Johnny Farrell, a small-time gambler, usually involved in the shadiest casinos in town, arrives in Buenos Aires, getting involved in dubious backstreet gambling dens, until a chance meeting with Balin Mundson, the owner of the local established, if illegal, casino, when Mundson saves him from an armed hood, leads Johnny to being made his right-hand-man, Mundson realising that it is a better idea to have someone like Johnny on his side rather than being against him. Johnny seems to be in complete control of the gaming floor, but doesn’t impress the washroom attendant, Uncle Pio, who just calls him ‘peasant’. Although Mundson is most famous for his casino, which the authorities are completely aware of, he is also involved in a large scale tungsten cartel with Nazi connections, a very lucrative sideline. Johnny is shocked when Mundson returns from a trip abroad with his new wife, the beautiful and dangerously seductive Gilda, a woman he has only just met, but who was one of Johnny’s ex-lovers, and the one who hurt him the most. Mundson tells Johnny to keep a eye on her, and he is forced to watch as she dallies with men all over the city, at all times of day and night, but not reporting back to his boss. When the Germans behind the tungsten cartel decide they want to cut Mundson out of the operation, Johnny is approached by the Argentinian secret police, who want his help in trapping the Germans, but Johnny already has his hands fill with Gilda, their supposed mutual animosity hiding a passion for each other which they cannot hide. After being confronted by the Germans, Mundson shoots and kills one of them, then realising has to flee the country, but as he makes his escape in a small plane it explodes shortly after take off. Gilda inherits her husband’s considerable estate, and Johnny marries her, but out of loyalty to his dead friend rather than love for Gilda, but he is soon to find that nothing gilda is involved with is seemingly ever genuine, and both of them are in real danger. One of the prime film noirs of the 40s, Gilda, directed by Charles Vidor (A Farewell To Arms / Song Without End), was the film which made Rita Hayworth one of the major box-office stars of the late 40s and 50s, with a screenplay by Marion Parsonnet and an uncredited Ben Hecht, also making her character one of the most memorable vamps in cinema, a genuinely bad girl who means bad news for almost every man who gets near to her, Glenn Ford’s two-bit gambler Johnny Farrell being one of the few to escape her clutches but find that her grasp is pretty inescapable. The screenplay very deliberately throws in several elements which immediately bring to mind the timeless Casablanca, made four years earlier, with its’ heroes being essentially in exile in a foreign country, a woman returning to plague the life and rekindle the flame within a jaded, hard-bitten anti-hero, an ambivalent relationship between the Police and the criminals, each making accommodations to the other, and even a couple of Nazis turning up as the baddies, but once Hayworth appears this is very much forgiven, and one may still be surprised in a script which has some surprisingly blatant innuendoes and intimations, as well as Ford’s character having a strangely ambivalent side to his persona, his animosity toward Gilda becoming very genuine, and perhaps fuelled by other factors apart from the obvious. The central menage-a-trois is provocatively played, with George Macready, a character actor who became a fixture on the US TV of the 60s and 70s being a good villain in the form of Mundson. Femmes have rarely been so fatale as Hayworth’s Gilda, and the whole production is a strangely subversive delight.