I am not entirely sure where in 1953 this movie came from, but I am grateful for it and for that portion of 1953. I really enjoyed it. I had wanted to see it for months, but worried about watching it, because The Reckless Moment (1949) and Caught (1949), both of which it sounded thematically close to, are meat grinders. It doesn't even suffer from the same kind of curtain-crashing patriarchy as Woman on the Run (1950), which I would like very much if it would just stop judging its heroine so hard. I don't know if this was the ahead-of-his-time aura of Fritz Lang or the stubborn aftereffects of Vera Caspary or what, but while it is not flawless, it is a film noir that believes women are people and have important relationships with other women and deserve happiness even when they don't conform to the prevailing codes of their gender and I will take that. It is also well-filmed and Anne Baxter has a snub little cat face that can turn fierce without spite and I should evidently pay more attention to Richard Conte, because he is as flawed a hero here as he is an almost forgivable villain in The Big Combo (1955). The other noirs I've seen by Lang werecorrosive—this one thinks the whole male-female system is broke as fuck, but then it doesn't just consign women to suffer for it. Even if it was an outlier in his philosophy, I'm still happy.
[edit] I realized in the shower that in terms of tone and genre among the films I've seen by Fritz Lang, The Blue Gardenia most closely resembles the otherwise sui generis You and Me (1938). It has similar shifts from romantic comedy into expressionist darkness—and back—and a similar concern with communities, there criminal/straight rather than female/male. That may mean that if I see more American Lang, both of these movies will look less like outliers. You and Me also generated one of my favorite production photos, but that is irrelevant to its themes.
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I am not entirely sure where in 1953 this movie came from, but I am grateful for it and for that portion of 1953. I really enjoyed it. I had wanted to see it for months, but worried about watching it, because The Reckless Moment (1949) and Caught (1949), both of which it sounded thematically close to, are meat grinders. It doesn't even suffer from the same kind of curtain-crashing patriarchy as Woman on the Run (1950), which I would like very much if it would just stop judging its heroine so hard. I don't know if this was the ahead-of-his-time aura of Fritz Lang or the stubborn aftereffects of Vera Caspary or what, but while it is not flawless, it is a film noir that believes women are people and have important relationships with other women and deserve happiness even when they don't conform to the prevailing codes of their gender and I will take that. It is also well-filmed and Anne Baxter has a snub little cat face that can turn fierce without spite and I should evidently pay more attention to Richard Conte, because he is as flawed a hero here as he is an almost forgivable villain in The Big Combo (1955). The other noirs I've seen by Lang were corrosive—this one thinks the whole male-female system is broke as fuck, but then it doesn't just consign women to suffer for it. Even if it was an outlier in his philosophy, I'm still happy.
[edit] I realized in the shower that in terms of tone and genre among the films I've seen by Fritz Lang, The Blue Gardenia most closely resembles the otherwise sui generis You and Me (1938). It has similar shifts from romantic comedy into expressionist darkness—and back—and a similar concern with communities, there criminal/straight rather than female/male. That may mean that if I see more American Lang, both of these movies will look less like outliers. You and Me also generated one of my favorite production photos, but that is irrelevant to its themes.