sovay: (Jeff Hartnett)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote 2025-01-30 11:32 pm (UTC)

I still haven't seen I Wake Up Screaming, but I love the explanation that it had to be retitled after the preview because when a movie starring Betty Grable is titled Hot Spot, the audience gets confused when it turns out to be a murder mystery. Sort of a reverse Murder In the Cathedral title situation.

Ir sounds totally in line with Farewell, My Lovely/Murder, My Sweet (1944).

(I did not know that I Wake Up Screaming had ever had another title, since it's so memorable and straight from the novel. I need to rewatch it because I never wrote about it and the plot is sufficiently convoluted—most of Steve Fisher's novels and screenplays are—that I remember a lot more of the mood than the action, but it is visually stunning, has a nice freakout part for Elisha Cook Jr., and while no one really does wake up screaming in it that I can recall, Victor Mature does wake up to find that Laird Cregar has been watching him sleep, occasioning a line about having a bad dream with his eyes open, which in light of the number of people on the internet who would climb Laird Cregar like a skyscraper was extremely funny to me.)

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