Gilda

How do you film a sex scene between two men? At first, the answer may seem obvious: film it like you would a sex scene between a man and a woman. But the social politics of same-sex desire preclude the familiar trappings of heterosexual lovemaking; if a man makes a pass at another man at a bar, there’s a fair chance that the other man will punch him in the face. (Imagine if, for instance, in Good Will Hunting, the role of Skylar had been played by Ben Affleck rather than Minnie Driver. How do you like them apples?) Such is not the fodder of romantic comedies and, indeed, we have yet to see a major studio-produced gay romance, comedic or otherwise. This is tied to the fact that, in life as on film, gay sexuality remains linked to discretion, something to be taken care of inoffensively, out of sight.

Recent films such as Moonlight (2016) and Call Me By Your Name (‘17) have done a good job of replicating those hidden spaces: in the former, two teenage friends crouch on a nighttime beach and slip their hands into one another’s jeans; in the second, much the same takes place in a bedroom between a teenager and his father’s assistant once the rest of the house has gone to sleep. These intimacies are relegated to the cover of night, and even then the meeting of flesh is tamed for our eyes. Sex in popular American cinema has always been finicky and glossed-over, but unlike a movie featuring, say, Jennifer Lawrence or Scarlett Johansson, there is no soaring romance to these exchanges, no amber glow. Just solemn, shy sincerity, flickering and indistinct in the shadows.

Compare these scenes, then, to the opening of Gilda — a movie released seventy years before Moonlight and, in its own coded way, much more explicit and frank in its illustration of male fornication: Having just won a bundle at a dockside crapshoot, Johnny (Glenn Ford) slinks into the night and, brightly, stops for a minute to count his bills. Suddenly a gun is pointed at his back; a goon demands that he hand over the cash. But before he can, a third party enters the scene: a gleaming black walking stick. It flicks the gun from the goon, who, when he bends down to pick up the weapon, is assailed again by the walking stick — only this time, a long knife blade juts from its end.

“Get going,” growls a flat Germanic voice. The goon does so.

Finally the owner of this sinister appendage comes into the light: Ballin Mundson (George Macready), immaculately accoutered in homburg, ascot and languid facial scar.

“Thank you,” the rough-hewn Johnny sighs. “You saved my life.”

The stranger smiles as he and Johnny walk together a few paces. Then they stop — not to re-count the bills, but to talk behind a wall of shipping crates.

Ballin pulls out a cigarette case. Johnny helps himself.

“Thanks,” he says, as Ballin flashes a lighter under his nose. “You’ll have to let me return the favor one day.”

Ballin exhales a line of smoke. “What, save my life?”

Johnny looks at him, hungry and worn. “Light your cigarette.”

From its beginning, Gilda — ultimately a movie about misogyny but, by extension, also a study in the cult of masculinity that breeds such gendered contempt — depicts queer male sexuality as a cool balance between luck and will, gentlemanly friendship and calculated obedience. In the following scenes, Johnny visits Ballin’s casino, where he cheats at cards and beats up the henchmen. Rather than having him carted off by the police, Ballin responds to Johnny’s provocations and takes him on as his — ahem — right-hand man. Together, they run the casino like a pair of ghoulish playground bullies, roaming the schoolyard after dark.

Old movies tend to link homosexuality with crime in general, but this dubious epistemology is also a telling metaphor for the nature of gay sexuality in mid-century America. Johnny and Ballin’s initial meeting at the dock shows that they share a language of efficiency and violence. “I make my own luck” they say to one another, as if talking to a cracked mirror. This credo is repeated like an incantation throughout the film, and it’s a euphemism for homosexuality, of course, but it’s also a proud declaration of Machiavellian thuggishness. Risk is the nature of their existence; dealing in crime is a form of mastery over unseemly personal desire.

Borne as it is out of defensiveness, the impulse to control quickly escalates to pathology. Johnny is no sooner employed by Ballin than he puts on airs of condescension, wearing his new tuxedo as if it shielded him from his own fallibility. And after working at the casino for several months, Johnny is granted access to Ballin’s precious personal documents: patents, corporate deeds — all of which taken together amount to a formidable monopoly. One that, as the Deutsche-centric Ballin modestly postulates, will allow him to one day “rule the world.” Sound familiar?

Such shenanigans are far more sinister than a crooked game of cards, and Johnny finds himself wet, so to speak, in very murky waters. But it’s alright by him; after all, he and Ballin have their understanding: a three-way friendship, completed by the nefarious walking stick. (“Say hello to my little friend…”) Almost overnight, the closeted man has become an agent of fascism. “I was born in that alley where you met me,” Johnny assures Ballin. “That way I have no past, see? Only future.” Their drive to fortify themselves against any threat to their desires becomes a compulsion of global magnitude. They become monsters.

And then into this gay little arrangement steps a woman. And what a woman. Vocal, vibrant and impetuously self-determined, Gilda (Rita Hayworth) is not only Ballin’s impromptu bride (they meet while he is away from the casino for a few days, and marry before he gets back) — she is Johnny’s ex-squeeze. The former lovebirds bristle the moment Ballin “introduces” them, and from there on it’s a regular battle of the sexes. Or, more like, a regular woman’s-desperate-effort-to-escape-the-clutches-of-a-wounded-male-ego. In Gilda, misogyny is used as a means of dramatizing the essential panic that fuels fascism: our inability to control other people.

Usurper of Ballin’s cane in his and Johnny’s cozy three-way, Gilda’s presence does more than threaten the boys’ lurid contract: it threatens Johnny’s very sense of masculine prowess. Glenn Ford is smug, insolent as Johnny — the protagonist, to be sure, but fundamentally dangerous. He rolls his eyes at the rest of the world, certain that he knows better than everyone around him. This is the kind of obstinacy that characterized contemporary male movie stars like Humphrey Bogart or James Stewart; audiences responded to their cynical detachment because it lent the men an air of roguish authority. And because their characters rarely risked much in the way of social taboo, Bogart and Stewart were usually buffered by what might be deemed their “lawfulness.” (Notable exceptions include In a Lonely Place [1950] and Vertigo [‘58].) They were on the right side, so their stubbornness was taken as a social virtue — rather than evidence of sociopathic insecurity.

What’s unusual about Johnny is, as a criminal, his self-righteousness is the only grounds upon which the audience is invited to identify with him. But this tenuous identification is itself tested by the maniacal means he adopts to reassure himself of his superiority: After Ballin leaves the scene (I won’t say how) and the one-time lovers reunite, Johnny ambushes Gilda by imprisoning her in their apartment. He cuts her off from the rest of the world, and employs his hitmen, influence and marriage certificate to make sure that his grip on her remains intact. Although the audience has been led to side with Johnny throughout the movie, he behaves so abominably that he disqualifies his own veracity as narrator. His prejudice is pushed to such a violent extreme that it calls the audience’s own morality into question: Who are you to sit by and accept this man as your hero? That is where Gilda truly shines — not as a radical depiction of masculine insecurity, but as ironic witness to a cruel, widely-accepted status quo.

The feebleness of Johnny’s villainy is only expounded by the fact that the woman he’s trying to oppress is played by Rita Hayworth. Bursting with animation and emotional vigor, Hayworth is remarkably generous with the camera in Gilda; a trained dancer, she understood what it meant to be watched. Every flip of her hair, every turn of her heel, is coordinated to end with the star facing her audience, smiling. Early in the film, seated with Johnny at a table in Ballin’s nightclub, Gilda scoffs at her ex’s attempt to write off her marriage to Ballin as exploitative and whorish: “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black!” When Johnny sheepishly defends himself by claiming that Ballin helped him get back on his feet, Gilda merely smiles.

“Now isn’t that a coincidence,” she says. “That’s practically the story of my life.”

At that moment, a handsome gentleman approaches their table, his eyes trained on the glittering redhead. Without missing a beat, Hayworth looks up, cocks her face to a more attractive angle, and breathes: “Hello.”

In many ways, Gilda is reflective of its star’s own personal struggles. Married as she was to a string of abusive husbands, Johnny’s voiceover halfway through the film (“She got a job singing in a nightclub, she started divorce proceedings, and she met a man”) could be a refrain for Hayworth’s tumultuous private and professional lives. This comes through onscreen; while her acting style is exaggerated, almost comic, everything Hayworth says and does rings with conviction. Her later scenes with Johnny, for instance — begging for freedom, groveling at his feet — are terrifying and pathetic. But the movie’s best moments come on the two occasions that Hayworth performs “Put the Blame on Mame,” a song that catalogues various historical disasters and ironically re-attributes their cause to an omnipresent woman named Mame.

The first time she sings it, Gilda offers the tune as a rueful testimony, alone at night, strumming along with a haunting acoustic guitar:

…Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked a lantern in Chicagotown They say that started the fire that burned Chicago down… That’s the story that went around, But here’s the real lowdown:

Put the blame on Mame, boys, Put the blame on Mame. Mame kissed a buyer from out of town — That kiss burned Chicago down. So you can put the blame on Mame, boys, Put the blame on Mame.

Before she can finish the song, she is interrupted by Johnny. This is before he’s taken means to restrict her agency, so Gilda walks away from him unscathed. But later in the film, trapped in his snare, she reprises the song — only this time, it’s in front of a roaring nightclub.

Gowned in a shimmering black sheath, Gilda (unbeknownst to Johnny) struts before a full orchestra and performs “Mame” with gutsy self-indulgence. She suggestively peels off a satin glove and tosses it into the audience. When the number’s over, she continues to disrobe, sending her other glove and then her jewels through the air.

Reaching for the back of her dress, she quips: “I’m not very good with zippers!” Immediately, she’s set upon by a herd of men, each of them eager to aid in her striptease. Her cool detachment as the men fight to unzip the dress is akin to Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) looking on as Caspar Gutman (Sidney Greenstreet) furiously chips away at the eponymous statuette in The Maltese Falcon (1941). In that film, Gutman was eager to get at the jewels underneath — something he could possess, or hold as evidence of his own virility. For all intents and purposes, Gilda and the figurine are equivalent objects of desire, treasures in an ongoing war of psychopathic male greed.

The statue is a statue and therefore hasn’t the agency to counteract such evil, but Gilda’s performance is triumphant — an assertion of selfhood that shows up the cowardice of not only her husband but the world around her. Through sheer willfulness, Gilda outclasses her terrorizer and reclaims her personal integrity.

Her strength of character may be the thing that most distinguishes Gilda from Johnny, all of whose actions arise from a feeling of personal inadequacy. He punishes Gilda for representing heterosexual bliss (i.e., social as well as legal acceptance) that, as a queer individual, he can’t ever know. It is only by negating or exterminating some aspect of his sexuality that he maintains a coherent sense of self. In the end, of course, seeing as Hollywood has never been too keen on letting queers or criminals go scot-free, Johnny makes an unspoken promise to abandon his “lawless” side and remain with Gilda. She forgives him (“We’ve both behaved so badly, neither of us has to say we’re sorry”), and even Ballin’s black walking stick makes a final appearance just to drive the point home. Cue the cleansing sunrise, the swelling music — and order is restored! Johnny decides against making his own luck. He decides to go straight.

But his viciousness lingers long after the film has ended. One person’s impulse to sublimate another is the same that motivated the Third Reich to establish a ghetto in Warsaw, and that has motivated the Trump Administration to imprison immigrants in concentration camps. A terror for the Other saturates every shadow of this movie, but director Charles Vidor and screenwriters Jo Eisinger, Marion Parsonnet and Ben Hecht applied a collectively unique, self-aware artistry that elevates Gilda to a proto-feminist appeal for socialist ideals: a world free of blame, founded on transparency in human relations. The characters misconstrue one another’s motives so completely because they are determined to appear invulnerable. Vulnerability, in turn, is met with bafflement — as though it were something beyond comprehension. And indeed, what becomes of vulnerability in a world where survival depends on one’s ability to hide in plain sight?