Watch Vicki For Free

So much average

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Cheaply produced remake of TCF's I Wake Up Screaming (1941). That's surprising since Fox was a big-budget, glamor studio, at a time too when production was turning to elaborate color films because of TV. Nonetheless, the b&w sets are uniformly drab, even when supposedly upscale. The visuals could really use more noir to spice up the drab. So who did kill heartlessly successful model Vicki (Peters). Seems like a lot of people had reasons, including cop Boone and sister Crain.Film suffers from bland leading man Reid who unsurprisingly went from here to TV, and from Boone who's much better at being mean than being love sick—catch that last scene, one I expect the actor would just as soon forget. Future TV mogul Spelling also gets a big histrionic opportunity. At least he doesn't look like Hollywood. My guess is that director Horner is not at his best when coaching actors.It's a complex plot with a lot of cross-currents, erratically worked out. Maybe the most interesting is Boone's anger at Reid for promoting hash house waitress Peters into the fashionable world of high-class modeling. Now she's literally out of Boone's class and Reid is to blame. So now cop Boone doesn't care who killed Peters, just as long as he gets even with "pretty boy" Reid. I don't think they taught that at the Police Academy.Too bad the overlong screenplay wasn't pared down to eliminate the many dead spots, or that an A-list director wasn't put in charge. And too bad the production values don't measure up. But perhaps most unfortunate, it looks like a demotion for the under-rated Jeanne Crain after a number of A-films. But, it's 1953 and studios are cutting high-priced contract players, so I guess it's not surprising that the lovely Crain, who's the one bright spot in this film, left TCF after finishing here. Anyway, the movie itself amounts to an inferior re-make, unless you enjoy occasional camp.

Billboard and print model is found dead in her apartment; the New York City police get busy interviewing suspects, though the lieutenant on the case has personal reasons for wanting to find the killer. Steve Fisher's novel "I Wake Up Screaming" (its original title uncredited here, perhaps because it was already filmed as such in 1941 with Betty Grable), gets a strictly minor-league treatment this time, with nearly every actor on-board over-compensating for the uncertain script with pushy performances. Jean Peters, who looks like Jessica Walter and talks tough like Susan Hayward, is an odd choice to play the doomed, would-be starlet; Peters isn't the wide-eyed innocent/hash-slinging waitress the plot suggests, instead coming on with both barrels loaded. As her sister, Jeanne Crain has more of the Cinderella quality Peters should be projecting, and hers is the only substantial acting job in the picture. Playing the gruff, snarling lieutenant, Richard Boone is way over-the-top, as is Aaron Spelling in an hysterical role as a wormy desk clerk. Just silly enough to be watchable, though it is never explained why glamorous Vicki is living in that dumpy apartment--nor how her photograph pre-death has managed to land on the cover of every single magazine at the newsstand. ** from ****

A beautiful waitress (Jean Peters) is spotted through the front window of an all-night diner by a couple of public relations types, who decide to make her into a high fashion model. After a few weeks, her image is plastered everywhere, for cigarettes, perfume, etc. The Cinderella story ends abruptly with her murder. The film mixes the mystery of who did it, because all the men who knew her fell for her, with the obsessive desire of the homicide detective (Richard Boone) who, it turns out, was watching her nightly through the same window, but never went inside to ask her out or even to introduce himself, thus scaring the poor girl, who thought he was some kind of weirdo. It turns out, for the benefit of the film, he was, and that, by far, is the film's most intriguing aspect.

Despite showing the makings of a superior – potentially classic – film noir, Vicki falls just short of that goal. For the second time in the noir cycle, it tells the story of Vicki (or Vicky) Lynn, whose swift rise from hash-slinger to model to toast of the town ends in murder – a crime of passion. It first reached the screen in 1942 under the title I Wake Up Screaming, based on a serialized novel by Steve Fisher. Eleven years later, 20th Century Fox decided on a close remake, which obviously did not go back to the novel but simply freshened up the original script a little – some of the lines remain the same, as do occasional pieces of blocking and shooting.We first catch site of Vicki staring out languidly from a panorama of posters and billboards that display her face to push luxury items. But almost immediately the glamour turns to ashes as we watch her carried out of her brownstone apartment on a stretcher. Her central role – the haunting linchpin of the drama – is told in flashback (and substantially expanded from that of the previous film version). The role falls to Jean Peters, whose screen career was cut short by her marriage to Howard Hughes; but here, she fails to generate half the magnetism she did in Pickup on South Street, of the same year.The expansion of Vicki's part is only one of the subtle shifts among the dynamics of the characters. Jeanne Crain, in the early twilight of her stardom, portrays the sensible-shoes sister who cautions Vicki against the false lures of the big town but helps track down her killer. As the publicist who first dangled those lures, making Vicki a shooting star, Elliott Reid can't work up much sympathy as the prime suspect (he's too weak and generic an actor). So the movie's impact rests principally on the homicide cop who carries a secret, smoldering torch for the dead girl – in this version, Richard Boone. Again expanded from the first filming, the performance may be one of the hard-to-cast Boone's best. Not yet victim to the character-actor ugliness that was to befall him, he shoulders his obsession heavily, almost sadly (though he plays much nastier than Laird Cregar did in 1942). And in the small but pivotal role of the desk clerk in the sisters' digs, the earlier Elisha Cook, Jr. is supplanted by Aaron Spelling; Spelling, who would become one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Hollywood, can't dispel the spell Cook works on us (and excuse those irresistible puns).The emphasis in Vicki ultimately falls differently from the way it did in I Wake Up Screaming. In 1942, it was offered as a stylish mystery, a Manhattan whodunit. By the early fifties, it had become a story of obsession – a psychological thriller a la Laura, with the same skittishness about the fleeting nature of fame. Whether this change of tone was intentional remains moot, since the script underwent no major renovation. It seems largely the result of the change in cast, with the various roles filled by performers with different strengths – and possibly of directorial nuance. It's a shame this movie stays in obscurity, overshadowed by its forerunner; while neither version achieves the status of Laura, Vicki is by a small margin the more interesting of the two recensions.