The Gay Peasant and His Faithful Friend

Regular attendees of my Thursday-night film screenings might remember the season I presented back in 2022 dedicated to Ordinary Ladies.

The idea behind the Ordinary Ladies season had been to showcase films featuring female characters who did not fit into any of the usual cinematic "feminine" tropes. They were not the customary sex goddesses or temptresses or damsels in distress; they were (to coin a phrase) Ordinary Ladies with their own personalities and motivations and story arcs. They were (I argued at the time) distinct from the "vixens & floozies & sexy chanteuses" that one often encounters in classic cinema.

I selected a dizzying variety of films for the Ordinary Ladies series (and had a lot of fun doing so) but one title I did not screen under that banner is the one I plan to show this week.

Gilda is many things, but ordinary is not one of them.

As a film it positively drips with sexuality and subtext. As a character, she... positively drips with sexuality and subtext. 

Gilda is arguably Rita Hayworth's most iconic role. She is often cited as the very epitome of the femme fatale; the alluring screen goddess who represents pure desire and naked lust (within the restrictions of the Hays Office censorship codes, of course).

Hayworth herself was haunted by the persona of Gilda for years after its release, and famously said "Men go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me." (Rita Hayworth was haunted by far worse things in her later years, including the Alzheimer's Disease that robbed her of most of her life, but that's a discussion for another time.)

Gilda (the film) is frequently included in discussions of Hollywood's most iconic films noir (yes, that's correct; I looked it up) and it certainly has many of the trappings of a textbook film noir: a dark, sleazy underworld, inhabited by shifty denizens of the night; a flawed and conflicted hero; a (very) sexy temptress; even a hard-boiled voiceover narration.

But Gilda is not a textbook noir; it's something quite different. (Or perhaps we're just looking in the wrong textbook.)

When Bosley Crowther published his (negative) review of Gilda in the New York Times in 1946, he said

Despite close and earnest attention to this nigh-onto-two-hour film [it's actually nigh onto one hour and forty-five minutes, but never mind] this reviewer was utterly baffled by what happened on the screen. To our average register of reasoning, it simply did not make sense.

Crowther then attempts to summarise the plot to which he had apparently devoted his "close and earnest attention":

It seems that a fantastic female, the pivotal character in this film, turns up in a Buenos Aires casino as the wife of the dour proprietor. But it also seems that she was previously the sweetie of a caustic young man who is quite a hand at gambling and is employed by this same proprietor. For reasons which are guardedly suggested, she taunts and torments this tough lad until, by a twist of circumstances, her husband is suddenly removed. Then she marries the laddie but continues to fight with him because of some curious disposition which is never properly explained. In the end, after certain vagrant incidents, they are reconciled—but don't ask us why.

Poor Bosley. He had either led a genuinely sheltered life, or he was professing incomprehension because he didn't want to admit to his loyal readers that he had actually understood the subtext of the film he was reviewing.

Come to think of it, subtext is hardly an accurate description. The "subtext" in Gilda couldn't have been more obvious if they had presented it in glorious Technicolor & breath-taking CinemaScope and wrapped it up in a giant rainbow ribbon.

Bosley Crowther either didn't have many gay friends, or he just didn't want anyone to know that he had gay friends.

The "curious disposition which is never properly explained" that he alludes to in his review is explained about plainly as a Hollywood film possibly could in 1946: Glenn Ford and George Macready are a gay couple, and Rita Hayworth is the woman who comes between them. 

Why is that so complicated?

In fact, Bosley Crowther, in his slightly ham-fisted manner, had managed to put his finger on the very essence of Gilda. The "gay subtext" in the film is not some subversive, counter-cultural reading of the story, nor is it a 21st Century re-framing of an (almost) 80-year-old plot with modern sensibilities. 

If you don't acknowledge the relationship between the two male characters (as Crowther apparently didn't)  then the plot of the film quite simply makes no sense at all.

As Fiona Pleasance puts it in her modern review of the film, "There’s a powerful sexuality at work here, and it isn’t Gilda’s."

That is precisely the genius of Gilda. It features one of the most memorable "screen goddesses" of all time, in a performance that has rightly gone down in history as just about the sexiest temptress in movie history. But the steamiest relationship in the film has nothing to do with her. The real story here is about the relationship between Glenn Ford and George Macready.

No wonder Bosley Crowther was so confused. Gilda isn't the femme fatale at all. She's the beard.

We will screen Gilda at 7.30 on Thursday, the 28th of November at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.