Out now on Blu-ray from the Australian label Imprint is the wonderfully bizarre, 1958 thriller Screaming Mimi. Almost impossible to categorize, it’s part film noir, part psychological mystery, part slasher, and set in tawdry strip clubs and on menacing, dark city streets. It stars the statuesque beauty Anita Ekberg, so iconic in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Plus, it co-stars actor Phil Carey (who I watched devotedly on the soap opera One Life to Live where he played ruthless Texas oilman Asa Buchanan). Also in the film is the fabulous Gypsy Rose Lee, burlesque entertainer, author, and inspiration for the smash musical Gypsy.
The film is based on a 1949 pulp crime novel The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown about an alcoholic newspaper reporter named Bill Sweeney who is witness one night to the fourth near-victim of the killer of several women nicknamed the “Ripper.” He sees her through the glass window of her apartment in a bloody negligee when the police are arriving, with a fearsome dog at her side. When she attempts to stand, the dog jumps on her back and her nightgown falls to her feet and she is naked in the window. Sweeney decides to sober up and cover the case for his Chicago newspaper and becomes entangled with the woman in the window- an exotic dancer named Yolanda Lang. In the hard-boiled beginning of the book, Brown writes, “There’s murder before the story proper starts, and murder after it ends; the actual story begins with a naked woman and ends with one, which is a good opening and a good ending, but everything between isn’t nice. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
In the movie, Anita Ekberg plays Virginia, frolicking in the California ocean. She runs up the beach to an outside shower and is attacked by a psychotic, escaped mental patient wielding a knife. Her brother-in-law, a sculptor, emerges from the house next door and shoots the maniac, but Virginia is seriously traumatized and ironically ends up in the same nuthouse as her attacker. A psychiatrist- Dr. Greenwood (Harry Townes)- obsesses over her and they leave the hospital together and travel to San Francisco, where she gets a job dancing at “El Madhouse” run by Joann “Gypsy” Masters (Gypsy Rose Lee). The Red Norvo Trio provides the music in the joint. She is now “Yolanda Lang” and in her number, she comes onstage in a tattered dress and shackled in handcuffs. She gyrates around, losing the handcuffs and writhes up and down two hanging ropes. The crowd goes wild, especially newspaperman Bill Sweeney (Phil Carey), who writes a nightlife beat column for his paper. But her shrink Greenwood (now under the name Bill Green) is always protectively at her side. Yolanda is out walking her Great Dane “Devil” and is stabbed by a killer nicknamed the “Ripper” by the press. The dog chased him off and she was not seriously injured. As Bill investigates, he discovers a curious small statue of a screaming woman was found next to the murdered body of another dancer named Lola Lake (an uncredited Jeanne Cooper). And Yolanda was sent the same statue before she was attacked.
Columbia Pictures dumped the film in theaters on the bottom of a double-bill and the movie died a quick death at the box office. But for those of us who caught it, blurry-eyed, late night on TV, we never forgot it, and dreamed of seeing it released on home video. It finally appeared on a DVD-R in March, 2011. It was a manufactured-on-demand disc from Columbia Pictures and it was anamorphic and looked fine. This Blu-ray from Imprint really pops in sharp black and white, but is pretty bare bones- it only includes the film’s trailer as an extra.
The movie was directed by Gerd Oswald, who worked mostly on TV, directing everything from Perry Mason episodes to 14 of The Outer Limits. But he did a terrific job with the film version of A Kiss Before Dying (1956, starring Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward and based on a terrific thriller by Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby). The evocative score for Screaming Mimi is actually lifted from another Columbia film- On the Waterfront, composed by Leonard Bernstein.
Now, Anita Ekberg’s film career never really reached the heights of La Dolce Vita, although Ekberg famously remarked, “it was me who made Fellini famous, not the other way round.” Fellini used Ekberg again in a great section of Boccaccio ’70 (1963)- The Temptation of Dr. Antonio– where she comes alive off a billboard advertising milk and teaches a local prude (who wants her billboard banned) a lesson. Fellini also featured her in his film Intervista (1987). She mostly showed up as a sexy, busty, sight-gag in movies like Abbott & Costello Go to Mars (1953), Artists & Models (1955) with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Call Me Bwana (1963) with Bob Hope, and If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969). My personal favorite is Killer Nun (1979) where she plays a hateful nun named Sister Gertrude who secretly runs off to Rome on weekends and works as a prostitute to raise cash to pay for her morphine addiction. And to top that, in the movie, Joe Dallesandro plays her handsome doctor. Ekberg was fiercely outspoken but also secretly shy in real life, and when her career petered out, she retreated to a villa outside Rome with her Great Danes. How Yolanda of her.
Supposedly the Fredric Brown book was also the inspiration for Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, although, to me, that is a bit of a stretch. But in this film, Anita Ekberg cuts a striking figure on screen- she is stunningly beautiful but also haunting and quite touching. it’s a fascinating, offbeat thriller and needs to be resurrected, re-evaluated and revered.
“Screaming Mimi” is actually a World War II slang word for a German rocket which had a shrill, screaming sound when launched. But the words morphed into a phrase that described anxiety, panic and a heightened sense of hysteria. I vividly remember understanding the phrase all too well when I managed a movie theater in Provincetown in the 1970s during the nights we screened the repellent Franco Zeffirelli film- Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and I shuddered in horror in my office, trying desperately to block out the soundtrack, ready to explode in a rage-filled scream.
When it comes right down to it, we all can become a “Screaming Mimi” from time to time.
