I Wake Up Screaming (1941)

Film: I Wake Up Screaming (1941)
Stars: Betty Grable, Victor Mature, Carole Landis, Laird Cregar
Director: H. Bruce Humberstone
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Betty Grable-click here to learn more about Ms. Grable (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Obviously when it comes to creating a list of 12 famous sex symbols of the Classical Hollywood era, you're going to have to make cuts.  Hollywood is littered with beautiful women, oftentimes ones who are only appreciated (especially in their era) for their beauty, and so while I am very happy with the twelve women we'll be profiling this year, there were cuts I really wanted to include.  Toward the top of that list was Carole Landis.  Landis, almost completely forgotten today, was the sort of star that almost became a superstar in her era.  She starred in two films with Betty Grable in 1941, both today's I Wake Up Screaming and Moon Over Miami (both big hits), but unlike Grable, she didn't turn into a supernova as a result of her time at Fox.  This is almost entirely due to the casting couch, as Landis was sleeping with studio chief Darryl Zanuck, and when that affair fizzled, so did her career.  Landis would go from being a headliner in movies that might rival someone as legendary as Betty Grable to, at the end of her life just six years later, making Poverty Row films & committing suicide at the age of 29.  So today, while obviously we continue our look at the career of Betty Grable, I also wanted to acknowledge Landis, who herself was a sex symbol that Hollywood never gave the respect she craved.

(Spoilers Ahead) I Wake Up Screaming is a 1940's noir and as such, there's a lot of plot, so I'll try to summarize this as succinctly as possible.  We open with a beautiful murdered model named Vicky (Landis), who has in death become a sort of perverse tabloid sensation.  Initially we flashback both through visions from her promoter Frankie (Mature) and her younger sister Jill (Grable).  They're telling the police about Vicky's life before she died, but something is off in their story, and the police seem to know it.  We learn that Vicky was basically just a waitress with a pretty face but Frankie turned her into something of a local star, and she was about to head to Hollywood to use her newfound notoriety to translate into something more substantial.  The police are following both Jill & Frankie, particularly a portly, creepy-seeming detective named Ed Cornell (Cregar), who Jill remembered stalking she and Vicky before Vicky's death.  Cornell seems determined to pin the crime on Frankie, whom we're expecting is innocent, but the film's writers do a good enough job to ensure that we don't automatically discount him as the killer.  We find out eventually that it was the doorman who killed Vicky, but also that Cornell knew he was the killer the whole time.

This is where the film takes its best, and most shocking detour.  Cornell at this point has been super suspicious, but it wasn't clear why, and it felt like the directors were trying heavily to imply he was the one who really killed Vicky, and was trying to pin the crime on Frankie to get out of the crime.  What actually happened was that Cornell had been obsessed with Vicky since she was a waitress, visiting her and promising her a better life, but when Frankie actually delivered on that life, Cornell never forgave him.  We enter Cornell's apartment, and it's covered with framed photos of Vicky's various modeling shoots, a man obsessed with a dead woman whom he came close to securing for himself, but then had Frankie break him away.  In his mind, it was Frankie who killed Vicky because he took her away from him, never minding that of course Vicky had an actual murderer whom he let roam free.

This twist is awesome, and one I didn't see coming, and kind of makes the film.  It's short (82 minutes), and other than Cregar there's no truly spellbinding acting in this film, but no one is bad either, and even thankless roles like those given to Mature & Grable come out all right.  But the script is so compact, and really fun, and that ending is so twisted it's kind of hard not to love it.  I watched as Mature entered Cornell's apartment assuming he was in on the crime, and instead I got the sort of ending that I'd expect from a noir thriller in the 1990's, not in the 1940's where literally a film like Detour you have to have a fake ending just to get past the censors.

Grable rarely did drama, either before or after this, so it's interesting to see her outside of the typical rom-coms and musical numbers that would become her stock-in-trade.  She's good, though a bit mousy for my taste, and overshadowed by Landis (who gets the better part).  Landis does her best Ann Sheridan impression (Sheridan would have been an awesome Vicky), and is memorable despite being dead for most of the movie.  We won't be profiling Moon Over Miami (anyone who has seen in it can chime in in the comments, though), but if this is what happens when Grable was opposite female costars I get why she would spend most of the next decade not sharing the spotlight with other actresses.  Next week we'll jump significantly further into Grable's career, when she was the highest-paid woman in America and Landis would be near death's door.