Seeing it once more for the umpteenth time, I thought Rita Hayworth more glamorous and beautiful than ever. She’s this glossy, luscious, rhythmic, sexually aware and knowing presence, with hair that has a life of its own and is as sexually enticing as any other part of her. Gilda is a totally glamorous film and in its own way very democratic in all its impulses. I love the uncle Pio character played by Steven Geray in that his ‘peasant’ insults illustrate that democratizing aspect of Rita’s character – she always treats him as an equal in spite of being a gal on the make — versus Glenn Ford’s – the more vulgar whore– only to redeem him later. Johnny Farrell learns how to be loved by Gilda as he learns to respect Uncle Pio.

I remember a friend many years ago raising an eyebrow when I told him how much I loved Gilda. It’s been in my life now in one way or another for thirty years. And I still love it. But I now more fully understand why he thought it not a good film: The characters don’t resemble any real people, the plot is ludicrous, the ending unbelievable and pat, a lot of extraneous characters that don’t feel necessary and that not enough is made of. Nothing in it is for one moment believable. It’s all hokum. By one set of criteria, it’s a bad film.

However, if a film inevitably ends up being a collection of moments in one’s memory, this is full of treasured ones: the highly symbolized and highly sexual initial meeting between Johnny and Ballen (George Macready); Gilda’s strip-tease; the introduction of Rita (‘decent, me?’); the moment where Ballin threatens her as she’s lying in bed (the shift in focus and light); the moment after she drinks to damn the woman who ruined Johnny’s life; the moment where Glenn brings her back from the pool and Mundson becomes graphically two-dimensional; the party sequence with the s/m gear. There are brilliant dialogue bits as well (more women in the world than anything else, except insects?) It’s a good illustration of the difference between a landmark film and a great film, between a sociological phenomenon and a work of art, between a cultural memory and the repository of cultural values.

…And yet, films that might not have a direct referent to the world that we live in but that nonetheless tap as deeply and directly into a collective dream world of fantasy and longing as Gilda – a world we might very much wish to live and participate in — are so rare as to constitute their own, very particular, art form. Maybe, as the tagline goes, ‘there never was a woman like Gilda’ but the film sure succeeds in making us wish there were.

José Arroyo