Le crime était signé

"I Wake Up Screaming" is a weird, gaudy, creepy movie. One might call it one of a kind. But it is, in fact, not: "Vicki" is a remake. There are some differences in the storyline but it's different primarily because of casting: It's creative and bizarre in the original and pretty generic in the remake.

Carole Landis and Betty Grable have an authentically pulp look in "Wake." Jeanne Crain and Jean Peters look like sisters. They're both pretty but bland looking. Richard Boone is in the Laird Creger role. He's odd looking, to be sure. He refers to the man who brought the murdered girl from waitress to glamorous star as "pretty boy." He's prettier than Boone (who was a fine actor) but he's nothing special. His lack of color is at the heart of "Vicki's" failure.

Alexander D'Arcy looks great as the actor who also had a thing for Vicki. It's amazing that well over ten years earlier he'd played Irene vocal coach in the sublime "The Awful Truth."

Aaron Spelling (yes, THE Aaron Spelling) is effective and noirish as the whacked-out desk clerk at Vicki's apartment building. But when it comes to whacked-out, no one can top Elisha Cook, Jr., who played this role in the original.

The main problem is that anyone who's seen "I Wake Up Screaming" will know exactly what is going to happen in "Vicki." If anyone reading this happens to want to watch "Vicki" but hasn't yet seen "wake" -- please, watch the first one first.

Both have marvelously tawdry opening credits. "I Wake Up Screaming" has the better ones but "Vicki" is right in there. It's beautifully photographed by Milton Krasner.

I can't even say it's disappointing. What it does it does well enough. Surpassing the original would have taken a miracle.

A fairly close remake of the 1942 proto-noir "I Wake Up Screaming," "Vicki" was filmed and released 11 years later. During the picture's opening credits, however, with its elegant music and close-up portrait painting of a beautiful murder victim, "Vicki" may instead bring to mind another Fox noir, 1944's "Laura"; I'd swear that the typeface of the titles of the two films is even the same! "Vicki" features a cast of "lesser names" than did "IWUS," but follows the same basic plot path. Here, Jean Peters plays the title role, originally portrayed by Carole Landis, of Vicki Lynn, a pretty NYC model who is murdered while on the verge of her big Hollywood break. Jeanne Crain fills in for Betty Grable, playing her sister (a huge upgrade in terms of looks and acting ability, I feel), and Elliott Reid (I know...who?) takes over for Victor Mature, as the publicity man who gets Vicki's career started. Richard Boone here plays Ed Cornell, the maniac cop on the case (a debatable improvement on Laird Cregar's hulking presence), while future TV mogul Aaron Spelling (!) plays a wacky hotel clerk, taking the part once essayed by the great Elisha Cook, Jr. So yes, lesser names, perhaps, but the presence of Jeanne Crain, one of the greatest of screen beauties, always helps carry a picture...for this viewer, anyway. "Vicki" is a fairly compact film with little flab. It is well played by all and features a moody score by Leigh Harline. Director Harry Horner, a man better known in Hollywood for his contributions as an art director and production designer, acquits himself quite well here, lavishing great attention on his use of light and shadow. Watching the film, I was also reminded, by Carl Betz' presence as a sympathetic cop, of another Fox noir that I had recently seen, "Dangerous Crossing" (a superior film to this one), which also stars Betz and Crain. In all, "Vicki" is a lesser noir, but still great fun. Oh...at the film's tail end, one of the characters is revealed as being a nutjob for having constructed a shrine to Vicki in his living room; perhaps I should consider scrapping the Jeanne Crain shrine that I was going to build in mine....

Vicki (1953)

This film gets a bad rap. It's not brilliant, and it is a weaker version of the bold and gritty "I Wake Up Screaming," but it's beautifully filmed, tightly edited, and it has decent acting throughout.

The one acting exception might be the oddly cast main detective, who as a complex and critical role here, and who is miles from the original performer, Laird Cregar, in 1941. But on the same token I didn't think Betty Grable was convincing in the original, and the role here is filled with an appealing coolness, and a more crystalline beauty, by Jeanne Crain. And it's hard to ignore the astonishing Elisha Cook Jr. in the first version, compared to the awkward and overacted night clerk here.

Comparisons are hard to ignore because the plot is quite identical in both. It's a weird scenario overall, and it demands some forgiveness because of the trick played on the viewer by the detective. "Vicki" is told through a series of flashbacks, many of them, making for a highly constructed and rather choppy experience, which is intentional. The lead male besides the detective is a likable guy, a fairly ordinary fellow despite his position as a bigwig talent promoter in New York. When he is accused of killing the title character (the movie opens with a scene of her corpse being hauled away), it becomes a little Hitchcockian.

But psychology isn't a factor here, and neither is suspense. In fact, there isn't much to grip the viewer besides waiting to see how the plot will unfold, almost as a jigsaw puzzle where the picture in the puzzle doesn't matter so much as the shape of the pieces. Which is too bad. The elements are here for an amazing movie--and an amazing remake, even with today's style of filmmaking. It isn't a disaster, but it lacks a little on every front--except Haller's truly exceptional cinematography--and so we get a decent movie.

But if you like this at all, do see the more impressive (and also flawed) 1941 "I Wake Up Screaming," with a beefy and very different leading man in Victor Mature. And there is an undeniable influence from the slick and far better and more famous 1944 "Laura," complete with its title as a woman's name and a song being written for the movie. If you have seen either predecessor and are simply curious, you won't be ruined or angry if you watch this late noir from 1953, "Vicki." It's pretty good!

Despite showing the makings of a superior – potentially classic – film noir, Vicki falls just short of that goal. For the second time in the noir cycle, it tells the story of Vicki (or Vicky) Lynn, whose swift rise from hash-slinger to model to toast of the town ends in murder – a crime of passion. It first reached the screen in 1942 under the title I Wake Up Screaming, based on a serialized novel by Steve Fisher. Eleven years later, 20th Century Fox decided on a close remake, which obviously did not go back to the novel but simply freshened up the original script a little – some of the lines remain the same, as do occasional pieces of blocking and shooting.

We first catch site of Vicki staring out languidly from a panorama of posters and billboards that display her face to push luxury items. But almost immediately the glamour turns to ashes as we watch her carried out of her brownstone apartment on a stretcher. Her central role – the haunting linchpin of the drama – is told in flashback (and substantially expanded from that of the previous film version). The role falls to Jean Peters, whose screen career was cut short by her marriage to Howard Hughes; but here, she fails to generate half the magnetism she did in Pickup on South Street, of the same year.

The expansion of Vicki's part is only one of the subtle shifts among the dynamics of the characters. Jeanne Crain, in the early twilight of her stardom, portrays the sensible-shoes sister who cautions Vicki against the false lures of the big town but helps track down her killer. As the publicist who first dangled those lures, making Vicki a shooting star, Elliott Reid can't work up much sympathy as the prime suspect (he's too weak and generic an actor). So the movie's impact rests principally on the homicide cop who carries a secret, smoldering torch for the dead girl – in this version, Richard Boone. Again expanded from the first filming, the performance may be one of the hard-to-cast Boone's best. Not yet victim to the character-actor ugliness that was to befall him, he shoulders his obsession heavily, almost sadly (though he plays much nastier than Laird Cregar did in 1942). And in the small but pivotal role of the desk clerk in the sisters' digs, the earlier Elisha Cook, Jr. is supplanted by Aaron Spelling; Spelling, who would become one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Hollywood, can't dispel the spell Cook works on us (and excuse those irresistible puns).

The emphasis in Vicki ultimately falls differently from the way it did in I Wake Up Screaming. In 1942, it was offered as a stylish mystery, a Manhattan whodunit. By the early fifties, it had become a story of obsession – a psychological thriller a la Laura, with the same skittishness about the fleeting nature of fame. Whether this change of tone was intentional remains moot, since the script underwent no major renovation. It seems largely the result of the change in cast, with the various roles filled by performers with different strengths – and possibly of directorial nuance. It's a shame this movie stays in obscurity, overshadowed by its forerunner; while neither version achieves the status of Laura, Vicki is by a small margin the more interesting of the two recensions.

Billboard and print model is found dead in her apartment; the New York City police get busy interviewing suspects, though the lieutenant on the case has personal reasons for wanting to find the killer. Adaptation of Steve Fisher's novel "I Wake Up Screaming" (its original title uncredited, perhaps because it was already filmed as such in 1941 with Betty Grable) gets strictly minor-league treatment here. Dwight Taylor's screenplay is uneven; director Harry Horner tends to overcompensate for the script's deficiencies by encouraging his cast to ham it up. Jean Peters, who looks like Jessica Walter and talks tough like Susan Hayward, was an odd choice to play the doomed, would-be starlet. Peters isn't the wide-eyed innocent/hash-slinging waitress the plot suggests, instead coming on with both barrels loaded. As her sister, Jeanne Crain has more of the Cinderella quality Peters should be projecting, and hers is the only substantial acting in the picture. Playing the gruff, snarling lieutenant, Richard Boone is way over-the-top, as is Aaron Spelling in an hysterical role as a wormy desk clerk. Just silly enough to be watchable, though it is never explained why glamorous Vicki is living in that dumpy apartment--nor how her photograph pre-death has managed to land on the cover of every single magazine at the newsstand.