Filmed in black-and-white by ace cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (whose previous credits include Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past [1947] for RKO); directed by the film noir expert Fritz Lang, the auteur of such great films noirs as Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945); and written by Vera Caspary, author of both the novel and the screenplay of Laura (1944), one of the ultimate films noir of the mid-1940s, you would think The Blue Gardenia would be a superproduction, full of acerbic dialogue, noirish photography, and taut direction. Perhaps this is one of the films where noir style as we know it is losing its grasp both on the professionals who created it and on its audience.

The Blue Gardenia is rather a pedestrian film with some wonderful acting by Anne Baxter as Norah Larkin, a pretty telephone operator sharing an apartment with Sally Ellis (Jeff Donnell) and Crystal Carpenter (Ann Sothern). Expecting to marry her soldier fiancé, who is currently overseas, Norah receives a “Dear John” letter ending their engagement. Feeling depressed, she agrees to a date with Harry Prebble, a local bon vivant who wines and dines her. He even buys her a corsage with a blue gardenia in it.

Prebble, played by Raymond Burr, is a very talented artist who is also a serious womanizer. He gets Norah drunk, and she goes to his apartment with him. When she resists his amorous advances, she (believes) she bludgeons him with a poker from his fireplace set. Thinking

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