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List Price: $14.98 | | Label: 20th Century Fox
Salesrank: 14688
Released: June 6, 2006 |
| Our Price: $7.48 |
| Used Price: $5.52 |
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MPAA Rating: Unrated
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
A great surprise ending marks this film noir classic, filled with taut suspense. Starring Betty Grable in a change-of-pace role.
I Wake Up Screaming (Fox Film Noir) Reviews:
i wake up screaming 
2009-09-13 - Supreb top notch thriller. Carole Landis as Vicki gives a career best performance while there is excellent support from Laird Cregar and Victor Mature. Betty Grable is good too.
40 Special 
2009-08-25 - 8/25/09
Loved the movie! The star Victor Mature is a promoter in this film and he makes a bet with this waitress he can make her famous in a matter of weeks and he does. Her sister Betty Grable walks into their apartment only to find Victor looking over her sisters dead body lying on the floor. He pleads with her he didn't kill her and tells her he had just gotten there only minutes before she did. He's hauled down to jailed and questioned. Betty Grable is questioned as well. There is one particular cop that goes out of his way to prove Victor did it. The movie moves at a good clip. The acting is excellent as is the different characters that make up this film. I was surprised to see Betty Grable do as good of a job with such a serious role. Keep in mind this is the forties and the vacabulary might be a bit innocent by today standards but the plot is just as good then as it is today. Bad boy falls for good girl only to prove he innocent of the crime or is he. The use of shadows in this movie is outstanding especially at the end. Victor is standing in the apartment stairway hiding from the desk clerk while watching him work. The shadows from the elevator doors lay across Victor's body appearing to have him pinned to the wall. You must see it to believe it. Great who done it right up to the end and why they did it.HMMMMM!!! I recommend it!
movie review
2009-07-07 - The movie is great love it, but I ordered this movie 19 May 09, it was suppose to be shipped by the 21st of May and I did not receive this movie until the 3rd of July.
I Wake Up Staring at Ed Cornell
2009-05-09 - Judging from the title alone, a casual buff of vintage films might pass this one by as just a cheapie, a screamer, another pulp movie to display Betty Grable's legs and Victor Mature's chest.
Not so. This is one of the earliest of the film noir genre, and, as historian Eddie Muller tells us in his engaging commentary, probably THE first noir made by 20th Century-Fox -- and the release date of 1941 offers proof of this, contemporary with "Citizen Kane", which might also be characterized as a quintessential film noir.
It's a beauty: dark, tense, full of plot twists, showing off all those photographic tricks characteristic of noirs: steep camera angles, blatant light/shadow contrasts, shooting through window blinds or doorway gratings, even capturing the pattern of Ms. Grable's wide-open eyelashes against her cheeks (as Eddie Muller observes).
The latter-day viewer may laugh at the cliches -- a suspect, say, sitting on a low chair railing at his interrogators above his head shining lights into his eyes -- but they are nonetheless part of the genre and may not have been so trite at the time. (Tommy Udo's nasal laugh in "Kiss of Death" was endlessly satirized because is was so effective when the film was new.)
The directing is agile, the action is unpredictable and full of bits of business, the acting is just great. Betty Grable and Victor Mature turn out marvelous performances that will surprise those who assume these two had nothing more going for them than beautiful bodies. (An irrelevant swimming-pool scene demonstrates that the studio was thinking the same way.) Victor Mature has one of the most expressive faces of any actor I've ever seen (shown to even better effect in "Kiss of Death"), and DVD commentator Eddie Muller says that he acted with his scalp -- his hat moved back and forth when he raised and lowered his eyebrows.
The dialogue's pretty snappy, too, often pushing the limits of the Production Code, and helps break the suspense. Dwight Taylor, son of Broadway actress Laurette Taylor (the original stage Amanda Wingfield of "Glass Menagerie") was no slouch as a screenwriter.
Carole Landis is shining here, as she should be, but tinged perhaps with the viewer's knowledge of her sad end a few years later.
But Laird Cregar is the guy who stalks off with the movie in his big pockets. People should get to know this fine actor, if they don't already. He LOOMS. One customer reviewer calls him a composite of Sydney Greenstreet and Vincent Price. You get the idea. Only 25 years old in this movie, alas, he died in 1944 at age 28.
Something worth screaming about
2008-05-12 - I Wake Up Screaming is one of quite a few films that give the lie to the notion that Victor Mature couldn't act, with his likeable press agent very different in tone and delivery from many of his roles. But good as he is, it's Laird Cregar's creepy cop patiently and cheerfully (well, as cheerfully as he can manage) shadowing him and turning up everywhere like a bad penny who dominates the film - this is a guy who makes Hank Quinlan look like a poster boy for acceptable face of law enforcement without even raising so much as his voice. Terrific dialogue and a cast of likely suspects from Alan Mowbray to Elisha Cook Jr. actually gives this one a convincing whodunit element - you actually do start wondering if Mature could be guilty towards the end. Great stuff.
