The Blue Gardenia (1953)

Film: The Blue Gardenia (1953)

Stars: Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, Raymond Burr, Jeff Donnell, Nat King Cole

Director: Fritz Lang

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ann Sothern: click here to learn more about Ms. Sothern (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week when we talked about Ann Sothern's career with Words and Music, I noted that her celebrity was starting to wane with the Maisie films no longer in production.  However, Sothern's career would hit its low point in the next few years.  Despite critical hosannas for A Letter to Three Wives, arguably her magnum opus as an actress (she wasn't nominated for an Oscar but should've been), coming out to critical acclaim & commercial success in 1949, her health overcame any possibility at a comeback.  Sothern battled hepatitis for three years, causing MGM to cancel her contract (which was legal to do at the time), and leaving her flat broke.  During that time frame, Sothern barely worked, and by 1953 was in desperate need of money, only doing supporting work in films like today's The Blue Gardenia because she needed to pay her mounting debts.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about three women who live together, including Crystal (Sothern), a flirtatious girl-about-town and her primmer friend Norah (Baxter), who is pining for her soldier fiancé to return from the Korean War.  When it turns out that her soldier will not return, and has in fact run off with another woman, Norah decides to spend the night being romanced by a known playboy Harry Prebble (Burr).  After getting drunk with Harry, she goes back to his place, and he attempts to rape her, at which point she hits him over the head.  The story blacks out from there, but the next morning Harry is dead, and Norah assumes that she killed him.  So do the cops, who find her shoes at the place, and along with reporter Casey Mayo (Conte), look for the shoes' owner in a macabre twist on the Cinderella story.  Wracked with guilt, eventually Norah comes forward, but as we learn in the film's final moments, it was another scorned love (whom the censors wouldn't be able to say was pregnant out-of-wedlock, but any viewer can see that's the case in plain sight based on her dialogue), who killed Harry when he refused to marry her, with a passed out Norah nearby to take the blame.  The film ends with Norah & Casey both free to pursue a romance themselves, Norah moving on.

As you can tell from that description, this is not Ann Sothern's movie-she is very much the supporting player in this picture, though you'd be forgiven for wishing she wasn't.  Sothern's work is the best of the bunch, giving a sass from the sidelines that was her trademark.  Baxter at its center, never a subtle actress, cannot handle the weight of playing the bereft Norah, portraying her as nearly inhuman as the movie movies on, certainly not someone that would plausibly stay under the radar of the police as they frequently find their way in her path.

Therefore I don't subscribe to the critical reclamation of this particular movie.  In 1953, this film received lousy reviews but many have credited it in the years since as a dark noir, one that feels like a solid indictment of the McCarthy era...but I don't buy it.  Baxter, an actress occasionally capable of greatness (specifically her two Oscar-nominated roles), is too stylized to land her part, and the movie is too realistic to be camp...as a result it comes across as a lousy melodrama.  Unfortunately for our star this month, this meant that Ann Sothern would not get a big film comeback...but within a few months, television would prove that she wouldn't need one to get back into the spotlight.