Review of I Wake Up Screaming (1941) by Dalia D — 26 Sep 2007

I Wake Up Screaming has a less literal title; no one wakes up screaming in this movie and in fact, I don't think anyone actually screams either. It's a much more sneaky kind of scary, less frenetic than Sorry, Wrong Number, but more sick and eerie. This is largely thanks to the very disturbing Laird Cregar, a detective looking for the murderer of a sparkling (and again, bratty) wanna-be starlet (played to the nines by Carol Landis). The detective wants nothing better than to pin the rap on suave-as-silk sports promoter Frankie Christopher (what a name!), played, again to the nines, by Victor Mature (what a name!), who discovered the little celebrity when she was nothing but a "hash-slinger" (diner waitress). Now that she's dead, Christopher is free to pursue his real infatuation: the starlet's more subtle stenographer sister (Betty Grable, who, next to Carol Landis, looks dull as dishwater).

There are other suspects in the case, but the detective ignores them, hulking around in the dark, prowling the streets and sneaking into Christopher's apartment to watch him sleeping (hence the title, I guess, although Mature's too tough to play a man who screams). In a climax that renders all of Hitchcock's creepizoids completely impotent by comparison (I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Hitchcock learned much of his art from this movie), Christopher breaks into the detective's apartment, finding that the entire thing is a shrine dedicated to his dead starlet: there is an altar with fresh flowers and candles beneath her headshot, and the walls are lining with newspaper cuttings and all of the advertisements in which she had modeled. It turns out that our detective/stalker had been stalking our starlet back when she was just a mere hash-slinger, but since Christopher got it into her head that she could be a star, she would have nothing to do with him. He knows that the real murderer was the doorman of her building, but he let him off and willfully intended Christopher to get back at him. Before Christopher can bring him to justice, the detective has swallowed a draught of poison, leaving Christopher and Dull as Dishwater to live happily ever after. Hitchcock, on the other hand, would never have left his audience feeling so comfortable at the very end.