Main Cast: Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, Raymond Burr, Jeff Donnell
Release Year: 1953
Country: US
Run Time: 90 minutes
Plot
After learning that her boyfriend, a GI in Korea, has found someone else, Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter) impulsively agrees to meet womanizer Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr) for dinner. Norah allows herself to get drunk and accept Prebble's invitation to his apartment. When he tries to force himself on her, she hits him with a poker. Unfortunately, Prebble is found dead the next morning, and Norah, not even remembering how she got home, thinks that she killed him. Meanwhile, newspaperman Casey Mayo (Richard Conte), looking for an angle, invites the "Blue Gardenia Murderess" to turn herself in to him. The high point of the film is the interplay between the vulnerable Baxter and Burr at his smarmiest. ~ Steve Press, All Movie Guide
Review
The Blue Gardenia contains one of the purest examples of Fritz Lang's ability to transform commonplace pieces of household technology (such as clocks and telephones) into engines of destiny. Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter), at a moment of weakness (she's just read a letter from her boyfriend breaking off their relationship), answers a phone call meant for someone else and finds herself on a blind date with Raymond Burr's sleazy Harry Prebble, who ends up dead at the end of the night. In interviews, Lang often dismissed this film as a job-for-hire, but its recurring image of the telephone as a sinister conduit of possibly fatal information (and misinformation) remains intriguing. Decked out in a wonderfully tacky 1950s milieu featuring a tiki bar with Nat "King" Cole on the bandstand, The Blue Gardenia subtly questions that decade's mass-produced cultural blandness by exposing the dark side that's never very far below the surface, at least in Lang's films. ~ Tom Vick, All Movie Guide
Daniel Hall - Art Director, Maria P. Donovan - Costume Designer, Emmett Emerson - First Assistant Director, Fritz Lang - Director, Edward Mann - Editor, Raoul Kraushaar - Composer (Music Score), Lester Lee - Songwriter, Bob Russell - Songwriter, Gene Hibbs - Makeup, James Barker - Makeup, Nick Musuraca - Cinematographer, Alex Gottlieb - Producer, Willis Cook - Special Effects, Ben Winkler - Sound/Sound Designer, Charles Hoffman - Screenwriter, Vera Caspary - Short Story Author
