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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 7, No. 31 |
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NOIR CLASSICS
mystery I WAKE UP SCREAMING and the 1953 remake VICKI. |
The flood of noir classics
unearths two treasures
of TheColumnists.com
One of the great blessings of the present day is that young movie fans are addicted to the film noir classics of the 1940s and 1950s, which provides a big economic incentive for the studios to release them in remastered, augmented DVD versions that are catnip to older mystery fans like yours truly.
Several studios are busily mining their archives for more noir treasures and I'm happily waiting, checkbook in hand, to snap them all up.
Case in point: The Fox Film Noir Collection, which grows lustily each month, adding some of the best films of the genre, some of them never before on home video or available only in older VHS editions.
Two of my all-time favorites came out this summer: Fox's 1941 thriller I WAKE UP SCREAMING, based on the novel by Steve Fisher, and its 1953 remake, VICKI, a respectful alternate version that adds some very nice touches of its own.
And here's the extra good news: You only have to pay $14.95 each for them and, if you buy online thorugh Amazon or one of the other internet retailers, you'll get them both for just a little more than $20.
Both are black and white, standard frame films and, though the 1941 original is slightly better in execution, I'm very partial to the 1953 film, made during a period when studios were abandoning black and white photography and plunging headlong into either 3-D or widescreen processes like Fox's own CinemaScope in order to compete with television.
In the original, the leading man is a young Victor Mature, new to Fox and just getting used to clothing after his sensational appearance a year earlier as the caveman hero of ONE MILLION B.C. He plays slighlty shady sports promoter Frankie Chirstopher, a slick ladies' man who runs with the bad boys and becomes the leading suspect when Vicki Lynn (Carole Landis), the beautiful fashion model he made famous, is brutally murdered.
This 1941 movie was a reunion for Mature and Landis, who played his cavegirl sweetie in the dinosaur movie the year before. Landis was a stunning beauty, who's largely forgotten today. Her career was cut short after her suicide death a few years later. Legend says she was despondent over the unhappy ending for her love affair with actor Rex Harrison at the same time her Hollywood fame was fading.
Today's younger film fans probably know Victor Mature best from SAMSON & DELILAH , THE ROBE, DEMETRIUS AND THE GLADIATORS and the other religious spectacle films he made later, which took advantage of his beefcake build and rugged good looks. But he was a much better actor than those films might suggest and he showed to very good advantage in I WAKE UP SCREAMING and the later KISS OF DEATH, two of the very best films noir.
Mature's character is one of those guys the cops instinctively hate because he's slick and he's cocky. He's especially disliked by the grim, mean-spirited police detective who has his own obsession with Vicki and most eagerly wants to nail him for the murder. This guy is played to perfection by huge Laird Cregar, best remembered today for his chilling Jack the Ripper-type role in Fox's THE LODGER, made just a few years later.
We see Landis almost exclusively in flashbacks as the various suspects explain their relationship to Vicki Lynn. Meanwhile, Mature's Frankie is developing a growing romantic relationship with the dead girl's sister, played by Betty Grable.
In 1941, Grable was not yet the superstar she became during World War II when she was Fox's biggest musical star and the G.I.'s favorite pinup girl. In fact, she'd been signed just the year before and got her big break as the lead in DOWN ARGENTINE WAY, a hugely popular Fox musical in Technicolor by replacing the ill Alice Faye, who then was the studio's top musical leading lady.
If I were to pick the best reason to see I WAKE UP SCREAMING today, it would be to see these blossoming young stars just as they started to reach their ultimate potential. Oddly, Carole Landis seems much sexier than Grable in the film, but it was Grable who caught on bigtime. Victor Mature seems much more relaxed and confident on screen than you would expect for a man with only a couple of films to his credt, one of them a non-speaking, mostly-grunting role as a prehistoric man.
But the star who made the most of his role was Laird Cregar, whose hulking look and sinister voice made him seem a natural to become either the next Sidney Greenstreet or perhaps something much bigger. Fox had signed him in 1940 after seeing him in a supporting role at Warners--and he seemed ready to become one of the screen's greatest villains when he died suddenly at age 28 in 1944, the result of a massive heart attack they say was brought on by severe dieting after completing his final film, HANGOVER SQUARE, another creepy classic.
Ironically, VICKI, the 1953 remake, also serves to showcase several promising new stars. Doomed Vicki Lynn, a showy blonde in the 1941 film, was played by sleek brunette beauty Jean Peters, whose career, like that of Carole Landis, also would come to an abrupt end a few years later when she married Howard Hughes and was swept away into decades of seclusion with the eccentric billionaire.
Peters had made her film debut at Fox in 1947 as Tyrone Power's leading lady in the big budget historical spectacle CAPTAIN FROM CASTILE, By the time she made VICKI, she was an experienced film actress and her performance is very nuanced and much better than what Landis did with the role. Peters was always one of my personal favorites during her run at Fox, where she was the thinking man's antidote to Marilyn Monroe, the resident superstar there.
Her sister is played by veteran Fox star Jeanne Crain, who was making her last film on her Fox contract. Crain was a beauty contest winner--Miss Long Beach of 1941--and mostly had light roles that took advantage of her beauty. (Her auburn hair and green eyes really showed well in the 1945 STATE FAIR, a Technicolor musical.) She doesn't exactly light up the screen in VICKI, but she seems more right for the quieter, more down-to-earth sister than Grable did in the original.
The Victor Mature character, renamed "Steve" Christopher and played rather soberly by Elliott Reid, is nowhere near as interesting in VICKI. He's not the quasi-criminal slicker of the 1941 film, but pretty much just a high profile public relations man and promoter. Much more interesting is the dark detective role played by Laird Cregar in the original.
For the remake, they made the detective a regular-sized man, but an even darker, more sinister one. Cast in the role was Richard Boone, who had not yet become a familiar face on television. Boone had been at Fox since his screen debut in HALLS OF MONTEZUMA (1950), but hadn't established any real following. He's very nasty and unsavory in VICKI, but still didn't attract subsequent film roles that might have taken advantage of his nice turn as a bad guy. The following year he began to make his TV name with the MEDIC series, then in 1957 began the role that made his fortune, Paladin in HAVE GUN, WILLTRAVEL.
For me, the most interesting thing about VICKI, though, is the casting of the small, but pivotal role of the hotel clerk at the building where Vicki lived. In the original the part was played by Elisha Cook, Jr., who specialized in "little weasel" characters who generally were afraid of their own shadow or were quickly put out of their misery by tougher guys, i.e. Bogart in THE MALTESE FALCON and Jack Palance in SHANE.
For the remake, they cast little known Aaron Spelling, a chinless, chestless wimpy-looking actor who was perfect for the part. Spelling is wonderful in VICKI, playing a man who's everybody's doormat and nobody's hero. When he thinks he hears Vicki's ghost talking to him through the switchboard, Spelling chews scenery with the best of them. He, of course, gave up acting a few years later and became one of TV's richest and most successful producers. His producing partner for many of his biggest hit shows was Leonard Goldstein, the man who produced VICKI.
I found watching these nifty old mysteries over again, almost back to back, a great treat. If you've never seen either one, start with I WAKE UP SCREAMING, then proceed to VICKI. There's a lot to enjoy and the audio commentaries by experts in film noir will give you lots of information you'll find very useful. Meanwhile, let the flood of films noir to home video continue!
©2006 by Ron Miller.
The DVD cover illustrations are courtesy of 20th Century Fox
Home Video. This column first posted Oct. 2, 2006.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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