I Wake Up Screaming - 1941

“I Wake Up Screaming” (1941) is fun noir. I think my favorite line happens in the nightclub when Allyn Joslyn, with a wry smirk, asks snooty, soon-to-be murder victim Carole Landis, “My I have the next mazurka?”

It’s the oddball moments in this movie that make it a quirky delight. Since even a cursory plot description is a minefield of spoilers, I’m not going to discuss the plot, just mention a few oddball elements I like.

First, the title, which has nothing to do with anything, except it’s deliciously lurid.

The gag when Betty Grable, hoping to send a cop on the wrong trail, points to a door through which Victor Mature may have escaped, only to have a Murphy bed fall on the confused flatfoot.

Victor Mature, whom we saw last week in "Captain Caution" (1941),  is being chased by an even more clever police detective played by Laird Cregar. Sadly, Cregar’s life was cut short only three years after this film was made. His work in this movie is the most riveting of all the actors, a complex character with more to his back story than just your routine dogged detective. Early on he pins the murder on Victor Mature, and spends the rest of the film tracking him, playing a cat and mouse game, when Mature slips through his fingers. I love the scene where they ride together in the car, and Mr. Cregar, as he speaks, playfully fashions a noose with string in his busy fingers.

But along the way we are introduced to a menagerie of the usual, or unusual suspects to make us question who really committed the murder. Alan Mowbray and Mr. Joslyn are along as society gossips and as sellers of information.  Joslyn has a loaded gun in his beside table.  We've mentioned before how anyone in an old movie can pull open a drawer to find a loaded gun.

The effortlessly weird Elisha Cook, Jr., with his big round eyes and childlike gaze creeps us out and makes us suspicious.  But Mature is the prime suspect, a fast-talking promoter who was selling Miss Landis as a Bright New Talent.

Betty Grable is her grieving sister, in a non-singing role this time (though I guess she did film a number that was cut from the movie).

Grable and Mature form an uneasy alliance at first, both looking for the murderer, but soon they get to be more than that, probably dating from the moment she sees him in his 1940s form-fitting bathing suit. Oh, my, yes. A vision of manly grace and considerable attributes.

Going on a date to an indoor swimming pool in the middle of the night, in the middle of a noir murder mystery. Hmm. I looked hard for Esther Williams, but she must have been in the ladies’ room.

Whenever Mature and Miss Grable are together, we heard the sometimes soft and lilting, sometimes jazzy rendition of “Over the Rainbow”. It has a strangely eerie effect in this movie, just another delightful oddball element.

And the loving, smitten way she saws off his handcuffs with a hacksaw on their first date.

And when he sticks a Tootsie Roll in the detective’s back, pretending it’s a gun.

The way Carole Landis gets to perform a song, but only as an image on a screen the cops show to Mowbray to make him crack.

And who sent all those flowers to Landis while she was alive, and keeps sending them to her grave after her murder? Florist Charles Lane -- that’s right, that sexy heartthrob Charles Lane, gives hints but will not mention the name aloud.

I recognized the theme over the opening credits to be Alfred Newman’s “Street Scene,” but how many of you, like me, immediately thought of the theme song to the old time radio show “My Friend Irma”?

Notice that the guy cheering at the prize fight, sitting in front of Victor Mature and Betty Grable (ah, the days of bringing your date to a boxing match) is an African-American gentleman? He’s blocking Mature’s view. He’s dressed in a suit and nothing about him is stereotyped or makes him in any way different from the audience of cheering white actors around him. Only because of that, and because this is move from an era where such innocuous, color-blind characterizations were rare, does that make him stand out like a beacon.

A brief, really nice beacon.

But perhaps just another unusual throwaway moment in an oddball noir.

By the way, at least two characters that I can think of get awakened in the middle of the night by strangers in their rooms.  It's pretty freaky.  But nobody wakes up screaming.