So I guess it's a love/hate thing for me. And there are scenes that they actually get right. Not only the cinematography but the music performed by Red Norvo captures the mood of the novel very well. But for all its faults (unfortunately, the ending is one of the things they botched) the film has its charms. I would put most of the blame on screenwriter Robert Blees, who had previously scripted the giant monster movie The Black Scorpion. Though I think the above reviewer was kind of harsh on Oswald and the cast- especially Harry Townes, who understates the creepy obsessiveness of Doc Greene very well- the fact is the movie falls short of the book by a considerable margin. Also being a Fellini fan, I have long been curious to see the film, Anita Ekberg's first starring role, (La Dolce Vita was two years later.) I know that Fellini was a pretty big fan of Brown- at one point he planned to adapt his sci-fi novel What Mad Universe- so I'm pretty sure he discovered Ekberg in this film. I have read it a few times since and have no intention of stopping- it's really one of those forgotten classics of the hardboiled genre. When I first read Fredric Brown's 1948 novel, I was mesmerized. Not a great movie perhaps, but I really dug it. Rare for the time, it even has a psycho-killer, called 'The Ripper', who leaves the epononymous 'screaming mimi' dolls next to his/her butchered female victims. It also features European sex symbol Anita Ekberg as a voluptuous stripper (who looks like she could eat Edwige Fenech or one of the other later European sex kittens). Interestingly, it was apparently based on the same Fredric Brown novel as Dario Argento's 'Bird with Crystal Plummage' (although at least one of these movie was obviously only loosely based on the source novel because they don't really resemble each other too much). It's technically a late period film noir, but rather than having the traditional pessimistic tone and hard-boiled, voice-over narrative, it is completely off-the-wall and chock-full of the suggested depravity and lurid psycho-babble that would characterize the later European films.

the German 'krimis', the Italian 'gialli', the horror films of Bava and Argento). This film could be considered one of the missing links between American film noir and the suspense and horror films that would become so popular in continental Europe over the next two decades (i.e.

The screaming mimi fredric brown