The Blue Gardenia
Upon waking up to the news that the man she’d gone on a date with the previous night has been murdered, a young woman with only a faint memory of the night’s events begins to suspect that she murdered him while attempting to resist his advances.
From the archive
The Blue Gardenia is a 1953 American film noir starring Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, and Ann Sothern. Directed by Fritz Lang from a screenplay by Charles Hoffman, it is based on the novella The Gardenia by Vera Caspary. An independent production distributed by Warner Bros., The Blue Gardenia – a cynical take on press coverage of a sensational murder case similar to the real-life Black Dahlia killing – was the first installment of Lang's "newspaper noir" film trio, being followed in 1956 by While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. The song "Blue Gardenia", performed in the film by Nat King Cole, was written by Bob Russell and Lester Lee and arranged by Nelson Riddle. The director of cinematography for The Blue Gardenia was RKO regular Nicholas Musuraca, then working at Warner.
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The Blue Gardenia (1953) is hosted by the Internet Archive as a public-domain or openly licensed work, which means its copyright has expired, lapsed, or was released by the rights holder. No signup, no payment and no advertising interrupts playback. Nitrate streams the file directly from the Archive and hosts no video itself.
- Director
- Fritz Lang
- Starring
- Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, Raymond Burr, Jeff Donnell, Richard Erdman, George Reeves, Ruth Storey
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