Femme Fatale Fantasy: Gilda’s fiery impact on film noir and false ideals
To celebrate 100 years of Columbia Pictures, we’re examining the deep impact of the 1946 film noir Gilda and its sparkling star Rita Hayworth, from Shawshank to the Moulin Rouge.
Have you ever seen a woman like Rita Hayworth in Gilda? No? Well, have you seen The Shawshank Redemption? The inmates view the 1946 film noir (“I Leo-pointed when they watched Gilda,” writes Letterboxd member Dylan), then Andy Dufresne uses a poster of Hayworth to cover up the hole to freedom he’s digging—Stephen King’s original novella was titled Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. Have you seen Mulholland Drive? It’s the sight of a Gilda movie poster that inspires the amnesiac actress (Laura Harring) to name herself Rita.
Gilda, directed by Charles Vidor, centers not on the titular role but on a crooked gambler named Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford). He arrives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to make his own luck, where he meets Ballin Mundson (George Macready), the wealthy owner of an illegal casino. After getting caught cheating at blackjack, Johnny smooth-talks his way into becoming the casino’s manager, and a greedy little partnership is formed. It all collapses like a house of cards when Johnny meets Ballin’s wife. Guess who!
With a flip of her luscious hair and a shimmering smile, we are introduced to Gilda. The tension is immediate: we can’t tell if Johnny despises or adores her, recognizes her or doesn’t. All that’s clear is that she has the potential to be his downfall. Of this scene, Sam writes, “Yeah, Glenn Ford plays the main character and we experience the story from his point of view, but this is Hayworth’s picture right from the moment she springs onto the screen in one of the most iconic character introductions of all time.”
Gilda is undoubtedly the star of the show, despite occupying limited screen time in comparison to Johnny. If you find their pairing a wee bit unbelievable, just know that Hayworth and Ford ended up having a decades-long on-off affair; he was even the pallbearer at her funeral when she died of Alzheimer’s complications at age 68. Still, Laura’s statement that “all the scenes with Rita Hayworth >>>>>>>>>>> All the scenes without Rita Hayworth,” is true. Meanwhile, theironcupcake gushes, “She sizzles, she burns. She’s Rita Hayworth as Gilda, the ultimate noir goddess of the silver screen.”
But here’s the thing: Gilda is Rita Hayworth, but Rita Hayworth is not Gilda. It’s impossible to live up to her, this feminine ideal, this perfect woman who doesn’t really exist outside of fantasy. Take, for instance, this exchange from Notting Hill:
Anna (Julia Roberts): Rita Hayworth used to say, “They go to bed with Gilda, they wake up with me.”
William (Hugh Grant): Who’s Gilda?
Anna: Her most famous part. Men went to bed with the dream; they didn’t like it when they would wake up with the reality.
The reality: Rita Hayworth was actually Margarita Carmen Cansino. She was half Spanish Roma, and the studios decided to whitewash her by playing up her half-Irish side. They encouraged Cansino to change her name, dye her brown hair ginger-red and undergo two years’ worth of electrolysis to alter her hairline in order to become a “star”. Her reward was a celebrity status marred by miserable objectification: the atomic bomb tested at the Bikini Atoll bore an image of her in Gilda—in reference to her “bombshell” reputation—which, according to her then-husband Orson Welles, infuriated the leftist actress.
Gilda has had more positive impacts, too. The Criterion release features interviews with Martin Scorsese and Baz Luhrmann, in which they profess their love for this fiery noir and discuss how it influenced Casino and Moulin Rouge!, respectively. Parallels abound between the characters of Johnny and Robert De Niro’s casino manager Sam “Ace” Rothstein, as well as with Gilda and Nicole Kidman’s “Sparkling Diamond” cabaret courtesan Satine.
The Moulin Rouge! of it all was especially apparent on my third Gilda rewatch. Throughout the 110-minute runtime, Gilda shimmies and strums guitar, flirts and flitters, walks a razor-thin line between Johnny’s love and hatred. It drives him mad with jealousy to see her seduce other men during her striptease-adjacent musical performances, just as it drives her mad to bear the brunt of his cruelly unsympathetic behavior. Bar for bar, both of these dramatic love stories are the cinematic equivalent of ‘Mr. Brightside’ by The Killers; jealousy really does turn saints into the sea.
Another saint affected by the sickening sting of paranoid envy? Roger Rabbit. In the four-time Academy Award-winning Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Roger hires a private eye to snoop on his glamorous wife, Jessica Rabbit, after suspecting her of having an affair. According to a 1988 New York Times article, Jessica was partially based on Hayworth: director of animation Richard Williams said, “It’s the ultimate male fantasy, drawn by a cartoonist,” and that he had “tried to make her like Rita Hayworth”. The similarity was not lost on Cormac, who astutely writes, “Gilda walked so Jessica Rabbit could run!”
But Gilda isn’t merely a straight male fantasy. It’s also deeply bisexual. Don’t just take my word for it, take TCM host Eddie Muller’s: in his outro to Gilda on the channel’s weekly Noir Alley show, Muller calls Johnny a “live-in houseboy” for Ballin. “I am well aware that this reading of the film may have lost a large swath of TCM viewers who don’t believe… [a] movie from 1946 could possibly have gay or bisexual characters,” he admits. “Well, yes! Not overtly, but covertly? You better believe it.”
Muller is referencing the infamous Hays Code, a set of censoring industry guidelines championed by Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America president William H. Hays. If your film didn’t follow these rules (which ranged from no profanity to no “sex perversion” to, appallingly, no miscegenation), it was barred from playing in theaters, effectively burying it. Throughout the ’30s to the ’60s, filmmakers skirted the stifling code by pumping their movies full of cheeky, implicit innuendos.
Gilda is no exception—this thing is dripping with repressed eroticism, from Ballin’s phallic cane-weapon to the sensual way Gilda leans down to light a cigarette. They could show Gilda entering her home with a man, implying adulterous sex, but could not show anything remotely close to the act itself. As a result, the film is occasionally confusing, wispy, existing in this liminal space between reality and fantasy—much like Hayworth herself.
Nevertheless, it remains an “absolute classic,” according to Slig001. “Gilda takes staples such as a love triangle and a femme fatale and tangles it into a dreamlike story involving spies, a casino, a cheeky bathroom attendant, German patents and more odd elements.” It is odd. The name “Johnny” is said 101 times. There’s a bizarre subplot revolving around a tungsten cartel. Even the femme fatale archetype that Slig001 mentioned is subverted: though the marketing positions Gilda in this role—and at times, she certainly does fill it—perhaps it’s the power-obsessed Ballin who is the true homme fatale. After all, isn’t he the one who initially lures Johnny down the darkened path to the illicit casino?
This theory ties into the film’s centerpiece musical number: a stunning rendition of ‘Put the Blame on Mame’, in which Gilda sings, dances and slyly peels off her gloves for an all-male audience. (Hayworth’s singing voice was actually dubbed by Anita Kert Ellis, furthering the idea of Gilda as an impossible fantasy.) The song is about how a seductive woman named Mame can be blamed for natural disasters—even though Ballin is the one committing the real crimes, Gilda is the one who gets saddled with the deadly reputation. It’s very, “Oh, pretty girl, let’s hate on her!”
On that note, I’ll leave you with the words of another song by a pretty girl. Or, rather, a material girl.
“Rita Hayworth gave good face!” —‘Vogue’ by Madonna
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