I Wake Up Screaming opens with both Victor Mature and Betty Grable being questioned by the police in the death of Grable's sister Carole Landis. Plausible cases could be made against them both, but the police let them go for lack of evidence.
One detective though is determined to see Mature get that fabled hot seat in Sing Sing for the crime. Laird Cregar is a cop with a reputation of never giving up, he'll get his man come hell or high water.
In fact Cregar has a devotion to the dead woman that amounts to a Laura like fixation that Dana Andrews had in that film. Although it looks like he wants to solve the case from almost the beginning of the film it's clear he has agenda all his own.
Other suspects in this film are Alan Mowbray, Elisha Cook, and Allyn Joslyn. Landis was quite the user of men and discarded when no longer needed. Any one of these and others could have had reason and maybe opportunity to do the job.
Grable and Landis would play sisters once again in Moon Over Miami, a much different kind of film than I Wake Up Screaming. Although in that one both are a pair of gold-diggers out for a rich husband.
The film really belongs to Laird Cregar who in his short life and career racked up an astonishing variety of roles. His detective Cornell is about as different as the epicene Curo from Blood and Sand as different as the luckless Willard Gates in This Gun For Hire and still different from the rapscallion prospector in Hello Frisco Hello.
One thing that I did not understand though it's a nice touch in the film. The background music is something Darryl Zanuck would have to have paid for. The two themes used are from other films not from 20th Century Fox. The theme from Elmer Rice's Street Scene which was from Samuel Goldwyn/United Artists is used as is Over The Rainbow from MGM's Wizard of Oz. Zanuck must have paid Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer some big bucks for the rights.
I Wake Up Screaming did give Betty Grable a chance to shine in a non- musical part which she does. The rest of the cast does well and Laird Cregar just shines.
