Fritz Lang has said that he made this murder mystery in 20
days and it looks it but it does entertain and I’ll forgive him for this one
because he also made “The Big Heat” the same year.
The dense and somewhat unbelievable plot takes place in Los
Angles and focuses on three women who work at the same telephone company and
also share an apartment that is modest and realistic. The roommates are played
by the sassy and sarcastic Ann Sothern who does the whole film with a cigarette
dangling from her mouth, Jeff Donnell who seems to be mentally challenged and
who is a murder mystery fan and reads cheap pulp fiction throughout the film by
her favorite writer Mickey Mallet which is an obvious
spoof on Mickey Spillane who was at his peak of popularity in the
early 50’s and the most troubled of the group Anne Baxter. Baxter is lonely and
early in the film is about to spend her birthday alone with a photograph of her
boyfriend who is fighting in Korea. As Sothern gets ready for a date with her
ex-husband and Donnell is about to rush off to the neighborhood bookstore to
pick up the latest book by Mallet, Anne is content to cook a nice dinner for
herself and her photograph. Dressed in a lovely black taffeta dress (this
figures prominently in the plot), and toasting her boyfriend’s photo, Anne
opens the most recent letter from him and reads that she’s been dumped by him
for a nurse he’s fallen in love with while recuperating from wounds suffered in
the war. Anne sheds a few tears into her pot roast dinner. Suddenly the phone
rings and its Raymond Burr on the other end, who thinks Anne is the other Ann
who he tried to pick up earlier in the day at the phone company. Burr is a
womanizer and a bad artist and thinking Anne is the other Ann invites her to
have some drinks and Chinese food at a restaurant called The Blue Gardenia,
which is a Polynesian joint. Anne is also blue so she agrees to meet Burr, it
is after all her birthday and she’s just been royally dumped. At the restaurant
Nat “King” Cole is performing the title song, and Raymond is confused because
he thought he was getting Ann Sothern instead he has Anne Baxter which is not
such a bad deal and he knows it. After ordering and pouring on the sweaty charm
Ray buys Anne a Blue Gardenia from the blind old lady who sells them in the
joint and starts pouring an obscene sounding drink called Polynesian Pearl
Divers down Anne’s pretty throat.
Anne
has soon gulped down 4 or 5 of these sweet and potent drinks and is drunk and
wobbly but agrees to go to Burr’s apartment where he of course tries to make
her, which Anne wants no part of.
Oh
trouble trouble trouble. Something happens and Anne blacks out and upon waking
she sees that Burr has been killed with a poker from the fireplace.
She thinks she did it and naturally she
panics and runs out of the apartment without her shoes, leaving not only her
glass slippers behind but also one of her hankies and the Blue Gardenia. There
you have it that’s the plot. Also involved is Richard Conte (looking pained and
bored) as a newspaper reporter who wants to find the killer who he calls the
Blue Gardenia Girl in his tabloid newspaper and George Reeves as a detective
also on hunt for the killer. The ending is rash and rushed with a “surprise”
that you could see a mile away, but as I said for 90 minutes it entertains and
the cast is 50’s fun.
Shoved like a wedge of
cement into the sub genre of “movies about Hollywood” is Paul Schrader’s low
cost and low profile take on what’s happening with the young set in La La Land.
With a screenplay by Bret Easton Ellis who is no stranger to this place and the
people who inhabit it, the film opens at a dinner in a fancy L.A. Restaurant
where Christian (note the name) a young rich producer, his saucy girlfriend
Tara, his ready to please female assistant Gina and her young boy toy Ryan are
discussing nothing much. Christian is played by James Deen straight porn star
extraordinaire and his live in girlfriend is none other than Lindsay Lohan.
They are about to embark to Mexico where they are going to shoot some cheapo
movie which I think I heard them mumble would be of the horrible horror kind
with a budget no doubt bigger than the budget on this film. The male bimbo toy boy is to play the lead
and was pushed and pulled into this great opportunity by Lindsay who it turns
out was once a lover of the handsome dude a fact not known to Deen or his
assistant and will come back to bite Tara and Ryan on their asses. Lindsay
looks bloated, puffy and bruised like a piece of over ripe rotting fruit left
out in a bowl on a table by the pool in the hot California sun for too long, a
piece of rotting meat surrounded by flies and vermin. Deen who is scraggly and ordinary looking (to me anyway) is the
commander of the ship and indeed of the movie. He is if I’m to be honest a disgusting piece of work
just one of many, many to be found in this shit hole of a place called Los
Angeles. The palm trees look good, and I will say that I was fascinated by this
low take on the C list underbelly of Hollywood and Vine. Schrader made this
film which is handsome and shinny on a very low budget, an amount that I could
probably live on if not for the rest of my life then for quite a few of the
years remaining to me. These are all awful people, not a care in the world for
anyone but themselves, concerned only where the next threesome is coming from,
where to go on the next shopping spree and who to double cross. I will say that
Lohan was quite good not great but quite good, maybe reaching into her own
sordid little paparazzi drug addled life for the rancid background material that
she brings to the movie in great big beautifully wrapped packages of
nothingness and if she can get her scarred life
together maybe she can actually become an actress worth watching. I don’t
however go along with what Schrader wrote in the July/August issue of Film
Comment comparing Lohan’s meager talents to Marilyn Monroe even though his
short piece did give me a few chuckles. Monroe was beloved even though she had
her problems with drugs, the wrong men and bad and mad work habits. This dish
was savored and immensely talented and tucked in every night by an adoring
public, something that will never happen for Lohan. I don’t mean to take anything away from her good work in this
film which she pretty much carries on her back, but to compare her to one of the
great and lasting icons of the 20th Century is pushing it a bit. The
other actors are bad some very bad and as pretty as Nolan Gerard Funk is (he
better be with that name) his performance as Ryan is painful to watch. Deen
gives a porn star performance and judging from some of his comments on the
extras (“Bret Easton Ellis is the greatest writer in the world”) I would have
to say that he is also a drug addled idiot. There is a flash of violence near
the end of this short movie, that comes out of nowhere and of course in keeping
with the character of the characters it goes unpunished. The film is worth a
cynical look. 
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