What did you watch? The 1941 crime mystery thriller I Wake Up Screaming.

Was watching the moving THAT boring? I did not fall asleep only to have a more suspenseful nightmare that caused me to wake up, screaming.

The movie starts with our lead, Frankie, being interrogated by the cops. Vicky, a woman that Frankie was associated with, was found murdered and he’s the prime suspect. Frankie uses a series of flashbacks to tell the story of how me met Vicky.

Frankie is a promoter of various things, mostly sports. He and two of his friends (a reporter and a has been actor) have been sexually harassing Vicky when she was a mere waitress, and were so enamored by her put-downs that they make a bet to turn her into a high society starlet. For some reason she agrees to make an appearance at a fancy nightclub where she wins over a lot of important people and her picture is taken by paparazzi. Her career takes off and soon she pretty much ditches the other three men for more connected hollywood insiders, spurning their advances as well. Vicky is then murdered soon after.

This is a bother for Jill, Vicky’s sister and roommate, who finds Frankie standing over Vicky’s body. But the cops don’t have anything else to hold Frankie with, and let him go, pulling him in when they try to put the pressure on his reporter & actor friend. And Frankie admits to Jill that Vicky deciding to get a new agent wasn’t that much of a setback, nor was he in love with her – Vicky wouldn’t be his type. The kind of woman he wants to marry isn’t the kind he wants to put in movies or TV or radio and exploit, he wants a woman like Jill who will stay at home.

WOW. I’m paraphrasing, but I’m not inferring. He says this.

All the men are creeps in this movie, pretty much, but I don’t think that the tone of the film is to highlight the gross attitudes men have toward women in 1941. I think it’s one thing to have characters who are suspects because they’re infatuated with her, some in explicitly creepy ways, but the way each guy talks about what they expect out of Vicky or Jill, eww. Dial it back a little.

So? Who woke up screaming? One of the creepy guys is the killer. Frankie has motive and maybe there was some romantic tension between him and Vicky, but hey the plot gives you Jill, his exact type, so there.

Is it Noir? No. It is a murder mystery, and though we follow Frankie for much of the movie, there’s nothing that clears him, at least to the audience. I can think of one movie, The Lady Confesses (1945), where the male lead is introduced as being framed, and is free to hunt for the killer, only for us to discover (SPOILER) he was in fact the killer. (To be fair, the narrative switches from his being framed and allowed to do detective work to clear himself, to his girlfriend, who he delegates the detective work to.) If we’re rooting for Frankie because he’s sweet on Jill and he needs to clear himself so he can be with her for a happy ending to this mystery where he’s in deep, then maybe the audience needs to know that he was in fact framed, so that the suspense isn’t so much who did it BUT how he gets out of it and gets the (other) girl. Otherwise, like The Lady Confesses, make it from Jill’s POV, so that she makes the discovery and Frankie (if he’s innocent) falls for her due to her moxie and initiative AND ALSO SHE’S THE ONE WHO GETS A JOB WHILE FRANKIE HAS TO STAY AT HOME…nevermind. Sorry.

Was it good? Meh. Honestly, I kept seeing this one in the noir & classics pile and it had been on my list for a while. It’s 1941, these people need some feminism STAT. Just a little, so that Jill doesn’t have to be won over by Frankie not wanting her to have ambitions of any kind. I think that’s what weighs it down, because the rest of the men being creeps makes them all good suspects. So, give it a whirl. It’s for sure better than The Lady Confesses. (I did a review of that movie on a blog elsewhere, I don’t think it’s on the RwC host anywhere.)

Anything about the cast? The creepy cop is played by Laird Cregar, who we saw back as the backstabbing villain in This Gun For Hire (and I wrote about his closeted and brief life in that review). The creepy hotel front desk employee is played by Elisha Cook Jr., who plays a number of weaselly and/or ineffectual criminals & scaredy cats in these movies. Frankie is Victor Mature, and Jill is Betty Grable. Vicky is played by our brave soldiers’ favorite pinup girl, Carole Landis, and this is her & Betty’s 2nd movie together in as many years. Carole Landis’ career didn’t take off much further if wikipedia is to be believed. I’ll let you click on the link for that dirt, but I’ll get to the sad end, where, after four marriages, she committed suicide at 29 at the home of a married actor who wouldn’t break up with his wife to commit to Carole.