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If you want your picture in the paper, you'll have to go out and kill somebody first
It is useful for me to remember that we are living right now in a particularly harsh backward swing of the pendulum. The past may be a different country, but to imagine that it was always a more rigid, more stratified, more conservative one is to play right into the hands of the reactionaries who are doing their best to return our present to some Stepford pastiche of pop culture as false as the Production Code: it is not our business to help them whitewash and straighten the gains of previous generations by agreeing that racism and sexism carried the good old days without question, that any representation to the contrary is anachronistic politics or wishful thinking, and that the loss of human rights will be a reversion to status quo, not a perversion of it. If Theodore Parker was right about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, the rest of us should remember that it doesn't happen in one clean curve, painlessly excelsior. We can't treat it like an automatic process. We can't get complacent. Even the Fifties were never entirely "the Fifties." And yet this dismissal of the past as naturally less enlightened than the present remains so seductive and pervasive that it is both shocking and valuable to see a mid-century movie which believes that even if a woman gets drunk, even if she goes home with a stranger, even if she takes off her shoes and tucks herself up on his couch and half-asleep pulls him down into a kiss, that doesn't mean she's forfeited the right to say no.
The movie is Fritz Lang's The Blue Gardenia (1953), a welcome and somewhat unexpected addition to my slow-growing catalogue of feminist noir. At first it looks like a romantic comedy, perhaps in the style of Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) or How to Marry a Millionaire (1953): the Los Angeles adventures of three roommates, all blonde, all single, all working the same switchboard of the West-Coast Telephone Company, each with a very different outlook on romance. Tart, worldly Crystal Carpenter (Ann Sothern) has a much better love life with her husband now that they're divorced, enjoying their drive-in dates without losing the license to flirt with handsome reporters and pose for wolfish artists. Cheerful, slightly spacey Sally Ellis (Jeff Donnell) can't be bothered with boys when she's "living a life of passion and violence" through pulp novels—her latest favorite bears the wonderfully, trashily plausible title of My Knife Is Bloody, by "Mickey Mallet." And Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter) is a model of long-distance fidelity, declining even friendly invitations to stay in night after night with a photograph of her childhood sweetheart in Korea, an all-American dreamboat who signs his letters "Yours very truly" until the night of Norah's birthday, when he starts the latest one a lot like "Dear John." The next minute a call comes in for "Granite-1466," the phone number they all share. The man on the other end is asking for Crystal. She's just gone out for the evening with her ex-husband. On a concussive rebound, devastated and humiliated that all her nunlike faithfulness was rewarded with the air instead of a ring, Norah impulsively accepts in her roommate's place. She puts on a little black dress and matching pumps and heads out to a restaurant she's never been to, to have a good time with a man she's barely met. If almost anyone else at Warners were directing, we might be about to embark on some kind of blind-date, mistaken-identity, shenanigans-ensue meet-cute. Instead she'll stagger home at the end of the night, barefoot, bruised, and disoriented, about to wake up at madonna/whore ground zero—as her life slides ever more suddenly sideways, Norah will find herself either romanticized as a good girl or sensationalized as a femme fatale when in truth she's nothing but herself, a woman who's making some good decisions, some bad ones, and may or may not have bashed a man's brains in with a poker when he tried to date-rape her.
America in 1953 didn't have the term "rape culture," but it had the attitudes and the behavior and the script by Charles Hoffman—adapted from the 1952 short story "Gardenia" by Vera Caspary, who knew from women's agency—does not pussyfoot about pointing them out. That Norah was drunk enough to black out most of the evening puts her in a position more traditionally occupied by men in this genre, but dreadfully familiar to any number of women in real life. She thought she was doing something safe. She wasn't. She doesn't know if she killed a man. She doesn't know if they had sex first. She doesn't know if it was consensual. She doesn't even know how she got out of his apartment; the only thing she knows for certain is that her version of the story won't be believed. The newspapers are already making hay of the murdered man's pin-up art, splashing a lurid story of "high-voltage dolls" in the breezy assurance that any calendar girl seen downing half a dozen tiki drinks at a Hollywood and Vine nightspot headlined by Nat King Cole can only have been "just a flashy blonde putting on an act as a lady." The ambitious columnist behind the scoop (Richard Conte) says "beautiful blonde defending her virtue" as though he means "griffin" or "unicorn" and well he might, if Norah's roommates accurately represent the readership of the Los Angeles Chronicle. Before they know the truth, Sally double-takes with delicious disapproval at the reported number of Polynesian Pearl Divers imbibed, while Crystal waves away the official description of the suspect's dress with a more suitable stereotype: "Probably black? Probably bright red! That type of girl never wears black." Any girl who went out with a cheesecake artist should have known what she was getting into; any girl who was told "there'd be other people" should have laughed that old chestnut off. When Norah protests that the unknown woman might have been "fighting for her honor," world-weary Crystal sighs back, "Honey, if a girl killed every man who got fresh with her, how much of the male population do you think there'd be left?" Even our apparent hero, Conte's Casey Mayo, keeps a "little black book" of girls' names and numbers, none too subtly rated on an exclamation point system—he's so notorious for it that when he returns from meeting the anonymous caller who sounded like his first real lead on the "Blue Gardenia," the name he coined for the mystery woman based on the tiki bar, his photographer friend (Richard Erdman) asks, "Did she go in the little black book?" It's telling that Casey replies in the negative: "Wrong type." He's bought into his own spin; despite his initial spot-on suspicion of the handkerchief-muffled voice that knew the unreleased details of the women's shoes found in Harry Prebble's apartment, Norah's sweetness and gentility and anxiety in person convince him that she can't be the girl he's looking for, and neither is she going to be one of his casual hookups. She's a nice girl. Someone he can feel protective and wistful about after two hamburgers and five cups of coffee and one jukebox play of Nat King Cole's "Blue Gardenia." "On the level. I had a feeling I could go for her." The Blue Gardenia herself, that "unknown murderess" to whom he wrote such a sympathetically worded, front-page appeal? Watch your metaphors, Mayo: "I want to be the guy to nail her."
With all this victim-blaming and slut-shaming flying around, it is all the more noticeable that the film itself is firmly on Norah's side. There are extenuating circumstances for the violence of her self-defense, but there are no extenuating circumstances for Harry Prebble: from the moment Norah pushes him off with an explicit "No—don't—" and he forces her back into the couch and they grapple so hard the dyed gardenia he bought her at dinner flies off her dress, the camera shoots him like a monster, all weight and looming shadow, so much bigger than Norah, so much stronger, at least until she gets the fire iron in her hand. It is clever of the script to remember that he is no such thing. He's played by Raymond Burr, coming off a string of memorable noir heavies and right around the corner from Rear Window (1954), so we shouldn't expect too much of his morals, but it would have been easy enough to make him a serial rapist, a sex maniac, dramatically dangerous in a way that reassures #notallmen of 1953, and instead he's just a guy. He's not even an uncommon kind of guy, the genial skirt-chaser who doesn't rise to the level of a missing stair. Norah wants "to forget the early part of this evening," he's happy to help, and he almost doesn't blow it. At the point where she's all but passed out on his couch, barefoot and hugging a pillow like a teddy bear, there is the slightest significant pause as he switches out the lights to leave her illuminated by the low fire. It is possible at this moment to imagine a version of events—not noir, of course, and therefore not of interest to this film—where he just drops a blanket over her and goes to finish the commercial painting he owes. He leans over her instead and murmurs, "Happy birthday, Norah." And that's when she reaches up and kisses him like he's her faithless soldier come back from Korea, and right after that is when she realizes that whatever she wanted out of her defiantly flirtatious evening, groggy, tiki-fueled sex with a stranger wasn't it, and right after that is when Prebble decides that's what he wants, actually, and Nicholas Musuraca's cinematography loses its sympathy for him faster than you can say "Mermaid's Downfall." At the same time, the film doesn't feel the need to stack Norah's innocence. After her second sip of a Polynesian Pearl Diver, she asks candidly, "Can I get high on one of these?" She isn't sure if she wants to, but she wants the option, and by the time the table is covered with all manner of chopstick-and-bowl appetizers, she's enthusiastically pressing Prebble to order another round of "South Sea piledrivers," whose alcohol content she has correctly diagnosed as "strong." Most importantly, when she fights him off in his apartment, she's not doing it for anyone but herself. There's no man she's being true to, not her ex, not a spare tire, not some future white wedding she's saving herself for. Just herself, in the dark, drunk and initially desiring, and Lang's with her all the way. Once her roommates find out the facts, they are, too. If the audience wasn't from the start, that's their problem, then and now.
For the obvious reasons, I find it enormously satisfying that The Blue Gardenia closes with a return to romantic comedy. I have never felt that film noir needs to end in total nihilism to count, and here especially it doesn't feel like a cop-out because it feels like sticking it to the Code: not only does a woman get away with a drunken sexual adventure that goes almost as badly as possible, the narrative doesn't throw her into the arms of a man to control her from now on. The final scene shows our working girls reunited, posing for the razzle-dazzle of press photography like a fashion shoot. Crystal purrs, "I'll take a dozen of each, boys—Mother keeps asking for a picture," and Sally chirps, "The last time they put my picture in the paper, I had to get bitten by a dog!" and Norah mimes an exaggerated sigh of relief for the cameras, arms full of roses and carnations. Lovesick Casey hangs back, having spent the latter stages of the action feeling like a prize heel and a half for leading the police straight to Norah with his disingenuous publicity stunt; despite his sterling investigative work since, she cuts him dead on approach and the smitten sap throws away his little black book. (His friend the photographer catches it, chortling as he turns the pages—sexism isn't dead—but I'll take the victories I can get in the age of Joseph Breen.) As the three women exit, it becomes clear that the torch-carrying is mutual, but if there's romance in store at Granite-1466, it's going to be on Norah's terms. If this is not quite as strong a statement as Beggars of Life (1929) or Baby Face (1933), I cannot fault a movie that went into production in 1952 for not being a pre-Code. It leaves plenty of room for the shadow-sides and doubles and reversals that play so fruitfully in noir; for a central atmosphere of paranoia and betrayal, both institutional and interpersonal, that might well have resonated with Lang after his inexplicable year out of work that he always believed was a blacklisting; and for female friendship, which can be difficult to find in a genre that, even when it foregrounds women, still tends to surround them with men. Crystal, Sally, and Norah don't live in style in their three-person efficiency with one bed, one couch, one recliner, and chores, but they live in affectionate, practical, mutual support that splinters only when Norah's guilt-sickness turns to panicked lashing out and heals without rancor as soon as Crystal understands that Casey Mayo's "Blue Gardenia" wasn't a slinky, kinky siren in a red dress after all. So much of film noir is about alienation that it is interesting to see one pay such close attention to community, especially among women. When Norah and Casey bond, it is over outsiderness.
I am not surprised that the poster for The Blue Gardenia is just as reductive and chauvinistic as the film is sympathetic and nuanced: "There was nothing lily-white about her—the clinch-and-kill girl they called THE BLUE GARDENIA." Clearly it comes from the same alternate marketing universe as World for Ransom (1954). Or that part of the '50's that actually was "the Fifties." Otherwise this movie left me with an inappropriate desire for dim sum and drinks with rum in them, which is as good a place as any to leave the recipe for the original of the Blue Gardenia's Polynesian Pearl Diver, Don the Beachcomber's Pearl Diver's Punch. I am not sure I would recommend drinking six in a row, even in company you trust. At least break it up with a Scorpion Bowl. This type of girl brought to you by my honorable backers at Patreon.
The movie is Fritz Lang's The Blue Gardenia (1953), a welcome and somewhat unexpected addition to my slow-growing catalogue of feminist noir. At first it looks like a romantic comedy, perhaps in the style of Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) or How to Marry a Millionaire (1953): the Los Angeles adventures of three roommates, all blonde, all single, all working the same switchboard of the West-Coast Telephone Company, each with a very different outlook on romance. Tart, worldly Crystal Carpenter (Ann Sothern) has a much better love life with her husband now that they're divorced, enjoying their drive-in dates without losing the license to flirt with handsome reporters and pose for wolfish artists. Cheerful, slightly spacey Sally Ellis (Jeff Donnell) can't be bothered with boys when she's "living a life of passion and violence" through pulp novels—her latest favorite bears the wonderfully, trashily plausible title of My Knife Is Bloody, by "Mickey Mallet." And Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter) is a model of long-distance fidelity, declining even friendly invitations to stay in night after night with a photograph of her childhood sweetheart in Korea, an all-American dreamboat who signs his letters "Yours very truly" until the night of Norah's birthday, when he starts the latest one a lot like "Dear John." The next minute a call comes in for "Granite-1466," the phone number they all share. The man on the other end is asking for Crystal. She's just gone out for the evening with her ex-husband. On a concussive rebound, devastated and humiliated that all her nunlike faithfulness was rewarded with the air instead of a ring, Norah impulsively accepts in her roommate's place. She puts on a little black dress and matching pumps and heads out to a restaurant she's never been to, to have a good time with a man she's barely met. If almost anyone else at Warners were directing, we might be about to embark on some kind of blind-date, mistaken-identity, shenanigans-ensue meet-cute. Instead she'll stagger home at the end of the night, barefoot, bruised, and disoriented, about to wake up at madonna/whore ground zero—as her life slides ever more suddenly sideways, Norah will find herself either romanticized as a good girl or sensationalized as a femme fatale when in truth she's nothing but herself, a woman who's making some good decisions, some bad ones, and may or may not have bashed a man's brains in with a poker when he tried to date-rape her.
America in 1953 didn't have the term "rape culture," but it had the attitudes and the behavior and the script by Charles Hoffman—adapted from the 1952 short story "Gardenia" by Vera Caspary, who knew from women's agency—does not pussyfoot about pointing them out. That Norah was drunk enough to black out most of the evening puts her in a position more traditionally occupied by men in this genre, but dreadfully familiar to any number of women in real life. She thought she was doing something safe. She wasn't. She doesn't know if she killed a man. She doesn't know if they had sex first. She doesn't know if it was consensual. She doesn't even know how she got out of his apartment; the only thing she knows for certain is that her version of the story won't be believed. The newspapers are already making hay of the murdered man's pin-up art, splashing a lurid story of "high-voltage dolls" in the breezy assurance that any calendar girl seen downing half a dozen tiki drinks at a Hollywood and Vine nightspot headlined by Nat King Cole can only have been "just a flashy blonde putting on an act as a lady." The ambitious columnist behind the scoop (Richard Conte) says "beautiful blonde defending her virtue" as though he means "griffin" or "unicorn" and well he might, if Norah's roommates accurately represent the readership of the Los Angeles Chronicle. Before they know the truth, Sally double-takes with delicious disapproval at the reported number of Polynesian Pearl Divers imbibed, while Crystal waves away the official description of the suspect's dress with a more suitable stereotype: "Probably black? Probably bright red! That type of girl never wears black." Any girl who went out with a cheesecake artist should have known what she was getting into; any girl who was told "there'd be other people" should have laughed that old chestnut off. When Norah protests that the unknown woman might have been "fighting for her honor," world-weary Crystal sighs back, "Honey, if a girl killed every man who got fresh with her, how much of the male population do you think there'd be left?" Even our apparent hero, Conte's Casey Mayo, keeps a "little black book" of girls' names and numbers, none too subtly rated on an exclamation point system—he's so notorious for it that when he returns from meeting the anonymous caller who sounded like his first real lead on the "Blue Gardenia," the name he coined for the mystery woman based on the tiki bar, his photographer friend (Richard Erdman) asks, "Did she go in the little black book?" It's telling that Casey replies in the negative: "Wrong type." He's bought into his own spin; despite his initial spot-on suspicion of the handkerchief-muffled voice that knew the unreleased details of the women's shoes found in Harry Prebble's apartment, Norah's sweetness and gentility and anxiety in person convince him that she can't be the girl he's looking for, and neither is she going to be one of his casual hookups. She's a nice girl. Someone he can feel protective and wistful about after two hamburgers and five cups of coffee and one jukebox play of Nat King Cole's "Blue Gardenia." "On the level. I had a feeling I could go for her." The Blue Gardenia herself, that "unknown murderess" to whom he wrote such a sympathetically worded, front-page appeal? Watch your metaphors, Mayo: "I want to be the guy to nail her."
With all this victim-blaming and slut-shaming flying around, it is all the more noticeable that the film itself is firmly on Norah's side. There are extenuating circumstances for the violence of her self-defense, but there are no extenuating circumstances for Harry Prebble: from the moment Norah pushes him off with an explicit "No—don't—" and he forces her back into the couch and they grapple so hard the dyed gardenia he bought her at dinner flies off her dress, the camera shoots him like a monster, all weight and looming shadow, so much bigger than Norah, so much stronger, at least until she gets the fire iron in her hand. It is clever of the script to remember that he is no such thing. He's played by Raymond Burr, coming off a string of memorable noir heavies and right around the corner from Rear Window (1954), so we shouldn't expect too much of his morals, but it would have been easy enough to make him a serial rapist, a sex maniac, dramatically dangerous in a way that reassures #notallmen of 1953, and instead he's just a guy. He's not even an uncommon kind of guy, the genial skirt-chaser who doesn't rise to the level of a missing stair. Norah wants "to forget the early part of this evening," he's happy to help, and he almost doesn't blow it. At the point where she's all but passed out on his couch, barefoot and hugging a pillow like a teddy bear, there is the slightest significant pause as he switches out the lights to leave her illuminated by the low fire. It is possible at this moment to imagine a version of events—not noir, of course, and therefore not of interest to this film—where he just drops a blanket over her and goes to finish the commercial painting he owes. He leans over her instead and murmurs, "Happy birthday, Norah." And that's when she reaches up and kisses him like he's her faithless soldier come back from Korea, and right after that is when she realizes that whatever she wanted out of her defiantly flirtatious evening, groggy, tiki-fueled sex with a stranger wasn't it, and right after that is when Prebble decides that's what he wants, actually, and Nicholas Musuraca's cinematography loses its sympathy for him faster than you can say "Mermaid's Downfall." At the same time, the film doesn't feel the need to stack Norah's innocence. After her second sip of a Polynesian Pearl Diver, she asks candidly, "Can I get high on one of these?" She isn't sure if she wants to, but she wants the option, and by the time the table is covered with all manner of chopstick-and-bowl appetizers, she's enthusiastically pressing Prebble to order another round of "South Sea piledrivers," whose alcohol content she has correctly diagnosed as "strong." Most importantly, when she fights him off in his apartment, she's not doing it for anyone but herself. There's no man she's being true to, not her ex, not a spare tire, not some future white wedding she's saving herself for. Just herself, in the dark, drunk and initially desiring, and Lang's with her all the way. Once her roommates find out the facts, they are, too. If the audience wasn't from the start, that's their problem, then and now.
For the obvious reasons, I find it enormously satisfying that The Blue Gardenia closes with a return to romantic comedy. I have never felt that film noir needs to end in total nihilism to count, and here especially it doesn't feel like a cop-out because it feels like sticking it to the Code: not only does a woman get away with a drunken sexual adventure that goes almost as badly as possible, the narrative doesn't throw her into the arms of a man to control her from now on. The final scene shows our working girls reunited, posing for the razzle-dazzle of press photography like a fashion shoot. Crystal purrs, "I'll take a dozen of each, boys—Mother keeps asking for a picture," and Sally chirps, "The last time they put my picture in the paper, I had to get bitten by a dog!" and Norah mimes an exaggerated sigh of relief for the cameras, arms full of roses and carnations. Lovesick Casey hangs back, having spent the latter stages of the action feeling like a prize heel and a half for leading the police straight to Norah with his disingenuous publicity stunt; despite his sterling investigative work since, she cuts him dead on approach and the smitten sap throws away his little black book. (His friend the photographer catches it, chortling as he turns the pages—sexism isn't dead—but I'll take the victories I can get in the age of Joseph Breen.) As the three women exit, it becomes clear that the torch-carrying is mutual, but if there's romance in store at Granite-1466, it's going to be on Norah's terms. If this is not quite as strong a statement as Beggars of Life (1929) or Baby Face (1933), I cannot fault a movie that went into production in 1952 for not being a pre-Code. It leaves plenty of room for the shadow-sides and doubles and reversals that play so fruitfully in noir; for a central atmosphere of paranoia and betrayal, both institutional and interpersonal, that might well have resonated with Lang after his inexplicable year out of work that he always believed was a blacklisting; and for female friendship, which can be difficult to find in a genre that, even when it foregrounds women, still tends to surround them with men. Crystal, Sally, and Norah don't live in style in their three-person efficiency with one bed, one couch, one recliner, and chores, but they live in affectionate, practical, mutual support that splinters only when Norah's guilt-sickness turns to panicked lashing out and heals without rancor as soon as Crystal understands that Casey Mayo's "Blue Gardenia" wasn't a slinky, kinky siren in a red dress after all. So much of film noir is about alienation that it is interesting to see one pay such close attention to community, especially among women. When Norah and Casey bond, it is over outsiderness.
I am not surprised that the poster for The Blue Gardenia is just as reductive and chauvinistic as the film is sympathetic and nuanced: "There was nothing lily-white about her—the clinch-and-kill girl they called THE BLUE GARDENIA." Clearly it comes from the same alternate marketing universe as World for Ransom (1954). Or that part of the '50's that actually was "the Fifties." Otherwise this movie left me with an inappropriate desire for dim sum and drinks with rum in them, which is as good a place as any to leave the recipe for the original of the Blue Gardenia's Polynesian Pearl Diver, Don the Beachcomber's Pearl Diver's Punch. I am not sure I would recommend drinking six in a row, even in company you trust. At least break it up with a Scorpion Bowl. This type of girl brought to you by my honorable backers at Patreon.
no subject
As well, and perhaps more importantly, it gives me hope to be reminded, through this really thoughtful review of one movie, of the past's reality, and the importance to remember it as fully and three-dimensionally as possible. Whether that's in politics or culture (and I know they're inextricably intertwined), we can't let ourselves believe in the cardboard good/bad old days, for precisely the reasons you give.
no subject
I am delighted to receive late-to-the-party comments! It's not like I watched this movie in its first flush of theatrical release.
(I still haven't gone out for tiki drinks since seeing it and I still want to, despite feeling that somehow it's missing the point.)
As well, and perhaps more importantly, it gives me hope to be reminded, through this really thoughtful review of one movie, of the past's reality, and the importance to remember it as fully and three-dimensionally as possible. Whether that's in politics or culture (and I know they're inextricably intertwined), we can't let ourselves believe in the cardboard good/bad old days, for precisely the reasons you give.
It just feels more important the more time passes and the more obfuscation gets thrown on the past, which affects how we measure or conceive of the present. I am really glad the review resonated with you. Thank you for leaving a comment to tell me so!