Contents

Introduction 6

1 Background 9

2 Making Gilda 18

3 Rita Hayworth as Gilda 42

4 Gilda the Film 61

5 Interpreting Gilda 86

6 Gilda and Its Contexts 99

Notes 110

Credits 117

Bibliography 119

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1 Background

The story, in many places, is familiar. An American, who at timeswears a white tuxedo, running a bar and casino with a crookedroulette wheel in an exotic foreign location; a love triangle; amemorable song; Nazis; murders – with the consequences of the mostcrucial of these brushed aside by a sympathetic policeman. But Gilda(1946) was much more than a formulaic attempt by ColumbiaPictures to repeat the success of Warner Brothers with Casablanca(1942). It had a much darker tone – Johnny Farrell, a professionalgambler, is rescued from a robbery by Ballin Mundson, an elegant

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figure who carries a cane-knife. Subsequently, Johnny ingratiateshimself with Ballin, and becomes the manager of the casino he ownsin Buenos Aires, Argentina. Enough hints are dropped (the way Ballinand Johnny glance and smile at each other, the fact that Ballin slipshis arm into Johnny’s outside Gilda’s dressing-room, and the constantword-play around the cane-knife) to suggest that the relationshipbetween the two men is homoerotic. On one of Mundson’s businesstrips, however, he returns with a wife, Gilda. It quickly becomes clearthat Johnny and Gilda have once been lovers. In the beginning,Johnny represses his continuing feelings for Gilda by trying(unsuccessfully it appears) to keep her faithful to Ballin.

There is also a criminal dimension to what soon becomes aseething emotional triangle: Ballin is tied in with a shadowy group ofNazis in a bid to secure a world monopoly in the supply of tungsten.The two storylines run together when he kills a Nazi agent in themiddle of Carnival and is forced to fake his own death to escape thelaw. Johnny now supplants Ballin as head of the tungsten combineand as Gilda’s husband. But Johnny’s purpose in marrying Gilda is notsimply to cement his control of the cartel (which Ballin hasbequeathed to Gilda with Johnny as executor). It is to make her suffer:he effectively imprisons her, trying to ensure that she remains faithfulto Ballin’s memory. Gilda takes her revenge by performing a song(‘Put the Blame on Mame’) and semi-striptease in Johnny’s bar,‘proving’ she is the tramp Johnny believes her to be. Under pressurefrom Detective Maurizio Miguel Obregon (Joseph Calleia), Johnnygives up all the information on the tungsten cartel. In return, Obregonassures Johnny that Gilda – who is about to leave for America – hadonly ever pretended to be promiscuous. Johnny goes back to Gilda atthe casino and the two reconcile. Ballin now reappears, intent onkilling them both, but is instead killed by Uncle Pio (Steven Geray), a casino employee. Obregon arrives and points out that a man canonly die once and there is in any case something called ‘justifiablehomicide’. Johnny and Gilda are free to return to the United Statestogether. Unlike Rick Blaine, they can go home again.

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The parallel with Casablanca is revealing in other ways. In Casablanca, the three main protagonists are all noble individuals.Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) is the leader of the anti-Naziunderground movement in Europe. Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart)has fought the fascists in Spain. His cynicism and materialism seem tostem mainly from the consequences of his doomed love affair withIlsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) in Paris. He is still idealistic enough tosacrifice casino profits by letting a young man win enough at rouletteto allow his wife to escape the seductions of Captain Renault (ClaudeRains). Ultimately, he sacrifices his love for Ilsa by arranging for herto leave Casablanca with her husband Victor. Ilsa herself has onlyallowed herself to fall in love with Rick in Paris because she believesVictor is dead. Once she learns he is alive and ill, she immediatelybreaks off her relationship with Rick to look after him. Of thesecondary characters, even the corrupt and exploitive CaptainRenault ultimately decides to join the Free French army in fightingthe Vichy regime and the Nazis. While Renault heads off with Rick atthe end of the movie, few have suggested that this ‘beginning of abeautiful friendship’ is anything but heterosexual.

The case of Gilda is very different. None of the principalcharacters is in any way noble. Gilda is a showgirl. After the collapseof her relationship with Johnny, she marries Ballin because he is rich.She appears, for much of the film, to be completely amoral. To makeJohnny jealous, she flirts – and seemingly more than flirts – withseveral men. Johnny, though able-bodied, appears to have played nopart in the war. He is a very marginal figure, a down-at-heelprofessional gambler, when the film begins. By offering to put hiscrooked expertise at Ballin’s disposal, he rises to become manager of the Mundson casino. He also eventually becomes Ballin’s deputy in his plan to acquire an international monopoly of tungsten. The casino, indeed, is really only a front, a laundering operation tocover Ballin’s real ambition, the drive for world domination. With hisscarred face and ruthlessness (he is indifferent to the fact that thecartel he runs has bankrupted some suppliers, including the little

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man, and has no qualms about murdering a German agent in coldblood), Ballin is a villain straight from central casting. To many ofthose writing about the film it has also seemed likely that Johnny andBallin, at least before Gilda appears on the scene, have been lovers.2

Both Casablanca and Gilda profited heavily in terms ofpublicity from contemporary events. Casablanca had its New Yorkpremière just over two weeks after Allied forces landed in NorthAfrica. It had a highly topical title and its première was greeted by aparade of supporters of the Free French movement.3 Gilda similarlygained much publicity from the testing of an atomic bomb on Bikiniatoll in the Marshall Islands on 1 July 1946, a few weeks after thefilm’s première. At the suggestion of the Columbia publicitydepartment the bomb itself was named ‘Gilda’ and had a picture ofRita Hayworth on the side. While this enhanced Hayworth’sreputation as a 1940s sex goddess (the French satirical magazine LeCanard enchaîné began referring to her as an ‘anatomical bomb’), the actress herself disliked the stunt.4

Otherwise, the story of the immediate reception of the two filmsdiverged sharply. With few dissenting voices, critics respondedfavourably to Casablanca. The most enthusiastic review wasprobably that of Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. ‘TheWarners … have a picture’, Crowther wrote, ‘which makes the spinetingle and the heart take a leap.’5 Many American critics, in contrast,were unsure what to make of Gilda. Crowther, in contrast to his viewof Casablanca, disliked almost everything about it from its ‘vaporousthread of plot’ through Hayworth’s ‘five-and-dime’ acting and ‘crude’dances to the production team responsible for such a ‘slow, opaque,unexciting film’.6 Other critics had mixed views. There was a generalconsensus that the storyline was confused and made little sense. ‘If you aren’t a stickler for commonsense and significance’, remarkedthe Newsweek critic, ‘Gilda is a lot of fun in a cluttered way.’ John McCarten of the New Yorker wrote that the film revolvedaround ‘a susceptible lady’ who was ‘as innocent as a lamb and justabout as bright … who marries two lunatics in rapid succession’.

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Other reviewers believed that the plot ‘doesn’t bear close inspection’:it was ‘boring and slightly confused’, ‘not easy to believe’ and‘bewildering and somewhat pointless’. A number felt that the filmitself was too long, and had lost impetus along the way.7 In contrast,a minority, led by Kate Cameron [Dorothy King] of the New YorkDaily News, praised the film’s producers for maintaining suspensethroughout.8

The contrasting reception of the two films was echoed in termsof Academy Awards. Casablanca had eight Oscar nominations andwon three (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay).9 Gildagained no Oscar nominations (the film is listed on a website devotedto the Oscars as one of that year’s ‘sins of omission’).10 On the otherhand, despite the lack of ecstatic reviews and Oscars, not to mentionthe superficially unappealing nature of the characters in Gilda, the film outperformed Casablanca at the box office, earning back$7.5 million at the time of its first release compared with $3.5 millionfor Casablanca.11

Commercial success, of course, is far from being a reliable guideto whether a film will achieve classic status. Gilda is a film of highquality, with compelling characters, memorable (often quotable)dialogue, imaginative cinematography and superb set design andcostuming. But so were many films that have not come to be regardedas classics. The case for viewing Gilda as a classic rests on threeprincipal grounds. The first is the astonishing bravura performanceby Rita Hayworth in the title role. Hayworth’s road to Gilda (herthirty-ninth feature film) and her performance in the movie will bediscussed in Chapter 3. The second reason for seeing Gilda as aclassic is its emergence as a major site of critical and analyticalcommentary. As Chapter 5 shows, many film scholars have writtenabout the film in the last forty years. Third, Gilda has been cited by –or has influenced – a whole range of international culturalproductions. It has been referenced in fashion: in 2001, Saks FifthAvenue in New York offered a shortened version of the famous dressHayworth wore during her semi-striptease and the ‘Gilda look’ using

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cosmetics became fashionable in London.12 In music, Argentinianrock band Serú Girán paid tribute to the film in the song ‘Salír de laMelancolia’ (Coming out of Melancholy) on their 1981 albumPeperina. Gilda has been cited many times in television programmes(the celebrated poster of Hayworth wearing her black ‘Mame’ dressappears on the wall of the apartment of Ros Doyle [Peri Gilpin] in atleast one episode of Frasier, 1993–2004).

Finally, of course, among other cultural productions, Gilda hasbeen a constant reference point for film-makers. In Vittorio De Sica’sBicycle Thieves (1948), Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) takesa new job putting up cinema posters. Another employee shows himwhat he has to do by pasting up a picture of Rita Hayworth wearingher black ‘Mame’ dress. The first time Ricci puts up this poster,however, a thief destroys his livelihood by stealing his bicycle. In TheShawshank Redemption (1994), Gilda is being shown to the prisoninmates in 1949. Red (Morgan Freeman) stops Andy Dufresne (TimRobbins) from talking so that he can see Gilda’s first appearance

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(‘This is the part I really like – when she does that shit with her hair’).As Gilda tosses back her mane of hair and says ‘Sure, I’m decent’, allthe men in the audience whoop and holler and Red confesses ‘God, Ilove that.’ Andy likes Gilda too – he confesses it’s the third time he’sseen it in a month.13 In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), theyoung dark-haired woman (played by Laura Elena Harring) whosuffers amnesia after a car accident adopts the name ‘Rita’ on seeing

Convicts watch Gilda in The Shawshank Redemption; Beltenebros: Patsy Kensit reprises‘Put the Blame on Mame’

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a poster advertising Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Encouraged perhaps byHayworth’s half-Hispanic background, Gilda has had an especialfascination for Spanish film-makers. Pilar Miró’s Beltenebros (1991),a noir-ish thriller, included a poster for Gilda on the wall and aconscious reproduction of Gilda’s ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ dancesequence.14 Francisco Requeiro’s MadreGilda (1993) showedmembers of the right-wing Falange Party defacing posters of Gildawhen it opened in Madrid in 1948. The film’s narrative focused onthe story of Manuel, the son of an ally of General Franco, who thinkshe has rediscovered his lost mother when he sees Rita Hayworthplaying Gilda on the screen.15

I hope, in this book, to shed light on why Gilda should havehad so much influence on subsequent film-makers and film scholars,not to mention fashion designers and musicians. The approach takenhere differs from most of the analysis of the film published in thefinal decades of the twentieth century. Such analysis (as Chapter 5demonstrates) was usually informed by salient intellectual trendswithin the wider field of film studies. I am a cinema historian and Ibelieve that, to understand and better appreciate a film like Gilda,

MadreGilda: Spanish fascists protest against the showing of Gilda

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it is crucial to place it in the context in which it was produced andreceived. Movies are products of a specific industry at a particulartime. They reflect the nature of the studio that produces them, thewider industry pressures (notably the influence of censorship or self-regulation) and currently fashionable modes of film-making.They are produced by teams of people, each of whom brings her orhis experience, skills and personal history to the making of the filmconcerned. They commonly feature stars, playing roles that are aconstant mediation between script, directorial intent, the real andconstructed personality or ‘image’ of the stars concerned andaudience expectations. Finally, films emerge from a social andcultural (and at times political) background that shapes both theircontent and the way in which they are received by audiences andcritics. By studying these contextual issues, I hope to show not simplyhow Gilda was made, but also how it ‘works’ as a film and why ithas fascinated audiences and critics since the time of its first release.