I Wake Up Screaming
1941, directed by H. Bruce Humberstone
When all is said and done, I Wake Up Screaming leaves us with one burning question: who exactly was supposed to wake up screaming? At one point Frankie Christopher wakes up to find Inspector Cornell in his bedroom, but he plays it cool and never screams. Later on Frankie wakes his friend Larry Evans the same way in the man’s bedroom, but he too takes it calmly. The murder victim Vicky Lynn never fears for her life until she’s killed, and when it happens she’s been awake for a while. Her sister Jill isn’t prone to anxiety. You could imagine the doorman Harry Williams, the murderer, waking up screaming – he always looks a bit frightened – but that doesn’t fit either; the movie isn’t about him.
The only person left is Ed Cornell. Who would ever think someone so intimidating would wake up terrified? But the title doesn’t necessarily speak of fear. The story ends with a twist, revealing a vulnerable character behind Cornell’s tough facade, someone who may well wake up screaming with helpless rage. In the end the film is strangely sympathetic to Cornell, and its diminished emphasis on the murderer confirms that it’s interested in something beyond the usual judgments of good and evil that define so many crime mysteries.
Cornell makes a formidable first impression, his imposing face emerging from the darkness to stare at Vicky through the diner’s window. His appearance arouses curiosity and fear, and it’s a shock when he matches the threatening voice behind the spotlight at the police interrogation. Cornell takes such delight in persecuting Frankie Christopher that it’s a thrill to watch him, even if he’s railroading the unfortunate promoter. He plays the villain’s part to the end, but when he accuses Frankie Christopher in his dying monologue, there’s an unanswerable logic to his argument. Everything he says in the last scene is accurate.
Frankie admits he exploited Vicky. He plays the hero, but he’s clearly unscrupulous. He’s abusive to Harry Williams even before the young man commits a crime. Though he’s generous to the retired boxer outside the Pegasus Club, he’s responsible for that man’s disability. He calls Jill the “sourpuss sister” behind her back. He’s a believable character with contradictory qualities: conceited, smug, and dishonest, but likable enough that most viewers won’t begrudge him his happy romance with Jill. Nevertheless, when Cornell upbraids him at the climax, for once in the history of movies the villain stands on higher ground than the hero because his motives are better. Cornell was wrong to frame Christopher for murder, but now he’s lost that battle, while Christopher’s wrongs remain unacknowledged.
What is so wrong, though, with promoting a young woman to stardom? Vicky had limited prospects as a waitress, and Frankie gave her the chance to follow her dreams and work in Hollywood. It’s only an accident of circumstance that a jealous young doorman murdered her. Frankie can rationalize his work, but the movie puts everything he does to Vicky in a broader perspective. For every rising star who succeeds, many lives are damaged by the culture of glamor. It’s unsustainable, and even those who succeed are infantilized. When Jill asks Vicky what her new friends are doing for her, the answer makes her sound like a little girl playing a fantasy: “They’re going to glamorize me!”
Glamor can be defined as glorifying its object beyond the normal bounds of love or approval. It turns the glamorized person into an idol or a fetish, like the way Cornell makes his home into a temple to Vicky. By definition it’s impossible for everyone to be glamorous, because glamor implies elevation above the norm. Glamor presents itself as above life; it is always a surfeit, more than our allotted share. It must have existed in past centuries, but until the modern age it was inconceivable that masses of people would aspire to possess it at the same time. This is the gift of Hollywood, which taught its audience that everyone can reach for the stars and, through glamor or heroism, can become larger than life. It might appear to be an equalizing message, opposed to the elevation of a select few, but in fact this gospel of glamor worsens inequality because it teaches people to idolize the most successful. Everyone else can just pretend.
The opening and closing titles of I Wake Up Screaming are printed in stylized marquee lights, the kind that draw people into Broadway theaters and large cinemas. A popular expression for glamor is to “have one’s name in lights”, so that the titles hint at the film’s subject. Though the action only enters Times Square briefly when Jill acts the part of a reporter at the florist shop, constellations of city lights often fill the background. All the bright lights suggest a hotbed of glamor, at least from the perspective of a small-town American audience who might be drawn to New York City, like Vicky, for a more exciting life. I Wake Up Screaming argues against the Hollywood ideal of glamor, yet contrary to the sensational tone of its title it doesn’t scream – it embeds its point quietly in a suspenseful story of humanized characters.
The marquee lights and Vicky’s contract are not the only allusions to Hollywood. The theme for Jill and Frankie’s romance is the “Over the Rainbow” melody used two years earlier in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz. It’s not only that “Over the Rainbow” comes from Hollywood, but that its original usage critiqued excesses of fantasy. It expresses Dorothy’s wish for a life beyond the ordinary, much like the glamor that so often enticed Hollywood’s audience. It’s ironic that it’s applied to Jill instead of Vicky, except that Dorothy comes to learn the folly of looking beyond her fair share of life. Jill appreciates that lesson from the outset. Unlike her sister, who goes out with Frankie to be seen, she goes with him to enjoy his company. Whereas Vicky became an actress because she craved attention, Jill’s only aspiration to act is to pose as a journalist at the flower shop (in the Theater District, significantly), playing a small role for a private audience only because it needs to be done.
It’s paradoxical that I Wake Up Screaming, like The Wizard of Oz and other Hollywood films, is critical of the values promoted in the very studios where it was made. This is not altogether unusual. The best Hollywood films were made with a social conscience that often stemmed not only from writers and directors but from producers and executives who may have genuinely wanted to make a positive influence. Plenty of movies did promote ideals of glamor or heroism, but those were also side products arising from the culture of celebrity that Hollywood spawned. During the Studio Era it wasn’t altogether rare for Hollywood to offer correctives to its own negative effects.
It’s also ironic that the more down-to-earth sister is played by Betty Grable, who was much more an icon of Hollywood glamor than Carole Landis, who plays Vicky. This film however precedes Grable’s extraordinary fame as a pin-up girl when soldiers carried millions of photos of her in a bathing suit to World War II. There’s no reason someone with her looks and talent couldn’t play a more ordinary type. It’s important that neither beauty nor sex alone is synonymous with glamor. Glamor, rather, is a surplus quality, an idealized abstraction that creates a hierarchy akin to the gap between gods and mortals.
There’s a curious pattern in I Wake Up Screaming that points indirectly at the damaging effects of Hollywood’s message of glamor. The characters are always intruding on each other’s privacy. Cornell shows up in Frankie’s bedroom at night, Frankie appears at Larry Evans’ bedside, Cornell barges in on Jill’s flat, Harry Williams trespasses in the sisters’ home before the murder, and Frankie confronts Cornell in the latter’s home at the end. Frankie and his two friends each get keys to Vicky and Jill’s apartment, and Larry breaks into it through a window (with Vicky’s permission). Cornell imposes himself to hitch a ride in Frankie’s car, and he plays a peeping Tom at Vicky’s diner. All of these violations of privacy are a correlative for the way Hollywood, at its worst, trespasses on people’s minds, playing with our innermost desires as it encourages us to reach beyond ordinary life for something unattainable.
CONNECTIONS:
The Wizard of Oz – “Over the Rainbow” song linked to a wish for glamor
Brief Encounter – Lead couple watches a fictional movie titled Flames of Passion in a cinema
I Knew Her Well – Title where the identity of the “I” is in question
Mulholland Drive – Young woman drawn to the big city by deceptive dreams of glamor
Inland Empire – Hollywood as an invasive force colonizing the private areas of people’s minds
NOTE:
A few hidden jokes in or associated with I Wake Up Screaming:
- After Jill knocks out Inspector Cornell to let Frankie escape, she misdirects Cornell’s partner through a false door that traps him behind a fold-down bed. The officer is named Murphy, and this type of bed is called a “Murphy bed”.
- Jill accompanies Frankie to a public swimming pool on the elaborate premise that it’s a habit of his stemming from a deprived childhood. His belabored excuse masks the almost certain fact that the pool itself is an excuse to show off Betty Grable’s legs.
- Some dvds include a deleted scene where Jill, selling phonograph records in a department store, entertains an elderly customer by singing a song called “Daddy” to him. When he doesn’t buy the record she suggests another song called “Beat Me, Daddy”. The scene is so ridiculous and unnecessary that one may bet that the studio demanded a musical number to show off Grable’s talents, and the filmmakers, knowing it would never fit, did their absolute worst to ensure its omission.