richard conte

blue gardenia poster

Three women live together in a ridiculously large apartment. Seriously, there is a kitchen, a bathroom, and this massive living area, but no bedrooms. The ladies all sleep on pull-out-style beds in the gigantic living room. A room that could have easily been converted into at least a couple of bedrooms. I think the film wants us to believe these ladies aren’t rich; they can only afford a studio apartment for the three of them. But it also needs to block them in interesting ways. The three of them need to be filmed in different spaces and not be all crowded together. So we get this gigantic living space.

Sorry, that kind of thing drives me a little crazy. Now where was I?

Oh yes, these three women – Crystal (Ann Southern), Sally (Jeff Donnell), and Norah (Anne Baxter)—all work for a telephone company as operators. They have varying relationships with men. Crystal is dating her ex-husband (because when they were married, he had all the faults of a husband, but now that they’re just dating, he has all the perks of a boyfriend). Sally mostly stays home reading detective novels, (but when the phone rings, she announces – “If that’s for me, I’m in! No matter who it is.”) Norah is in love with a man stationed in Korea.

All three are constantly hit on by Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr), a skeezy pinup girl artist, who tries his luck with any and all girls. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t care who he makes it with as long as he’s making it with someone.

When Norah gets a letter from her boyfriend telling her he’s met someone else, she agrees to go out with Harry. He takes her to the titular restaurant and plies her with drinks. She has a good time, and he takes her home. Before he can make his moves, she passes out on the couch. But he’s not the type of guy to let a little blackout rob him of a good time. She wakes up enough to fight him off. She picks up a fireplace poker, and…the film fades to black. The next morning she finds herself in bed with no memory of what happened. He doesn’t wake up at all. He’s found dead by the maid.

The rest of the film finds Norah trying to figure out just what happened, all the time thinking she must have killed him. This probably counts as a spoiler, but about 40 minutes into the film, I turned to my wife and said, “I don’t think she killed him.” Norah is just too nice. She’s too good of a girl to have killed a man like that. And the fact that the film faded to black before we ever saw her strike a blow made me think there must have been someone else.

At some point Casey May (Richard Conte) enters the picture. He’s a journalist chasing the story. After writing a few front-page stories (and here’s another point of contention for me – all the front pages on his newspaper are just headlines printed in massive type; there are no pictures, no actual story, just headlines. What a waste of space.) But I’m digressing again. Where was I? Oh yes, after writing a few front-page stories, he needs a new angle and decides to write an open letter to “An Unknown Murderess,” where he asks her to turn herself in to him and promises the paper will pay for her defense (as long as she gives him an exclusive interview).

She’ll eventually call him, and naturally there will be a romance angle that enters the picture. The film concludes abruptly and all too neatly. It is rare that I complain about a film being too short, but this one really could have used an extra half hour. I mentioned earlier about how I thought she didn’t do it; I could have gotten behind Casey and Norah doing a little investigating trying to find out who the real murderer was. Instead they just throw a solution at us and roll credits. It’s too bad too, because up until then I was really enjoying the film.

tony rome movie poster

Tony Rome attempts to blend the cold calculations of classic film noir with the cool, hip 1960s thriller, but is unsuccessful at both. It isn’t a bad film, but it lacks a certain something. It doesn’t pop like it needs to.

The script (based on a novel by Marvin Albert and written by Richard L. Breen) is wonderfully twisty and convoluted, but it fails at creating the sort of witty, cynical dialogue Raymond Chandler was so good at writing and Humphrey Bogart was great at saying. Frank Sinatra was a great singer and a decent actor, and he was the epitome of cool, but he struggles to make Tony Rome interesting, and surprisingly fails at making him hip. He was in his fifties at the time, and this was the late sixties, so I suppose his hep factor had waned.

The film struggles with it as well. The opening titles find Tony Rome sailing about Miami Beach in his houseboat while Nancy Sinatra sings the title song. Sinatra looks goofy wearing a sailor’s hat. He docks, gets out, and notices a pretty woman wearing a bikini. The camera crash zooms in on her derriere, then immediately cuts to the bottom of a young male boxer.

It is an interesting cut, a fun nod to the casual sexism of these types of films. The camera all too quickly moves away from the boxer, which is either an even more interesting recognition of sexism (zooming in on a woman’s bottom is sexy, but staring at a man’s arse is gross and must be moved away from post haste) or I’m reading way too much into this very brief moment.

Tony Rome is a former cop turned struggling private investigator. He’s hired by his former partner, whom he hates, and is now working as a hotel detective, to take a drunken, passed-out woman currently sleeping it off in one of the hotel’s rooms, home.

The woman is Diana Pines (Sue Lyon), the daughter of a rich, powerful construction magnate, and it wouldn’t do the hotel any good to have her discovered in her condition on its premises.

Rome agrees, but when he arrives, he’s tasked by the father to find out where she has been and why she’s been acting so strangely lately. Before he can even walk out of the house, he’s hired by Diana’s step-mom to leave out some of the gory details when he reports to the dad.

When he gets to the houseboat, he finds two thugs tearing up the place. They are looking for a pin. When Tony informs them he doesn’t know what they are talking about, they courteously ask him whether he’d like to be knocked out with a gun whacked to the back of the head or via some chloroform.

When he awakens, he finds Diana looking over him. She also asks him about a pin, thinking he stole it before he took her home. The pin is a diamond-studded piece of jewelry, and it’s gone missing. Diana hires Rome to find it for her.

All of that happens in the first ten minutes. A whole lot more occurs over the next 90 minutes or so before the film concludes. I’d explain it to you, but I had a hard time following it all. He gets help from and romances Ann Archer (Jill St. John), and is antagonized by Lt. Santini (Richard Conte), while a surprisingly large number of bodies pile up. I enjoyed the mystery even though I’m not sure it made all that much sense.

It is an enjoyable enough film that I’m willing to check out its sequel, Lady in Cement. even while wishing it had been a little smarter, hipper, and tightly constructed.