Murder and madness hound an exotic dancer (Anita Ekberg), her dog Devil, and a macabre statuette she fetishizes...<br /><br />I love this sordid little Columbia "B" which plays a key role in the evolution of the American Film Noir into the Italian Giallo cycle and helped (along with 1957's THE GIRL IN BLACK STOCKINGS) pave the way for Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO a few years later. The Hitchcock also has a surprise ending concerning the star and his shower stabbing isn't so new, after all. SCREAMING MIMI has the gritty, B&W, low-budget look Hitchcock consciously sought for his film and the MIMI's director, Gerd Oswald, helmed a number of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS TV episodes and was an uncredited second unit director on Billy Wilder's macabre SUNSET BLVD. Like Oswald and his film, Dario Argento used the same lurid Fredric Brown pulp novel as source for his THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and was actually more faithful (in spirit) to the novel: MIMI grabs the viewer by the throat in the opening scene but the movie would have been more shocking if it hadn't been told in linear fashion. The fact Yolanda was attacked by a maniac years before was one of many surprises and revealed half-way through the novel (as it is in the Argento). Here's how Brown's novel opens: <br /><br />"The protagonist of Brown's novel, William Sweeney, is also a writer, a newspaperman. Walking the streets of nighttime Chicago in the grip of an alcoholic binge, Sweeney sees an amazing thing. Trapped by a giant dog between the double glass doors of her apartment building, a beautiful woman writhes; she has been stabbed by an unknown assailant. She appears to be the fourth victim of a ripper (as Sweeney's paper has dubbed the killer), and she is the only one to have survived. Bewitched by the beautiful victim Yolanda Lang -a stripper who's act includes the dog, Devil -Sweeney begins his own investigation of the crimes. His first lead is a mass-market statuette of a terrified woman, the screaming mimi, sold by the first victim the day she was murdered... Argento changed many details in the process of turning "The Screaming Mimi" into The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, but the most important is this: flawed and weak though he may be, Brown's protagonist is afraid of the universe of madness glimpsed when he gets close to Yolanda Lang. Argento's is drawn to it like a moth to the flame. The American pulp novel "The Screaming Mimi" was passed along to Argento for an opinion by Bertolucci, who intended to buy the rights for himself. Captivated by the novel's central idea, Argento resolved to borrow it and spin off a new story. In fact, he borrowed quite a bit more..." <br /><br />I saw SCREAMING MIMI as a kid on daytime TV and it reely scared the pants off me! I was very upset over the way Ekberg's dog got killed and found the crime scene photos of the other murdered strippers frightening. There was a lot of "adult content" that didn't get by my young mind, either: fetishes, an intense relationship between Yolanda and her dog ...along with lesbianism and dope! When Phil Carey tries to barge in on nightclub owner Gypsy Rose Lee and a young chick, their repartee ("Sorry, I didn't know it was tea for two") leaves no doubt that Gypsy is a dyke and marijuana, in the 50's, was called "tea". I love the "El Madhouse" nightclub -if the Red Norvo Trio's xylophone doesn't drive you nuts, nothing will and sex goddess Anita Ekberg's somnambulistic acting style perfectly suits a stripper with a couple of mental screws loose. Fetish-driven Yolanda Lang, writhing around in rags on ropes (in chains!), caters to the S&M in all of us and I wish there were more films like SCREAMING MIMI and THE GIRL IN BLACK STOCKINGS from the schizophrenic 1950's. I didn't have long to wait, tho: PSYCHO (and later the giallo) were just around the corner! In between were THE NAKED KISS, WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR?, and...