Just two days after we watched The Scarf (1951) along comes another case of not "whodunnit" but "dididoit" or better still, "doirememberdoing it." Another case of amnesia, this one implicating Hollywood stalwarts Vera Caspary and Fritz Lang, who should have known better. This time it's Norah Larkin, a telephone operator well played by Anne Baxter, who picks up a poker and takes a crack at wolf/would-be-date-rapist/nasty-character Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr) and then blacks out. Another case of "stress amnesia," I suppose. After many twists it turns out that Norah may have struck Prebble but not hard enough to finish him off -- the real murderer was another of Prebble's victims, a seduced and abandoned ex-girlfriend.
I have to say, once again, that Norah's amnesia seems less like a medical condition than a very very tired plot gimmick. Memory is lost and regained o so conveniently. But the larger implications of the relation of memory to sense of self are left unacknowledged and unexplored.
Just as in The Scarf, Norah recovers her memory and gets the guy -- in this case Casey Mayo, the reliable Richard Conte, who plays a gossip columnist who has just enough brain to solve the mystery.
The Blue Gardenia has been called "feminist," but if it is, its feminism is mild and unobtrusive. Is it that Norah's roommate Crystal Carpenter, played by wisecrack-heavy Ann Sothern, keeps her ex-husband and present-boyfriend around strictly for sexual purposes? But that's all the film offers in the way of strong women; Norah herself, after her one moment of reflexive poker-wielding, becomes passive, emotional, incapable of taking action. Passive, she leaves it to others to clear her of guilt.
Your survey of amnesia in film is definitive and much appreciated. We need similar treatment of two other hoary plot gimmicks: doppelgangers and plastic surgery. Thank you.
Posted by: Brace Beemer | April 03, 2017 at 05:26 PM