Fritz Lang’s 1953 film The Blue Gardenia presents a female protagonist. The themes and concerns addressed in the film differ from other male-driven noirs. The audience is exposed to women in the workplace, female friendships, and a faithful woman who is waiting patiently for her boyfriend to return from Korea. Furthermore, the audience is aligned with a mystery murderess who the male reporters, police officers, and detectives are having trouble finding.
Norah and Crystal work as telephone operators, and they work with many other women. Some of these women have boyfriends, some are single, but none of the women are married. Not only are the telephone operators all female, but also the public relations representative who assists the police with their investigation at Norah’s workplace is a woman. These women enjoy their work and are able to live with friends, or on their own, without the support of a man. They have an independence unlike other noirs with male-driven narratives.
Female friendships are a continuous theme throughout the film. Norah, Crystal and Sally live together. Sally is youngest and seems to look up to the older two. She is naïve and childish, reading romanticized women’s literature and desperately hoping a man is calling to take her out. Crystal is the oldest of the three, and she is the most mature. She fulfills a motherly role, or at times, the dominant masculine role it seems. She is always smoking cigarettes, and she is the only one in a steady relationship. She is the leader of the household, and she is the only character who figures out why it is that Norah has been acting strange. (If Crystal is the masculinized woman, it is interesting and significant to note that she is never punished for this behaviour, while many other noirs [or films in general of the time] make certain that the reversed gender roles are returned to the societal norm before the film ends.) Norah is more mature than Sally, and less so than Crystal. After reading the devastating letter from her boyfriend who is in Korea, she loses her confidence, and agrees to meet with Harry Prebble (who had actually been calling for Crystal). After their night together which she is having trouble piecing together, she begins to wonder if she had anything to do with his mysterious murder.
Other film noirs such as Detour and Laura offer a male perspective to identify with as the narrative progresses, while the female characters are often fatal, deceptive, and manipulative… the working woman at her extreme in the fearful minds of men. In Lang’s film, the male character, Harry, is the fatal, deceptive, and manipulative one. He takes advantage of Norah when she is intoxicated. We also learn later on that he is discussing marriage with a completely different woman. He is always flirting with the telephone operator girls, and he paints calendar girls for a living. Once Norah begins to come to her senses, Harry refuses to leave her alone and she continues to insist that he stop, squirming to resist his aggressive attempts. Meanwhile, Detour’s Vera forces Al to go along with her greedy scheme. Laura’s Waldo manipulates the narrative in order to deter the audience from realizing his guilt, and to pin the murder on other likely suspects like Shelby. If The Blue Gardenia was viewed through the perspective of the male reporter Mayo, the audience would have been comfortable and familiar with the active, male, on-screen surrogate, but Lang’s nervous Norah makes for an interesting experience.
If an audience were to watch only noirs with male protagonists, they would be lead to believe that women did not interact with one another during the 1940s to 1950s. Male-driven narratives completely neglect the female friendship. Also, women in the workplace are hardly seen in the male-driven noirs, and the only example that comes to mind would be Laura in Preminger’s film, but she needed Waldo Lydecker to help start her career. In The Blue Gardenia the audience must share the point of view of an attractive woman who is heartbroken, and instantly becomes insecure, emotional, irresponsible, and may have just murdered a man in his own apartment.
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