The Blue Gardenia

Starring:Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, Raymond Burr, Jeff Donnell, Richard Erdman, George Reeves, Ruth Storey, Ray Walker, Nat 'King' Cole, Marjorie Stapp, Frank O'Connor, Kenner G. Kemp, Robert Shayne, Gail Bonney, Robert Bice, Victoria Horne, Larry J. Blake, Jeffrey Sayre, Edward Clark
Director: Fritz Lang
Studio: Image Entertainment
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com essential video

With its title inspired by the notorious Black Dahlia murder case, The Blue Gardenia throws a twist into the story by making the mystery woman not the victim but the suspect in a lurid murder case. Anne Baxter, playing a virginal blonde with almost breathless innocence, impulsively accepts a blind date after receiving a "Dear Jane" letter from her boyfriend in Korea. Raymond Burr oozes slime as the lothario who plots his seduction with cynical calculation ("For drinks, Polynesian Pearl Divers, and don't spare the rum!") and the naive Baxter is easy prey, until she fights back against his advances with a fireplace poker and stumbles home. Waking up the next morning with the past evening a veritable blank, she discovers herself the prime suspect in a murder case trumpeted into a sensationalistic headline story by calculating columnist Richard Conte. Fritz Lang transforms the rather conventional low-budget thriller into a paranoid nightmare, his cheap sets and flat backdrops creating a tawdry world peopled by cynics and opportunists preying on the guileless, and Baxter makes every guilt-ridden moment palpable. Like in many film noir thrillers, the pat conclusion seems wholly arbitrary, the product of the Hollywood happy-ending machine. However, Lang's film isn't about the mystery, but the experience of an innocent whose single, desperate transgression turns her world upside down. --Sean Axmaker

Description

Fritz Lang's scathing critique of fifties America's hunger for bloodshed and scandal. Classic Hollywood film noir with a feminine twist, "The Blue Gardenia" stars Anne Baxter (All About Eve) as Norah Larkin, a working girl who wakes up a murderess after passing out in the apartment of brutish playboy Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr). Branded "The Blue Gardenia" by a sensational columnist (Richard Conte), Norah dodges dragnets, informants and the cruel hand of fate as she struggles to conceal her involvement with Prebble and to remember the details of her ill fated night. As her hopes for justice fade, she decides to gamble her future on the journalist who transformed her into such a notorious public figure. Enhancing the melancholy mood of the film is the haunting theme song arranged by Nelson Riddle and performed to perfection by Nat "King" Cole.

Customer Reviews:

blue gardenia.......2006-07-03

I thought this was a fairly good film. The surpise ending was a treat. i particularly enjoyed the performances of Anne Baxter and Anne Sothern

A Bargain.......2006-07-01

This is a minor film noir but has a great performance from Raymond Burr (pre-Perry Mason) as a louse. The rest of the cast put on a good show and is well worth the reduced price from Amazon.

Good Mystery , if Not Great Noir........2006-04-03

"The Blue Gardenia" opens with a plausible plotline: A nice, slightly naïve, working girl (Ann Baxter) goes on a date with a sleazebag (Raymond Burr). In early 50s Hollywood, that's how Burr was cast. This was before the "Perry Mason" series made him so respectable. The jerk gets Baxter drunk on exotic drinks and tries to put the moves on her. To ward him off, she hits RB on the head with a poker-and passes out. The next day, Burr is dead and guess who the main suspect is? Director Fritz Lang uses an old ploy: The audience suspects Baxter is innocent but Anne blacked out and doesn't know what she did! The L.A. cops are looking only for a female murderess known as "The Blue Gardenia", named for the night club Burr took her. An enterprising, oily reporter (Richard Conte) gets involved, looking only for a good headline and to sell papers. He claims to be helping Baxter/the Gardenia but winds up getting her arrested! And then? And then Conte discovers a "certain clue", proving the good girl cannot be the Gardenia! BG winds down to an inevitable 1950s "happy ending". That is the film's major weak point. A second is the rushed resolution. It appears that Warner Brothers was determined to achieve a strict 90 minute run time. Yet a few more minutes at the end might have added some needed spice and tension. Silver and Ward's "Film Noir" opined that BG was shot in 50s b& w Television style, not the standard "noir" format. Other amazon reviewers made the same observation, but this aspect is not fatal. Though it is not truly a noir release, BG is a perfectly decent murder mystery. It has an engaging and offbeat cast! Those who can live with the small amount of aforementioned baggage should still enjoy watching BG.

Film noir with a touch of femininity and hits of MacCarthyism.......2006-02-26

I'm probably biased regarding this film as I love film noir and I love Fritz Lang. I have not yet been disappointed by any of his films! I do recommend this film to those of you who may have the same interests as me or for those who just want to see a well-made thriller of the 1950s.

Fritz Lang is probably best known for his "German Expressionist" films like Metropolis. It must not be forgotten, however, that he had a long and accomplished Hollywood career. The Blue Gardenia came at a time when Fritz Lang had already directed some great film noirs like Scarlet Street, Women in the Window and The Secret Beyond the Door and he was yet to make The Big Heat.

What makes The Blue Gardenia different from other film noirs, is perhaps the weight of the female characters. Although many film noirs have great female portrayals, like the phenomenal Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, few make the women the lead characters and men only secondary characters. This is, however the case in The Blue Gardenia where we follow closely Norah's sufferings and her two housemates (also female). This adds a notion of feminism as we are horrified by Norah's destiny in the film and the accusations brought against her.

Of course, this film was made in 1953 at the end of the age of MacCarthyism. Fritz Lang himself suffered from suspicions of being communist friendly, but he was never charged or presented before HUAC. Instead he could not find work in Hollywood for a couple of years. In the film, we can catch the atmosphere or suspicion, untrustworthiness, hesitation and slander that was so clearly a part of the witch hunting in Hollywood and in the rest of the US. Can Norah really have committed murder? Who can she trust? Her friends? The journalist Casey Mayo? And is it alright to make accusations and create slanders publicly in a newspaper? These are just some of the questions one could ask once one has seen the film...

It may not be Fritz Lang's best film or the best Film Noir, but it's still worth seeing!

Too Saccharine for a Murder Mystery. Too Bland All Around........2005-09-08

"The Blue Gardenia" is among director Fritz Lang's lesser films. It is often categorized as noir, but is only vaguely so. Adapted from the short story "Gardenia" by Very Caspary, it's more mystery/romance, like Caspary's "Laura", which made a far superior film. The cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca is in high-key style that was coming back into fashion in the 1950s, a major departure from the low-key lighting of the 1940s that became iconic of film noir. "The Blue Gardenia" looks an awful lot like 1950s television, which is alluded to in one bit of dialogue. It's placement during the Korean War and the plethora of post-war gender stereotypes also place this film firmly in the 1950s thematically. Ironically, Fritz Lang made "The Big Heat" the same year, which is solid film noir and perhaps his only truly great American film.

Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter) is a pretty, young switchboard operator with a boyfriend to whom she is devoted stationed in Korea. She cheerfully spends her evenings at home and never dates other men, wishing to remain faithful to her man overseas. But on her birthday, she learns that her boyfriend has fallen in love with another woman. Distraught, Norah impulsively accepts a dinner invitation from artist and infamous lothario Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr). She drinks too much and gets herself right snookered, a situation which Harry tries to take advantage of. Prebble is found dead in his apartment the next day, and Norah can't remember what happened. Confused and afraid, she responds to newspaperman Casey Mayo (Richard Conte) who, looking for an angle, promised his newspaper would provide the murderer with legal assistance in exchange for an exclusive story.

I found the most striking aspect "The Blue Gardenia" to be how much it looks and feels like 1950s television. The concept of characters and gender relations had changed radically from the 1940s by the time this film was released in 1953. The men, exemplified in Harry Prebble and Casey Mayo, are conspicuously charming, egotistical, chauvinistic, predatory, and inexplicably irresistible to the ladies. The women are silly, chatty, and in need of rescuing. No one is interesting, and everyone is shallow. Add to that the cheesy "Blue Gardenia" restaurant , and the film is a little ridiculous. Nat King Cole performs "The Blue Gardenia"'s thoroughly mediocre theme song in the restaurant scene.

The DVD (Image Entertainment 2005): This print has occasional specks and spots, but most of it is clean. There are no bonus features or subtitles.

Average customer rating:

Dirty Harry a la Roma!
Corruption, protection rackets, gun violence taboo of vigilantism
Superior Euro Crime Film
Stop That Racket!
Bad release

The Big Racket
Starring: Vincent Gardenia , Orso Maria Guerrini , Tony Marsina , Renzo Palmer , and Romano Puppo
Director: Enzo G. Castellari
Manufacturer: Blue Underground
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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Similar Items:

Street Law
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ASIN: B000EQ5UAA
Release Date: 2006-04-25

Description

ALL THE BONE-BREAKING, DOUBLE-BARRELED ACTION FULLY RESTORED FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER IN AMERICA!

Fabio Testi (REVOLVER, CONTRABAND) stars as Inspector Nico Palmieri, a tough police detective tearing apart Rome to bust a ruthless protection racket. But when these violent thugs expand their empire into drugs, rape and murder, Nico throws away the rulebook to unleash his own brand of justice. In a city ruled by fear, there's a fine line between cop and criminal...and one lawman is about to blast it to pieces!

Academy Award(r) nominee Vincent Gardenia (DEATH WISH) co-stars in this explosive crime thriller - featuring some of the most amazing stunts in '70s cinema - directed by Enzo G. Castellari (STREET LAW, THE HEROIN BUSTERS), now transferred from original vault materials and packed with explosive new Extras.

Customer Reviews:

Dirty Harry a la Roma!.......2007-06-19

Enzo G. Castellari's The Big Racket one-ups it's rivals by shooting its obligatory car somersaulting down a hill sequence from the inside of the car, with a visibly uncomfortable Fabio Testi obviously thanking God he remembered to fasten his seatbelt with every turn. Despite his protestations that "I'm a different kind of cop," Testi's hero is a predictably close Italian relative of Harry Callahan in a plot that ends up like a cross between The Magnificent Seven and Death Wish as he recruits the victims and criminal rivals of a ruthless protection racket carving up Rome to take the law into their own hands in an engagingly OTT factory floor shootout finale. Thankfully Testi seems to have loosened up a bit from his ramrod straight block of wood earlier performances, though the dubbing may have something to do with that. It's not exactly demanding stuff, and there's laziness to spare, not least with a jailbreak that happens offscreen and is never explained presumably for no better reason than no-one being able to think of a convincing one, but within its limited ambitions it gets the job done, and there's a likeable turn from this films contractually obligatory American co-star Vincent Gardenia

However, there are some real double standards in the American dubbing script: murder, rape and bloody mayhem, no problem, but no naughty words whatever you do. Thus our "dumb basket" hero is warned that if he doesn't cool it, he'll be "in deep diddly." In fact, whoever wrote the dubbing script is obviously having the time of his life, inserting the word "diddly" into as many scenes as many times as possible ("If I'm gonna be in deep diddly, I'd like to know what I'm in deep diddly for!"). Maybe it was a drunken dare after drinking too much Crodino - and boy, did the Crodino boys get their product placement money's worth in this one, with their posters and logos appearing in so many of the exterior and the restaurant scenes that you're just amazed they didn't slap a banner on the side of the Coliseum as well just to cover all the bases!

Corruption, protection rackets, gun violence taboo of vigilantism.......2007-03-11

THE BIG RACKET, written and directed by Enzo G. Castellari, and
starting Fabio Testi, is a movie that deals with an important theme
- corruption, protection rackets, gun violence, murders, thug
behavior, chaos running loose in the streets. It also deals with an
aspect that is often taboo in society, which is the frustration that
often is felt by merchant, when they feel they're getting the short
end of the stick as taxpayers, or when they are robbed, etc. Those
are very ugly aspects that people prefer to forget, and not deal
with.

In this picture, released 1977/78, the recurring soundtrack too,
underlines the ugliness of those aspects. A crude, metal guitar riff
is looped over and over, reminiscent of Black Sabbath or Tony Iommi,
to get the audience to feel the "on the edge of insanity" mental
landscape of the police officer, played by Testi, who is pulled from
the case, first, and then removed from his job, secondly, as a
consequence of the existing laws on the books of justice not fitting
the needs of the real world, that people rely on, to live their
lives in peace, and prosperity, and that he feels compelled to
solve.

Many will be turned off, by this "taboo" of retaliation against
gangsterism in the form of vigilantism, that the police officer
carries out, as socially unacceptable conduct, morally reprehensible
violence, even when carried out with the most honest, pure of
intentions, such as retaliating against a rape, murder, looting,
etc.

Others, will be disappointed by the lack of belief in the principles
of Christianity or their own religion, that underline forgiveness,
comprehension, patience, and allowing time for anarchists to "see
the light" and redeem themselves in the eyes of a Supreme Being.

Some, will not see anything beyond the 2 dimensional, video-game
aspect of the movie, such as in your favorite shoot 'em up XBOX or
Playstation release.

Whichever perspective of the viewer, it cannot be denied that the
images are crystal clear on the DVD, (very sharp transfer), the
audio and dialog in English (dubbed over Italian) is professional,
and well spoken, the thrill and suspense is maintained over 90
minutes. The acting, is also not shabby at all.

The weakness of this movie, obviously, is the only average
sophistication of the plot, that some may label that of a "B Movie"
coupled with the disbelief that viewers surely will feel, in
witnessing so many gun battles between the gangs and the Italian
police, in such a limited period of time, taking many dozens of
casualties on each side, over 90 mins.

Clearly, if the problem was of such an extent, a one-man-show would
be out of the picture, and even in the late 70's, a SWAT team,
armored tank, and perhaps even the military would have been called
in to deal with the chaos.

Superior Euro Crime Film.......2006-11-07

When it comes to Euro Crime films The Big Racket comes at top of the game. Of course what can you expect from the great Euro Crime director Enzo G. Castellari and the ever likeable Fabio Testi.

Testi plays a rough police officer that is getting sick and tired of the gang protection racket going on in a small Italian town. Gangs are using violence and destruction to get small business owners to pay. When Testi goes beyond the law to put the Racketeers away, he gets fired and then turns vigilante.

This is a violent, gritty film full of fantastic camera work and colorful anti-hero like characters. Testi here comes off looking like a true bad***. The uncut version provided here by Blue-Underground Entertainment does contain some harsh scences such as two brutal rape sequences so be forwarned.

Coming from a seasoned Euro Crime fan.....you can't get much better than this. There's enough tough guy posturing, cool camera shots and action to make any fan of Italian cinema happy.

Stop That Racket!.......2006-07-10

From the cover you'd think this flick was about Fabio Testi getting fed up with some noisy neighbors, but that's not it. The "big racket" is one of those protection racket schemes where a bunch of weasley turds threaten store owners to pay dues or have their business trashed. Fabio's a cop(of course) who's been after these guys for awhile, but anybody that watches action flicks knows that trying to bring criminals to justice through legal means never works. Whenever Fabio thinks he's got these guys, they manage to get off on some technicality or some other b.s. Once he starts using tactics that go outside the law, he's fired of course. Once fired, he decides to go Bronson and assembles an A-Team-like group that consists of some of the racket's past victims. One poor guy is a shop owner who was driven nearly insane by the rape and suicide of his daughter(A very good performance from this guy! His daughter looks 12!! Aren't there laws about sex scenes involving minors?). Another unfortunate dude witnesses the rape and murder(by fire) of his wife coz he had killed a few of the racket members and they decide to retaliate. The last act of the film is the best where this group gets together and plans a big assault on the racket. For those familiar with these kinds of films(especially Castellari's work), this one should be a treat. Not as good as Street Law, but much better than the Heroin Busters. Those used to Hollywood's version of an action film will just think it's dumb and cheesy. Fabio Testi is always a strong looking leading man, and able to carry a film even if he isn't the best actor in the world. The film definitely has it's corniness due to the year and country it was made in. One particularly funny scene is the last shot in the film that reminds me of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. After Fabio emerges victorious(and that's not a spoiler. Like you didn't know he would), for no particular reason he starts yelling and beating a car(at least I think it's a car, you can't quite tell coz of the camera angle) with the butt of his shotgun, and the film freezes on Fabio's manic and comical facial expression as the credits begin to role. This is the stuff good flix are made of. Mindless crimefighting fun-Italian style!!

Bad release.......2006-06-15

Oh dear, what are Blue Underground playing at. Why oh why bother to release such a poor movie, nothing memorable to see hear. Cheap and ugly Italian crime movie which bored me silly. Enzo G Castellari takes the money and spends none of it on-screen. I'm now very wary of these Italian crime movies, none of which so far released on dvd are much cop with me. Please B.U start releasing some decent lost movies. BLOOD AND LACE or NIGHTMARES IN A DAMAGED BRAIN would be my choice. Another superb quality dvd of an unmemorable nothing movie.

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