Screaming Mimi

Bodacious, gloriously-maned Ekberg and her magnificent dog Devil (dubbed a great dame and a Great Dane)are the goodies in this fifties pop-psych piece with its is-she/isn't-she-crazy scenario. Looking like a gorgeous amazonian goddess (purportedly only 5'7" without heels), the mighty Ekberg makes all the human males in her orbit look mousy and malleable as she sashays from loony bin to gin den, her emotions and motivations as mysterious as the titular statuette around which it all revolves. The movie has an offbeat tone and texture and a tendency to unbalance the viewer with the unexpected:

asylum-escapee Ekberg doing her shackled-slave dance routine in El Madhouse nightclub; Gypsy Rose Lee putting the blame on Mame in an awkward, abortive fringe-dress shimmy; the famed stripster's shacked-up status with a cute little hipster. Fans of such censor-bound lesbian depictions should love this cinematic morsel, as will devotees of no-budget noir!

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.

How did I miss this drive-in special back in 1958 when I hit those passion pits weekly. Yeah, it's lurid to the max, but it's also got some kinky touches carefully hidden during the Age of Ike when sex was summed up by Debbie and Eddie. Note the not-so-subtle innuendo that Lee's character has more interest in the cigarette girl than in handsome stud Carey. And what is that s&m chain doing on Ekberg's wrists as she writhes around during her so-called stage act, which we get to see not once but twice as though we may not have believed it the first time around. Then too, what's with Towne's kinky doctor who can't seem to decide just which of Ekberg's startling features he's most interested in. And finally, how did this bit of bizzaro escape the confines of a respectable studio, Columbia, and the co-producing team of Brown and Fellows. Say what you will, despite the sleaze, this low-budget piece of 50's movie-making has more inherent interest than 90% of its bigger contemporaries.

I expect cult director Gerd Oswald is responsible for taking up the challenge and turning what could have been a routine crime drama into a genuine curiosity piece. Just watch his direction of the movie's centerpiece, and I don't mean Ekberg's Amazonian proportions-- in fact, her best scenes are those standing around looking comatose. No, this is familiar character actor Harry Towne's masterpiece. He was always good at slightly off-center characters, but here he out-does himself, delivering a masterfully kinky performance that really defies description. I've seen nothing quite like it in years of movie watching. Just what is going on inside those many tormented expressions. Watch the scene where he stands outside the colloquy between Carey and Ekberg when she must decide where her allegiance lies. Note the subtle array of emotions that react to what is being said. He could have just stood there and picked up his paycheck, but he didn't. Instead he created one of the more interesting obsessions to appear on the big screen in some time. I hope there's a special place in Hollywood heaven for unsung actors like Towne who deliver so much and get back so little. Anyhow the movie remains an interesting piece of esoterica, even if the title likely drove away more people than it brought in.

This film could be considered one of the missing links between American film noir and the suspense and horror films that would become so popular in continental Europe over the next two decades (i.e. the German "krimis", the Italian "gialli", the horror films of Bava and Argento). It's technically a late period film noir, but rather than having the traditional pessimistic tone and hard-boiled, voice-over narrative, it is completely off-the-wall and chock-full of the suggested depravity and lurid psycho-babble that would characterize the later European films. Interestingly, it was apparently based on the same Fredric Brown novel as Dario Argento's "Bird with Crystal Plummage" (although at least one of these movie was obviously only loosely based on the source novel because they don't really resemble each other too much). It also features European sex symbol Anita Ekberg as a voluptuous stripper (who looks like she could eat Edwige Fenech or one of the other later European sex kittens). Rare for the time, it even has a psycho-killer, called "The Ripper", who leaves the epononymous "screaming mimi" dolls next to his/her butchered female victims. Not a great movie perhaps, but I really dug it.

ANITA EKBERG almost sleepwalks through her role of a disturbed woman who somehow finds herself in the midst of murder and mayhem in SCREAMING MIMI ('58), the title referring to a statue that is some sort of fetish that turns up at every killing. Miss Ekberg is also a statue here, towering above most of the cast except for PHILIP CAREY, the handsome male lead who shares one thing in common with Anita--he's a lifeless presence.

It's hard to get involved with these characters, especially since the story itself is a murky enough affair with some psycho-babble underpinnings in the convoluted storyline. On the plus side, the B&W photography of rainswept streets and dark shadows is impressive and the production aspects aren't too shabby.

GYPSY ROSE LEE manages to be lively enough as a nightclub proprietress, but her shimmy to "Put the Blame On Mame" is a pretty sorry attempt at the song made famous by Rita Hayworth.

The story starts out on a promising note, but quickly becomes an inept psychological thriller under Gerd Oswald's routine direction and moves toward a conclusion that lacks whatever punch it might have had because much of the disclosed information was already revealed.

This is an easily forgotten item that capitalizes solely on ANITA EKBERG's physical charms which are an eyeful for male fans but her acting is sub-par for a story that requires much more from an actress than mere physical presence and an overly generous bosom. She was much more fortunate a few years later to find herself in "La Dolce Vita". As for PHILIP CAREY, his stone-faced approach to acting doesn't help matters here.

Summing up: Hopelessly confusing and dull, when it should have been tight and suspenseful.