The Blue Gardenia (Warner Bros., 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning I watched the morning rerun on Turner Classic Movies of their “Noir Alley” showing of a fascinating 1953 film, The Blue Gardenia, directed by Fritz Lang based on a script by Charles Hoffman, adapted from a story by Laura author Vera Caspary. The Blue Gardenia got made at a particularly frustrating time in Lang’s career: after a brief stint at RKO, where he made two of his best movies, Rancho Notorious and Clash by Night, RKO’s famously mercurial and ferociously anti-Communist owner, Howard Hughes, fired him. He wasn’t exactly blacklisted but he got put on a sort of “greylist” – there was no edict that he not be hired but no one was rushing to sign him, either. Though The Blue Gardenia was a Warner Bros. production, the deal for Lang to make the film was actually arranged by Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn – which, given that Lang’s next two films, The Big Heat and Human Desire, were actually made at Columbia, seems like Cohn was testing the waters to see if someone else could get away with using Lang before he hired Lang himself.

I first saw The Blue Gardenia at the old Cento Cedar Cinema in San Francisco in the 1970’s and had caught up with it again on previous TCM showings. In some ways it’s a disappointing credit for Lang given that he had shown in his German career during the silent era that he could do big spectacle films like Die Nibelungen and Metropolis, but at a time when Hollywood was cranking out big spectacle movies like The Robe Lang was .getting assignments to do vest-pocket noirs like this. (Meanwhile, The Robe was directed by Henry Koster, another German expat but one whose strength was in musicals – he’d made Deanna Durbin’s star-making films Three Smart Girls and One Hundred Men and a Girl – and romantic comedies like The Bishop’s Wife, but who was way out of his depth directing a spectacle.)

The Blue Gardenia starts with a typical Hollywood situation – three financially stressed young women living together in a decnet but unspectacular apartment and borrowing each other’s clothes (since authorial fiat has made them all the same size). The three – Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter, top-billed), Crystal Carpenter (Ann Sothern, 18 years after she’d co-starred with Maurice Chevalier and Merle Oberon in Folies-Bergère de Paris and on the downgrade, but it helps that her role here is a salty second lead and she isn’t obliged to sing) and Sally Ellis (Jeff Donnell – the “girl named Jeff” I’ve watched in previous movies, mostly at Columbia) – have different attitudes towards men: Sally is feeling her single oats (as much as she could be in a Production Code-era film), Crystal is still dating her ex-husband Homer (Ray Walker), and she also regularly reads thriller novels with titles like My Knife Is Bloody by “Mickey Mallet” (an obvious pun on Mickey Spillane and his main character, Mike Hammer). Norah has a fiancé serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Only, after holding on to it for several days, Norah finally opens his most recent letter, which is literally a dear-Jane correspondence telling her that he’s met a nurse in Tokyo (where he went to be treated for war wounds), has fallen for her and will marry her as soon as they’re both discharged. This happens on her birthday, when she’s made a “roast” (actually just a steak, but she’s baked it in a roasting pan and basted it), set a symbolic place for him and opened a bottle of champagne.

Furious with getting dumped – and by mail, yet! – she accepts an invitation for dinner and drinks from Harry Preble (Raymond Burr) even though Preble, who had visited the telephone switchboard where the three women work, had actually intended the invitation for Sally. She and Preble go to a nightclub called The Blue Gardenia, where the featured entertainer is Nat “King” Cole (though I suspect he’s supposed to be playing a character far lower down the totem pole of the entertainment industry than Cole was himself) singing a song called “Blue Gardenia” that was written especially for the film and has had a longer life than the movie. (Like Cole’s previous hit “Unforgettable,” “Blue Gardenia” was covered by Dinah Washington, and a lot of other women singers have also taken it on.) Preble, who makes his living doing what the newspapers call “calendar art” – i.e., drawings of half-clad women for use in calendars, ads and as pin-up posters – is also a notorious seducer and a “regular” at the Blue Gardenia, where the waiters all know him and realize what it means when he asks his waiter to put extra booze in his would-be victim’s cocktails. In this case the drink is something called a “Polynesian Pearl Diver” – the Blue Gardenia serves Chinese food (and there’s a brief shot of the increasingly inebriated Norah trying vainly to eat her dinner with chopsticks) and is designed in full-scale Tiki mode, while the background music they play when Cole isn’t performing is Hawai’ian – and Norah downs way more of them than she should have.

The two drive back to Preble’s apartment in his convertible – and don’t stop to put the top up when it starts raining – and when they get there he wants to have sex with her while all she wants to do is sleep. To ward off his unwanted advances she grabs a fireplace poker and smashes his wall mirror with it, then passes out. When she comes to in the morning she’s back at her own place with no idea what happened or how she got back there, but later she finds out in the news that Harry Preble is dead, clubbed to death with a fireplace poker, and as the last person to see him alive she’s suspect number one in his death. She’s already attracted the attentions, both professional and romantic, of Los Angeles Chronicle columnist Casey Mayo (Richard Conte, second-billed but really too much of a thug type to be believable as a good guy) – one hears his character name and wonders what sort of meat comes with him – who’s determined to break what the papers are calling the “Blue Gardenia murder” and writes an open letter offering the woman from Preble’s apartment a reward (hiring her a first-class defense attorney at the paper’s expense) if she’ll give him an exclusive interview. Only just as soon as she meets him to seal the deal, the cops, headed by Captain Sam Haynes (George Reeves – he grew a moustache fro this one but he’s still recognizable, and it’s fun to see Perry Mason and Superman in the same movie!), show up and arrest her.

Then they realize she’s innocent after all when Mayo notices that the record on Preble’s phonograph is a different one from the piece Norah recalled him playing: she remembered he put on Nat “King” Cole’s record of “Blue Gardenia” after they’d heard him do the song live at the nightclub, but the record that’s on there when the police search Preble’s apartment is an instrumental version of the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. I suspect the use of Wagner reflects Lang’s love-hate relationship with the composer; when Lang made his two films based on the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried (1923) and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924), he commissioned an original score from Gottfried Hüppertz that would sound suitably “Wagnerian” without using any of Wagner’s themes or motifs, but when the films were released in the U.S. they went out with a score by Heinz Roemheld that was a pastiche of themes from Wagner’s cycle The Ring of the Nibelung. Lang was upset because he’d wanted his films to be seen as a totally different work of art from Wagner’s cycle, having nothing in common with it but a story source (and Kriemhild’s Revenge was based on a part of the story Wagner hadn’t used).

The police note that the album from which the Tristan record came (back when “record albums” were literally that: packages of individual 78-rpm records with sleeves bound together in a book like pages in a photo album) has a stamp identifying it as having come from the Melrose Music Store in Los Angeles. (This place really existed; I have a number of 78 rpm records in sleeves stamped with the Melrose address and phone number, and among the albums we see stocked there is Morton Gould’s easy-listening album After Dark, which I had as a child. So after seeing the Melrose stamp on actual record sleeves I was fascinated when I saw this movie and got to see what the shop looked like.) The man the police talked to at Melrose explains that Preble was a regular customer but a woman who worked there handled his account, and later we find out that she was his actual killer: she’d been dating him and stopped by his apartment to confront him over his refusal to marry her, she saw he had another woman there and killed him in a fit of jealousy, then put the “Liebestod” record on because it was ‘their song.” It’s an out-of-field ending that doesn’t really work as the solution to a mystery (even though writer Hoffman was a good enough Chekhovian he’d “planted” a scene with her in the beginning having an argument with Preble), but overall The Blue Gardenia is a quite good movie, a minor work in the Lang canon but well constructed and atmospherically photographed by Nicholas Musuraca, a former RKO contract man who’d shot so many of their classic noirs and this time shows a knack for subtly changing the lighting of a scene when Anne Baxter’s character is imperiled and the shadows of the noir underworld threaten to gobble her up. It’s not much of a story, but Lang told it effectively and showcased the previously innocent character who gets sucked into the noir world and has to figure out how to get out of it again.

According to “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller, Anne Baxter came away from working with Lang with pleasant memories; there are enough stories of him browbeating and psychologically abusing his other women stars that Patrick McGilligan’s biography, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, could well have been called Director Dearest, but given what we know about Marilyn Monroe’s personality Lang couldn’t have got the beautiful and sensitive performance out of her he did in Clash by Night if he’d abused her on set, and likewise with Baxter he got quite good results from her even though her basically innocent character doesn’t offer her the range or power of her role as the scheming bitch who pretends to be innocent in her best film, All About Eve. And it’s nice to see Raymond Burr as a pretty ordinary guy who’s guilty of little more than thinking with his dick and refusing to take Anne Baxter’s “no” for an answer – a far cry from the psycho stalker he played so effectively in the 1948 film Pitfall – though it is a bit hard to accept him as the debonair seducer no woman can resist, not only because he’s heavy-set and homely by Hollywood standards but also because we now know than in real life he was Gay.