THE BLUE GARDENIA: Women Are Not Much Like Men

In many ways The Blue Gardenia looks like a typical American film of the 1950's, three young women room who work as telephone operators share an apartment in Hollywood, one of them obsessed with her fiance´ who is serving in Korea. They are supposed to be in their early 20s, but look to be in their mid-30s. They wear cocktail dresses on dates, wisecrack with each other, and don't take their lives a bit seriously, apparently each expecting better things when the right man takes them away from all this. 

Ann Sothern and Jeff Donnell fit right into this picture, with Sothern being the slightly-older and far wisest of the three. The story kicks off when Anne Baxter, more upscale and decidedly less worldly-wise, gets a Dear Jane letter from her serviceman and is devastated. Alone, she is despondent and desperate, when the phone rings. The caller is a wolf-about-town (unknown to Baxter) who, thinking he has Ann Sothern character on the phone, invites her to join him at The Blue Gardenia for dinner. Baxter dons her glad rags, in this case a glamorous black taffeta dress and even a hat, and takes herself to the Polynesian watering hole to drown her sorrows. Raymond Burr is the suave roue´ who cannot believe his luck. He sees to it that the young beauty downs the requisite number of tropical cocktails with her meal and takes her to his apartment where he proceeds to keep the drinks coming. What follows is a harrowing scene that, although it predates "Me Too" by about 50 years, gives a pretty clear picture of coming events.

When the Raymond Burr character winds up murdered by a fireplace-poker, and Baxter has blacked out all memory of the evening, the film becomes a mystery with no solution in sight. Richard Conte, playing a newspaper columnist hot on the story, falls hard for lost little lamb (or is she?). Conte was a fine actor who went unheralded in his lifetime.

The Blue Gardenia fits into the category of film noir because it's a "B" picture in black and white in the right time frame. I see it as a "woman's" picture however. I looked through the IMDb viewer reviews and found a pithy one submitted by "Judith 333" which summed up my own response better than I could have. Judith called it a masterpiece and said, "I am surprised that so many people who review it here seem not to grasp it. They complain about lack of suspense because it doesn't use hackneyed noir film devices, but the film is not about that. It's about Anne Baxter, the world through her point of view. Her life is a beautiful dream of hopes of love and happiness for the future, which turns into a horrible nightmare that spirals downward with sickening realism and pathos. Snappy characters throughout, but they are not "wasted", miscast or otherwise ill-used. They are perfectly balanced in a skilled script that is not about actors chewing the scenery, but is a real film, an art film, by the master Fritz Lang, whose every decision in creating this film up to the smallest detail seems to me to be highly intentional. Highly recommended."

Judith 333 was surprised that so many people reviewing it seemed not to grasp it. I myself am not surprised. Most movie reviewers--even amateur ones--are men. I'm not saying all men are wrong all the time, but they see everything differently than women do.