The Blue Gardenia (1953)

Fritz Lang made better movies than The Blue Gardenia, a stylish thrillers that has plenty of captivating moments. The leading lady of the film ends up in trouble after spending a drunk night out with a guy. The guy, an über-slimy douche, tries to rape her when she has got intoxicated in a fancy restaurant. The next day she is accused of having killed him. She leaves with two girlfriends and the film strays from the male-dominated thriller genre by focusing on these women's everyday lives and troubles with lousy jobs and lousy boyfriends. Throughout the film, we get to know the routines and bantering of these friends. This framework of everyday life makes the weaker part of the film, the murder, much more interesting. Because the focus is never on guessing who the killer really is. When the film is busy with a tale about a journalist (just as slimy as the guy who has just been killed) trying to catch the killer, only to be bombarded with false leads, the film, to me, loses its appeal. But throughout, the film preserves some tension by means of odd small choices the director makes. And Los Angeles looks drearier than in most other cities - a city of dull busyness. The theme of the film - false leads and doublings - conjure up a world in which it does not matter the least, from a particular point of view, if one human being is mixed up with another. They're all the same, anyway. What Lang sometimes makes us see is, however, the existential dreadfulness of this exchangeability.