Gilda

[hazelk]

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.

Farrell leaves the crap game in a hurry and gets attacked by a mugger after his ill-gotten gains. He is saved by a tall, dark and distinctly sinister stranger with a stiletto dagger concealed in his cane, the phallic equivalent of a vagina dentata. The stranger introduces himself as Ballin Mundsen and leaves Johnny with an invitation to the illegal casino he owns. When our anti-hero is too conspicuously successful at the blackjack tables, he gets called up to the office where, as near flirtatious as the Hays code would allow, he persuades Mundsen to take him on as a croupier-manager. It’s a very queer film in many senses of the word.

While toasting their new friendship Johnny also reassures Ballin that he holds no truck with women and up until this point in the movie the only woman to have appeared has been viewed from behind and dismissed as a harpy. This homosocial state of affairs now changes, women throng the casino tables as Johnny takes charge, drinking, smoking and admiring the gambling but still not speaking.

Ballin disappears on a mysterious errand leaving Johnny in charge. On his return there’s a summons to his home that his friend answers eagerly only to be disquieted by the sound of a woman singing,

Who’s the canary?

Interesting choice of bird. As in cat got the, or the miner’s self–sacrificial little friend? The canary is Gilda, Ballin’s new wife making one of moviedom’s best known entrances

MUNDSON: Gilda, are you decent?
GILDA: Me? …Sure, I'm decent.

The head flicks up throwing a mane of gravity-defying auburn hair flying. There’s an instant antagonism between her and Johnny suggesting some shared history that Ballin senses and has possibly anticipated. As he tells Johnny he and Gilda have in common a lack of back-story both claiming to have been born the night they met him.

As Johnny leaves the voice-over takes on a new tone:

”It was all I could do to walk away. I wanted to go back up in that room and hit her. What scared me was, I-I wanted to hit him too. I wanted to go back and see them together with me not watching. I wanted to know.”

As Johnny is charged with keeping Gilda decent in the eyes of the public and her husband that anger suffuses his every thought although the voice-overs remain opaque about the original source of his rage. We never find out what Gilda did in his past, in his present she provokes, she dances, she flirts, she dismisses, very like the Mame of her signature song, a force of nature, female sexuality rampant. The lyrics of that song later serve almost as the voice that the film overtly denies her. “Put the blame on Mame boys, put the blame on Mame.”

In the meantime the spoken dialogue takes on a pattern of repeated innuendo,

Swimming I mean…

Dancing I mean…

Even the laundry takes on sexual connotations but darker than those are Gilda’s conversations with Ballin:

GILDA: If you're worried about Johnny Farrell, don't be. I hate him.
MUNDSON: And he hates you. That's very apparent. But hate can be a very exciting emotion. Very exciting. Haven't you noticed that?...There's a heat in it that one can feel. Didn't you feel it tonight?
GILDA: No.
MUNDSON: I did. It warmed me. Hate is the only thing that has ever warmed me.

Ballin is as impervious to the senses as the office he keeps above the casino with its louvered steel shutters and control panels to monitor lighting and sound. Gilda has no fear of Johnny and his barely suppressed raging but her husband she regards with superstitious dread. The final crisis comes, however, when she repeats his line about hate. Mundsen is on the run from the police after a murder at the casino and Johnny returns to the house ostensibly to deal with Gilda who he tells himself is his friend’s weak spot.

JOHNNY: Get your clothes on. You're gettin' out of here.
GILDA: Are we, Johnny? Are we?
JOHNNY: Not we! You!
GILDA: You do hate me, don't you, Johnny?
JOHNNY: I don't think you have any idea how much.
GILDA: (She approaches closer to him and echoes Mundson's words.) Hate is a very exciting emotion. Haven't you noticed? Very exciting. I hate you too, Johnny. I hate you so much, I think I'm gonna die from it.

She falls into his arms and they kiss passionately only to be interrupted by the click of a closing door from outside the bedroom. Johnny catches a glimpse of Mundson hurriedly leaving on the way to a private airstrip where he escapes capture by the police only to crash into the ocean.

It would seem that Gilda has won but with Ballin gone the role of the patriarch is taken on, internalised, by Johnny:

She didn't know then what was happening to her. She didn't know then that what she heard was the door closing on her own cage. She hadn't been faithful to him when he was alive, but she was gonna be faithful to him now that he was dead.

Far more efficient than Ballin ever was Johnny thwarts Gilda’s efforts to escape or understand him at every turn. Even the simple action of offering to light her cigarette has her practically on her knees. She runs, as ever, to other men, but even her lawyer turns out to be a stooge in the employ of her husband. Reduced to begging for her freedom she finally succeeds in turning the tables on him.

Swathed in black strapless satin Gilda makes an entrance at the casino in a performance/near striptease to her signature song. Noticably drunken and yet retaining every bit of Hayworth’s dancer’s grace she sways, swings her hair round and reaches, arms outstretched towards her slavering audience, offers herself up to them, to every man in the room.

Johnny’s thugs drag her away but she continues to taunt him with her history, with his present and finally gets a reaction but instead of kissing her this time as he strikes her hard across the face.

The film reverts to the myth of chivalry. Shocked Johnny retreats to his office hardly aware of the policeman coming to arrest him for his part in continuing Mundsen’s tungsten business, the MacGuffin of the film’s labyrinth plot.

The eventual ending is curiously sexless. Johnny finds Gilda to mutual apologies. Ballin reappears, is briefly scary then killed with his own dagger-cane, the cops forgive everyone and the lovers walk away. Hate is defeated but takes all the glamour with it. Hayworth is still beautiful but a goddess no longer, just a tall rangy woman in a houndstooth jacket. The movie woke up