Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Screaming Mimi!

40s noirs are by far the most overrated genre, producing only one legit classic (1945's Kafkaesque Detour) and roughly 17,000 borefests hyped up by hipsters for recycling chiaroscuro visuals the German cinéma had strip-mined bare in the mid-silent era. 50s noirs, however, were much better, with highlights like Kiss Me Deadly pushing the format into more surreal nightmare territory where it properly belongs.

Imagine not putting your opening titles backwards just to freak people out.

But the best of all 50s noirs is the unpromisingly titled Screaming Mimi. When first I heard of such a kino, I assumed it was a comedy, in which context its noir atmospherics turned out to be all the more effective. Fellini waifu Anita Ekberg stars as Yolanda, a Hitchcockian blonde-in-trouble who emerges from the sea to be abruptly set upon by a knife-wielding psycho in a shower, prompting her to be committed to the care of a sleazy psychiatrist who soon becomes obsessed with her (he's literally me). In fact, if you edited the name Hitchcock into the opening titles this would fit perfectly in the middle of the master's Freudian oeuvre.

Someone in the production decided it would be extremely funny if the great Swede had a great Dane. I can't even be mad because I would have done the same thing.

Somehow the bad shrink takes to managing Yolanda in a nightclub act in which she dances sexily, which is a standard motif for noir but the movie has the uncommon courtesy to show us the whole routine twice, because in 1958 you got value for your ticket price.

15:27

41:45

Sadly for Sigmund Svengali, the nominal protagonist eventually shows up asking questions, prompting plot bullshit in which Yolanda is once again attacked by a mystery psycho. Will Rando Protagonist get to the bottom of this? Who cares? The movie drips with style like a nympho's panties. The investigation is a clothesline on which to drape moody setpieces, sketchy minor characters and made-up psychobabble that doesn't so much seek to elucidate the depths of the human psyche as to highlight their impenetrability.

I'd resist the urge to comment on her bodily penetrability but I know you got there about the same time I did.

"But Ekberg can't aaact", you wheedle, hoping m'lady Becky from HR will hear you counter-signalling the archetypal Stacy. Based Anita eschewed the acting lessons the studio procured for her at great expense in favour of horse-riding, probably because she understood that great beauties are a superior species and needn't demean themselves by learning to do silly things like pretend to be made-up characters, when they could ride horses and be beautiful instead. The paparazzi (the very word derives from La Dolce Vita, which for all its artistic pedigree is exclusively remembered for Ekberg's scenes) seethed at her otherworldliness, dubbing her Iceberg for her justified contempt for them. On one occasion when they bugged her, she shot at them with a bow and arrow.

My source for this is a 9Gag screenshot I found on Twitter, but you will never convince me it's not true.

There can be no doubt that the fountain scene in La Dolce Vita is the crowning jewel in the slim canon of normative cinéma, but few understand its genius at more than a surface level. To place any less a woman than Anita as the centrepiece of the fountain, surrounded by the carven gods of antiquity, would be mere safe-edgy vandalism; shabby, petty, redundant. Only Anita, living marble in the black-and-white photography of the film, could do the impossible and elevate the fountain by her presence. This is the real provocative; the real audacious; the real avant-garde: it consists in triumphant, transcendent hetero-maximalism.

This one was carved by God.

So while for many her career began and ended with that famous scene, Ekberg deserves to be celebrated more generally for embodying the normative spirit of Stacy aristocracy, and Screaming Mimi to be rediscovered as the overlooked gem that it is.