The first shot of Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946) lasts just two seconds but I guarantee you will never, ever forget it. This is the clip the World War Two pin-up queen will always be remembered for—the one which is shown whenever sultry femmes fatale are discussed.
First the setup, then I’ll discuss Rita’s entrance (which comes 17 minutes into the film):
The movie opens at a Buenos Aires waterfront as Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford), a slick-haired gambler who “makes his own luck,” is tricking a group of sailors out of their shore pay using a pair of loaded dice. When he gets held up moments later, his life is saved by a passerby named Ballin Mundson (George Macready) who owns a cane with a retractable switchblade at the end. Mundson also owns a successful Buenos Aires casino and, once he sees Farrell’s wad of cash, invites him over for a visit.
In a tense, brilliantly-filmed scene, we see Farrell cheating the house at a game of blackjack. He’s invited upstairs for a little “chat” with a pair of Mundson’s thugs and, once he’s had a conversation with their knuckles, he convinces Mundson he could be a smart addition to his security staff. Mundson takes him on and soon Farrell has risen to the rank of right-hand thug for the brooding, mysterious casino owner.
Mundson has a scar running from nose to ear and speaks with an accent that has traces of German in it, but Farrell doesn’t let that dampen their growing relationship. He’s the picture-perfect film noir male: a cocksure loner who doesn’t necessarily go looking for trouble, but finds it anyway. Farrell keeps his cards close to his chest and, like Rick in Casablanca, he’s the kind of guy who sticks his neck out for nobody. But Mundson did save his life down on the docks and he has given him a good job as manager of the casino and then, in a moment of confidence, he did tell him the combination to the wall safe.
There’s a whiff of a homosexual attraction between the two men (though the Production Code at the time kept it to a subtle “whiff”), symbolized by the phallic stick with its hidden blade. Mundson calls the stick “(my) most faithful, obedient friend. It is silent when I wish to be silent. It talks when I wish to talk.” Together, the three of them—two men and a little stick—form a sort of triangle. There’s soon to be a fourth side to that triangle.
The war ends and Mundson suddenly announces he must go away on a little trip, leaving Farrell in charge of the casino. The night Mundson returns, he summons Farrell to his house. “You'd think a bell would have rung, or you'd think I'd have had some instinct of warning,” Farrell tells us in his narration. “But I didn't. I just walked right into it.”
Okay, here comes that moment I was talking about. Ready?
Mundson leads Farrell upstairs, saying he has a surprise for him. They walk to the doorway of the bedroom and Mundson calls out, “Gilda? Are you decent?”
The Two-Second Moment:[close-up] Her head is down and she flings it up, hair flying back and away then finally bouncing down around her shoulders. Her eyes glitter, her peaches-and-cream complexion glows and her mouth is slightly parted. If you stand close enough to the screen, you can actually feel the warm breath coming out of those lips. Take a whiff and you’ll probably find it’s scented with cigarettes and sex.
Gilda says, “Me?” Then her eyes catch sight of Farrell standing in the door and she falters for a millisecond—[quick cut-away to a reaction shot of Farrell also looking stunned]—then she regains her sensual composure and pulls up the strap of her dress which had slipped off her shoulder during the hair-toss. “Sure,” she purrs, “I’m decent.”
The shot, however, is more than decent. Even today, 55 years later, it remains quite possibly the sexiest two seconds on film (and, yes, I’m including all those Emmanuelle movies). If you think about it logically, the shot makes no sense; there’s no reason for Gilda to have had her head down like that. She’s standing in the middle of her bedroom and perhaps she’d been dancing to the phonograph playing in the background or maybe she’d been combing out those rich, full curls—but there’s no evidence of anything like that. It’s just a wildly exuberant movement by Hayworth which burns on our retinas. Gilda was filmed in black and white; if it had been in color, Hayworth’s red hair would have been like a torch swooshing across the screen for those two seconds, melting the filmstrip (and quite possibly our eyeballs) in the process. Lucky for us, it’s in stark black and white (by the way, Rudolph Mate’s cinematography is simply perfect—elegant and seamy at the same time).
I don’t mean to make too much of these few frames of film, but let me just say this and then I’ll move on: Hayworth captures everything about Gilda’s character in that movement. She’s a flirt, she’s a schemer, she’s sexy, she’s dangerous.
Farrell “walked right into it,” all right. Gilda is Mundson's new wife and from the very first moment, we know there's something simmering between Farrell and the nightclub singer. The movie quickly turns into a suspenseful story of the conflict between temptation and loyalty. Farrell must keep his passions bridled around his friend and savior Mundson, even though Gilda—with her omnipresent cigarettes and body-hugging evening gowns—tries to lure him down a dangerous path. Farrell is thrown into hormonal torment: “I couldn't get her out of my mind for a minute. She was in the air I breathed, the food I ate.”
Ah yes, but he hasn’t yet seen the other sexy bit Hayworth is famous for: the nightclub number where she sings “Put the Blame on Mame” dressed in a black, strapless, low-cut dress. [When Hayworth was asked by a reporter what held her dress up, she replied, “Two things.”] As she sings in the spotlight, Gilda slowly strips off her long black gloves. The look on her face is one that’s normally only found in the bedroom. Don’t be surprised if you see smoke start to curl out of your VCR.
Gilda glides to a climax which shouldn’t be too surprising to film noir devotees. If you’ve seen one Postman Always Rings Twice, you’ve seen ’em all. Passion, greed, lust, betrayal—all the usual stuff is on display here. What sets Gilda apart from many of its dark cousins is not only its brilliant performances (from every single cast member), but also the razor-dipped-in-acid script by Marion Parsonnet (with some uncredited work by Ben Hecht) and Charles Vidor’s stylish direction.
Shadow and light are trademarks of the film noir genre, but here Vidor uses them to add symbolic depth to the story. In several shots, Mundson looms in the foreground as a gigantic black hulk, a domineering force that shrinks other people in the frame. Black and white is used to carefully delineate good and evil…though in Gilda’s case, it’s a little of both. Notice the number of shots Vidor composes where Gilda’s head is in shadow (the dark intent of her mind) while her body is in light (the bright blaze of her sexuality).
This marked the third of four times Hayworth teamed up with Vidor (the other pictures were The Lady in Question, Cover Girl and The Loves of Carmen) and he extracted what is perhaps her finest (and certainly her most memorable) performance. Farrell may be the main character in the plot, but the whole film revolves around Gilda and her complex sexuality. As they say in advertising, Rita Hayworth is Gilda. Amazingly, she didn’t even get nominated for an Oscar for this movie.
Glenn Ford matches her with an equally terrific performance. I’d always thought of him as a standard-issue kind of actor—the kind who shows up, reads his lines with sincerity, then goes home and has a snack of milk and cookies before going to bed. Calm, cool, collected. But here—near the beginning of his 50-year career—he sparks up the screen with carefree cynicism. Farrell always has a devil-may-care smirk at the edge of his mouth and if he gets in a bad jam he knows he can always use his fists like punctuation marks to bring other men to a complete cold stop. Other men. Dames, on the other hand…
As the posters said, “There NEVER was a woman like Gilda!”
GILDA is the film that gave the world the indelible image of Rita Hayworth in that tight gown lovingly removing that long glove as she sings "Put the ...More at Family Video
The legendary Rita Hayworth sizzles with sensuality and magnetism as she sings Put the Blame on Mame and delivers a dazzling performance as the entici...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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