SCREAMING MIMI (1958)

Virginia (Anita Ekberg), a buxom blonde exotic dancer, is staying in a beach cottage when, as she starts to take an outdoor shower, she is attacked by a knife-wielding escapee from a nearby asylum. Charlie, a sculptor and her older stepbrother, shoots him dead from the cottage door, but Virginia is in hysterics and is sent to a sanitarium (the same one the maniac escaped from) in "deep traumatic shock," thinking somehow that she was the one who attacked someone with a knife. She is assigned to Dr. Greenwood (Harry Townes) who becomes obsessed with her, to the point where, when she is released, he quits his job to be her full-time caretaker—and agent, getting her a dancing gig at El Madhouse, a sleazy club run by Gypsy Masters (Gypsy Rose Lee, essentially playing herself). He also becomes a Svengali-figure to her; she seems to both need him and resent him. Masters gets an entertainment reporter named Bill (Philip Carey) to give her new star some newspaper coverage, and Bill gets involved with her, first because of her looks, then later due to her obvious vulnerability. Later, Virginia is attacked on the streets by a figure with a knife; she survives and the police assume she was a victim of "The Ripper," who killed Lola, another buxom dancer, a few weeks earlier. As Bill digs into Virginia's background, he discovers something odd linking her and Lola: the presence at the scene of the attack of a small sculpted figure of a screaming woman—which we know to have been produced by Virginia's stepbrother.

That’s about where the narrative stopped making sense to me, though there’s still quite a bit of movie left. One problem is that there are a number of plot elements that are either sketchy or completely undeveloped: the character of the stepbrother who turns out to be a red herring, the amount of time that passes between chunks of narrative, the motivations of any number of characters. The doctor is the most ambiguous character of all, and I never did figure out if he was supposed to be "good" or "bad." In a better movie, this could all have been harnessed in the service of a compelling psychological thriller, but here the director, Gerd Oswald, seems more interested in highlighting kinky plotlines just for exploitation. For example, Ekberg looks great but she's not the best actress, so I couldn't tell if Virginia's various moods and actions were plot-driven or just the result of Ekberg giving a weak (or weakly directed) performance. Frankly, all the actors feel low-energy and at sea, even Gypsy Rose Lee who you can tell is trying but is getting nothing from the director. Her brief rendition of "Put the Blame on Mame" is surprisingly bland. We discover, out of the blue, that Gypsy is a lesbian—when Bill goes to Gypsy's apartment, he finds her young companion there and feeling distinctly out of place, says, "Sorry, I didn’t realize it was just tea for two"—but nothing is done with this detail. Even worse is the Screaming Mimi figure which seems to have been tossed into the mix just to give the movie a title. (To be fair, this film is based on a novel by Fredric Brown, so some of these problems might arise directly from the original source.) Parts of this are low-rent fun—for example, Ekberg's vaguely S&M dance with chains—but overall, a disappointment even for fans of drive-in B-movies. [DVD]