Screaming Mimi (1958)

Director:

Gerd Oswald

Writers:

Robert Blees (screenplay)
Fredric Brown (novel)

Release Date:

8 August 1958 (Finland)

Genre:

Drama | Film-Noir | Thriller

Tagline:

Suspense around every curve!

Plot:

Exotic dancer Virginia Wilson (Anita Ekberg) sees a man get shot moments after he tries to knife her in a shower (two years before "Psycho")...

Plot Keywords:

Murder | Exotic Dancer | Nightclub | Psychiatrist | Dancer

Cast

Anita Ekberg	...	Virginia Wilson / Yolanda Lange
Philip Carey	...	Bill Sweeney
Gypsy Rose Lee	...	Joann 'Gypsy' Masters
Harry Townes	...	Dr. Greenwood / Bill Green
Linda Cherney	...	Ketti
Romney Brent	...	Charlie Weston
Red Norvo	...	Red Yost
Red Norvo Trio	...	Musical Ensemble
Alan Gifford	...	Captain Bline
Oliver McGowan	...	Walter Krieg
Stephen Ellsworth	...	Dr. Joseph Robinson
Vaughn Taylor	...	Raoul Reynarde
Frank J. Scannell	...	Paul, the Bartender

Runtime:

USA:79 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15

Company:

Sage Productions

Trivia:

The Red Norvo Trio (the musicians in Joann's club) is really a quartet.

Quotes:

Bill Sweeney: How tall are you, Yolanda?
Virginia Wilson aka Yolanda Lange: With heels or without?
Bill Sweeney: With anyone. Me, for instance.

Movie Connections:

Version of L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo (1970)

Soundtrack:

Sweet Genevieve

Late noir oddly recalls haunting cheapies of a decade earlier

Somehow surmounting a creaky script rooted in some crackpot psychiatry, Screaming Mimi creates a somnambulistic, doom-laden mood that keeps you watching, bemused. And that's not easily explained.

The director, Gerd Oswald, was one of the lesser expatriates from Germany, a pedestrian workman who the year before helmed Crime of Passion, a jejune noir starring Barbara Stanwyck, Sterling Hayden and Raymond Burr; it's hard to extinguish the sizzle in that kind of cast, but Oswald did a pretty fair job of it.

In Screaming Mimi, he was saddled with the sort of rounded-up cast that doesn't incite box office stampedes. Anita Ekberg, - the Swedish bombshell with the storied bosom - proves oddly affecting in the numbed-out role she's called on to play. And society stripper Gypsy Rose Lee supplies a welcome bit of sass as proprietress of a nightclub called El Madhouse. But the male leads emerged from the La Brea tar pits of Hollywood anonymity. Philip Carey passes as sort of a poor man's Gary Merrill (that is to say, absolutely penniless), while Harry Townes, an even more faceless actor, makes up the roster.

The plot? Ekberg, an exotic `dancer' who writhes about suggestively in an act with bondage overtones, is visiting her sculptor-stepbrother on the California coast when she's almost knifed by an escapee from a nearby asylum, whom the brother promptly shoots dead. In consequence, Ekberg winds up in the selfsame asylum where her smitten shrink (Townes) arranges her release and, in a development reminiscent of The Blue Angel or Sunset Boulevard, leaves his post to manage her career (as `Yolanda Lang').

Then one night she's stabbed (again), but her vicious great dane wards off the attacker. Carey, a columnist whose curiously broad beat includes night clubs and crime in the night, grows intrigued, and stumbles onto the fact that both Ekberg and an earlier victim possessed strange statuettes called Screaming Mimis....

It's a jumble, all right, but it manages to hold some interest. A large part of the credit must, by default, fall to top-notch cinematographer Burnett Guffey, by far the most talented factor in the movie. (He films one scene in the light from a flashing neon sign, alternating between a two-shot and daringly long intervals of pitch blackness.) The movie shares a restive, oneiric quality with certain low-budget noirs from a decade earlier, that again compelled more attention than they deserved. Go figure.