A hardbitten American expatriate who turns out to have had some history with the beautiful woman who’s just made an entrance. A nightclub. A crooked casino. Sinister Germans who act as if they own the joint. A getaway by plane … More than ever, Charles Vidor’s classic melo-noir Gilda from 1946 looks like the crazy evil twin of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca. But Gilda has a streak of irrational panic and hysteria alien to Bergman and Bogart.
Glenn Ford plays Johnny, a wastrel who fetches up in a quaintly imagined Buenos Aires just before the end of the war. A perennial card-sharp and gambling cheat, he gets a poacher-turned-gamekeeper job in a casino, as indispensable assistant to its hardfaced owner Mundson (George Macready) who has just got married to the head-spinningly beautiful and mercurial Gilda, played by Rita Hayworth. But Gilda got hitched on the rebound from some American guy who broke her heart … and that guy just happened to be Johnny. Their terrible secret festers and itches, and the erotic tension escalates.
Gilda is satirically woozy with the strange mood of the time: Argentina is preparing to normalise its de facto cordial relations with Germany and its many German emigres; German businessmen are in bed with Mundson, who sports a livid Germanic scar, and nurses a bizarrely fascistic plan to “rule the world” with a tungsten-mine monopoly cunningly using his dodgy roulette wheel itself, covertly to pay off competitors. A real 1940s Hollywood treat.
Source: theguardian.com
