Fritz Lang throughout his career was fascinated by crime, how it worked and how it worked upon the psychology of the masses. His masterpiece, indeed one of the greatest masterpieces of German cinema, M dealt with the way a city reacted to a serial killer who raped and murdered small girls.

The Blue Gardenia is a much lesser film than M, and few films could not be lesser. Compared to some of the other film noirs it is a more marginal effort- it stands alongside say Fallen Angel as a lesser effort from a great director. Like M this is a film with intent to say something about the psychology of crowds and crime. Its time maybe given the Ipswich case in England to look again at this lesser film, to read Lang's message.

The film is about a young woman in the 1950s. The plot is simple to dissect and really deals with two issues- the way that men and women relate to each other within the game of sexual chance that is building relationships and the way that the crowd perceives a crime.

The opening section of the film is concerned largely with the first theme- the main character, played by Anne Baxter, is jilted by a long term boyfriend and so decides to go out with a playboy for the night- he attempts to seduce her, using alcohol as a date rape drug and then when she resists his advances, attempts to rape her. The film might look from that point of view to reflect upon the issues of women murdering in self defence- but it isn't, the second part of the film makes it not about that issue but about guilt and innocence.

Our heroine passes out and when she wakes finds a dead body beside her on the floor- and becomes the main suspect for the murder of the playboy. The second half of the film concerns the way that the press report the murder, how journalists frame her in the public mind, labelling her the Blue Gardenia, and then attempt to frame her for the crime. The resolution of the film is the weakest part of it, which as in many Hollywood films of the era, takes us out of the darkness in a sudden burst of light- but even the revelation of the murderer gives us some indication of the wider critique here encoded.

Lang's interest is in modern society and particularly in the way that modern society's anonymity makes it dangerous. He also reflects, as this very perceptive essay discusses upon the individuality and interchangeability of his characters. This is a cityscape- there is no question that like the classic film noir (amongst whom its place is doubtful, the essay cited above beleives that its Lang's attempt to close noir as a genre) this is a film about a city and its a film about what can happen within that city. We the viewer know that the Blue Gardenia is incapable of murder, she is presented as an ingenue, a woman unskilled with men, kind and generous. Affectionate to her flatmates and terrified by the situation she finds her herself within.

But Lang gives us the sense of how the media manipulate our ignorance of strangers. He does this by using the flatmates of our heroine as a chorus line. They become the common man and woman of the street- in particular one (played by character actress Jeff Donnell) who reads mystery novels and gets some of the best lines in the film-

I didn't like Prebble when he was alive but now that he's been murdered, that always makes a man so romantic

We the audience can laugh at Donnell's statement- we know this man was an attempted rapist. We know he was a thoroughly unpleasant scoundrel who cared nothing for the woman who he unwrapped and through away like chocolate bars, but then we find ourselves saying the same things.

The worst section of the film though concerns Baxter herself. It is the loneliness of being suspected, of possibly being guilty. The Yellow Press whose articles are read out at various points in the film, talking of the 'high class doll' who did the murder, eventually solve the case but in the meantime they demonstrate how easy it is to assume guilt. The Blue Gardenia is guilty and they need her to be guilty but her guilt merely consists in being at the wrong place in the wrong time.

The very flaw of the plot, that the murderer is a deus ex machina, on screen only for enough time to establish in a shot motivation and then to establish that she did it right at the end, is meant to convey how random the whole series of events is. There is no way that the Blue Gardenia could have forecast that she would be linked to a murder enquiry- the terror of the film is supposed to be this element of random chance by which a decision taken somewhere else by an anonymous stranger, envelopes an innocent young woman under the shadow of the gallows.

The Blue Gardenia isn't one of Lang's greatest films, it is in many ways a failure- the ending designed to make a point frustrates (just look at the IMDB reviews to see that) but like all of Lang's films its designed to make a very sensible point. Suspicion does not equal guilt and it is easy for the innocent to seem guilty.

Something that should be remembered in the light of the declaration by the press of names of men arrested in Ipswich for the murder of five prostitutes that these just might be Blue Gardenias, innocents caught up in events which make them possibly look guilty. The press have convicted both of them despite a lack of charges until today and despite the fact that neither has been brought to trial. It seems like Lang's press journalists, always after the next headline, aren't dead.

They work in the British press!

The match of issues isn't exact. The murder of prostitutes is very different from justifiable defence against rape- but both share one important feature, we mustn't convict on prejudice. We must bear in mind Lang's lesson, that its possible just to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Let's hope the police have their man, but let's not convict on circumstantial details dug up by Daily Mail journalists- otherwise we might find ourselves in the position of those readers who beleived the Blue Gardenia was guilty just on the press's reporting.

There isn't any substitute for evidence and proof.