Gilda

They go to bed with Gilda; they wake up with me
Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansina. Rita Hayworth. Dancer, actor, forces pin-up, forties sex goddess. Her first big break was in Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, after that she played in musicals and melodramas but her best remembered films are two noir classics. The Lady from Shanghai made as director Orson Welles and Hayworth’s marriage was disintegrating is a bitterly personal film that teeters between the sublime (the Hall of Mirrors ending) and the ridiculous (Welles’ Irish accent). Gilda made two years earlier is more coherent and less personal but a no less powerful treatment of male and female sexuality.

It begins with a pair of black and white dice rolling towards camera and a voiceover that designates the slick-haired gambler who throws them as the anti-hero. The gambler’s name is revealed to be Johnny Farrell but other than that the voiceover is curiously opaque, confined to re-counting on screen events with a flip cynicism often belied by the boyish desperation that Glen Ford brings to his character’s initial portrayal.
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