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By
NICK ZEGARAC
H. Bruce Humerstone's I Wake
Up Screaming (1941) is a rather convoluted and
diffused film noir. It stars Victor Mature as
Frankie Christopher a playboy sports columnist and
promoter who pins his hopes and desires on Vicki
Lynn (Carol Landis); a shoot from the hip hash
slinger at a cafeteria. On a dare, Frankie
introduces Vicki to New York society, including
ham actor Robin Ray (Alan Mowbray) and press agent
Jerry MacDonald (William Gargan). Together, this
trio of wolves is responsible for turning a
virtual nobody into a glamour girl virtually
overnight. But all is not sables and diamonds
among the moneyed set. Vicki's sister, Jill (Betty
Grable) doubts Frankie's intensions -- a
skepticism that worsens as she herself begins to
fall in love with him. For her part, Vicki is pure
poison. She uses her new found clout to launch
herself on a film career, departing the three
musketeers without whom none of her transformation
would have ever happened. Ah, but then there's the
murder that puts a period to it all. Vicki winds
up with a toe tag and Frankie and Jill go up for
suspicion of the crime against all too familiar
and all too interested police inspector Ed Cornell
(Laird Cregar). There's also the rather off beat
inclusion of Harry Williams (Elisha Cook Jr.); a
sycophant hotel clerk who likes to ogle starlets
and who will play a rather prominent part later in
the plot.
With so much star talent thrown in, one would
expect a miraculous work of high art and high
stakes tension. But the plot only comes to life in
fits and sparks. The beginning of the film vaults
back and forth between a stylish Fox melodrama of
this vintage (with absurdly elaborate sets like
the New York Club where Frankie introduces Vicki
to society for the very first time) and gritty
atypical noir locales as in the police precinct.
There's a bit of 'who done it' going on until
thirty minutes into the film when we, as the
audience, are told who the killer is. The rest of
the tale then unravels like a guilty lover's
triangle with predictable conclusions. For mood,
the film gets high marks.
There is a genuine sense of 'noir' permeating most
of the production. Laird Cregar is rather
curiously effeminate as Cornell. We're never quite
sure whether his fascination with Vicki's murder
has to do with the fact that he secretly loved her
or is actually even more secretly lusting after
Frankie Christopher's jocular loins -- although
the scene where Frankie awakens in the middle of
the night to discover Cornell quietly observing
him from the foot of his bed gives us a fairly
good indication. But Grable… this simply isn't her
bag. As Fox's biggest female chanteuse since Alice
Faye, one keeps expecting her to suddenly burst
into song and when she simpers off instead with
only an ounce of curiosity it's bitterly
disappointing. Landis proves why her career never
went beyond the ingénue stage -- she's rather
tragically one dimensional.
Fox's DVD transfer on I Wake Up Screaming is just
a tad below par. Though the image is quite clean
and with a minimal amount of grain present, there
are several glaring instances where
mis-registration of the negative creates
distracting halos. The image also tends to
sporadically wobble from sprocket hole damage --
right to left -- during the film's opening scenes.
For the rest, whites are clean. Blacks are solid,
rich and deep. The soundtrack has been remixed to
stereo but the original mono (also included) will
do. Extras include an informative audio commentary
by Eddie Muller, a deleted scene where Grable's
character is put upon by her much too old boss who
aspires to be her sugar daddy, stills from the
production and promotion of the film, and the
film's original theatrical trailer. |
