and his newspaper.

“While this isn’t one of Lang’s best efforts, The Blue Gardenia is a gem thanks to Baxter's superb performance as the sweet working girl whose happy-go-lucky life has been turned upside down by a faithless boyfriend and an unscrupulous Lothario.

“Nat King Cole plays himself and sings the title song.”

 

N.S.: Nothing Fritz Lang made in Hollywood was “one of [his] best efforts,” not even The Big Heat. That’s because although Lang had arrogance sufficient for ten men, he arrived in America only half a man. He had made all of his masterpieces and classics in Germany in partnership with his brilliant, second wife, Thea von Harbou. Von Harbou was a brilliant novelist (Metropolis) and Germany’s greatest screenwriter of all time.

Already before Lang left the country, he and von Harbou had drifted apart and then divorced. Von Harbou then fervently embraced Nazism, eventually taking the job Josef Goebbels had offered her husband as head of the German Film Institute. (Lang’s first wife died under mysterious circumstances, rumored to be now suicide, after having witnessed Fritz and Thea in flagrante, now murder.)

Meanwhile, Fritz Lang remembered that he was a “secret Jew.” He was born to a Jewish mother, but raised by her as a Catholic before she converted to Catholicism. (The Nazis knew Lang was a Jew, but didn’t care.)

In Hollywood, the opportunistic but clever Lang co-founded the Anti-Nazi League, not to be confused with Hollywood’s Anti-Fascist League, a Communist front. Notwithstanding Fury (1937), The Woman in the Window (1944), and The Big Heat (1953), Lang had little to offer the movie-going public, without his Thea.