Charles Vidor (1946)

It’s worth seeing for the musical numbers that Rita Hayworth performs.  There are spectacularly ornate sets by Van Nest Polglase and Stephen Goosson; and Rudolf Maté’s chiaroscuro cinematography is often beautiful – especially in one of the few outdoor sequences:  a quick nocturnal car chase, followed by an aircraft crashing into the night sea and bursting into flame.  Otherwise, this famous noir melodrama is very dreary.  I fell asleep early on:  once I’d come to, I kept wondering whether to leave or hang around for Hayworth’s famous number (or whether I’d already slept through it).  Gilda, from a screenplay by Marion Parsonnet, is about the vaguely malign and teutonic Ballin Mundsen (George Macready), a tungsten baron who runs a casino in Buenos Aires but who wants the rule the world.  One thing he can’t control is his wife Gilda (Hayworth), the former mistress of Mundsen’s protégé Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford), who narrates the story in the conventional hardboiled way.

The merits of Gilda don’t seem to extend far beyond the visual surface of the film.  Gilda and Johnny have a relationship which dictates that they keep saying ‘I really hate you’ but mean the opposite:  this is OK as a device the first time but it’s overworked.  I didn’t understand why Charles Vidor revealed to us immediately that Mundsen hadn’t died in the plane crash at sea.  It doesn’t technically make sense when Johnny’s narrating the story.  Because we know Mundsen’s alive, Vidor deprives himself of a surprise climax when the man reappears.  Glenn Ford works hard but he’s no Bogart, either as a voice or a face.  Both George Macready and Rita Hayworth are more interesting because they exude different kinds of unease – Macready in the character he’s playing, Hayworth as a performer.   She must have been at her peak of glamour at the time and it’s both a relief and poignant that she’s so much more vibrant here than in, say, Pal Joey or Separate Tables, a decade or so later.   She has an oddly emphatic, forward-thrusting gait, occasionally echoed in her dancing.  Yet she’s such a constricted and unconfident actress that, when she speaks a line, her voice seems to be asking in an undertone, ‘Is that how I’m meant to say it?’   She’s freer when she dances and sings or, at least, mimes (the singing voice is Anita Ellis’s).  But even then she’s usually self-conscious.   In the BFI programme note, David Thomson (in Have You Seen …?) refers to Hayworth’s ‘savage abandon’ and Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg (in Hollywood in the Forties) – to her ‘animal abandon’.   This baffles me:  it’s largely because she mostly lacks this quality that the (aborted) striptease in her second rendition of ‘Put the Blame on Mame’, when Hayworth really does surrender herself, has such impact.  This routine also works well in contrast to the first, differently effective performance of the song, when Gilda/Hayworth sits and sings with beguiling composure, strumming a guitar.  The cast also includes Steven Geray, as a philosophical washroom attendant.

4 August 2011