Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George MacReady, Steven Geray. Dir. Charles Vidor, Columbia, 1946
My favorite erotic fiction deals with cuckolding. The stories fascinate me. As people, cuckolds don't seem to think they're worth nice things. Or happiness. On the other hand, the cuckolding partners and their multiple lovers don't come over as the clear victors, either. Part of the fascination - maybe most of it - lies in trying to decide which party comes out the MOST degraded.
Is it the submissive, sensitive husband and his unsatisfactory size/staying power? Is it the "slutwife" who finds satiety in being transformed into a fuckdoll to humilate her husband? Or is it the lover - often black - who gets to degrade the sexy white lady but who doesn't otherwise matter?
As in bdsm scenes, if the cuck is most degraded, that means he also "wins," as his desires to see his wife turned into a promiscuous slut while he gets to be bi without shame are most fulfilled, but one can make a similar argument for the other two legs of the tripod, as well.
In Charles Vidor's 1946 noir, GILDA, the sexual and emotional dynamics and politics between the three principals, Gilda (Hayworth), Johnny Farrell (Ford), and Ballan Mundson (MacReady) often resemble those of a classic cuckold fantasy, though screenwriter Jo Eisenger puts Gilda in pole position at the conclusion, with Johnny, her cuck, sure to enjoy the spoils of her victory.
Johnny Farrell, a professional gambler fleeing some unspecified troubles in the States, arrives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he cheats some American servicemen at craps and escapes with his stake only to be stuck up in an alley. Deciding whether to fight for the money, Mundson appears and stops the attack with a cane which contains a spring-loaded blade in its tip. Mundson tells Johnny of an illegal casino on the other side of town, but tells him not to go if he plans to cheat, and if he doesn't have a tie. Johnny ignores the advice and is caught cheating at blackjack, whereupon Mundson reveals himself as the casino owner, saving Johnny from another beating. Johnny ingratiates himself with Mundson and talks himself into managing the casino.
In most cuckold stories the cuck tends to be clueless, naive, suffering from tunnel vision, and/or unsuccessful in business. Johnny starts out at failure and, while he talks himself into the money fast enough, the men's room valet, Uncle Pio (Geray), dismisses him as a "peasant," and as he first strolls the casino in his cheap suit and garish tie he stands out amid all the glamor like a tarantula on a slice of angel food. He doesn't look successful or confident, doesn't appear smart beyond a basic cunning, and stands a little shorter than many. The basic idea of cuckoldry, that the cuck is unmanly, requires the average cuck be no more than 5'11", Ford's actual height.
Returning from a business trip, Mundson introduces Johnny to his new wife, whom he married after knowing her 24 hours. His wife, Gilda, is most of the problems Farrell fled the US over, being the former Mrs. John Farrell. Mundson at once suspects, but Gilda and Johnny brazen it out for the time being. Let the games begin.
Most of Mundson's other work, involving a shady deal on a tungsten cartel, takes place at night and Gilda at once begins flirting and spending time with available men at the casino, driving Johnny, assigned to watch over her, crazy with jealousy. Gilda's infidelities, if any, put Johnny in the position of covering for her with Mundson. Soon, Mundson suspects Johnny and Gilda are cuckolding him while Ford's losing his mind because he knows Gilda's affairs are meant to make him think the same. Meanwhile, Gilda, like the wives in cuck stories, revels in her power over Ford, frequently taunting him that he's getting exactly what he wants from the arrangement. Maybe she means getting to be with her, and maybe she means what wives in cuck fiction mean when they taunt their failed husbands using the same language.
As in the stories, both Mundson and Ford respond as cucks, passive in the face of Gilda's assumed, flagrant, infidelity, Ford doing the slow burn common in the fiction, but never challenging Gilda outright. Not, at least, until Mundson's shady control of the tungsten cartel slips and he flees, presumably crashing his plane into the sea, and leaving control of casino and cartel to Johnny.
Little of the cuck fiction I've read allows for a revenge scenario, in which the cuck gets the upper hand and beats his cuckoldress at her own game, but in those that do the result plays out much like the second half of GILDA, with both partners miserable, unable to be what they truly want to be. Johnny uses his power to prevent Gilda from consummating any new relationship which would get her the economic power to buy her old way of life back, but he's no happier than she, as his dreams of financial empire via Mundson's cartel run afoul of the cartel, the Argentine authorities, and Mundson, himself, who faked his own death.
In the end, told Gilda was never unfaithful, the classic dynamic reasserts itself, minus Mundson, as Johnny goes to Gilda, submissive, and asks her to take him back home with her. The movie never definitively establishes that Gilda did or didn't cuckold Johnny, only that Johnny believes it, or believes enough to continue the relationship, on Gilda's terms.
Eisinger writes the three central characters and Vidor directs them consistent with the roles in cuck fiction. Ford plays Johnny Farrell as forever insecure, even when his pocket is full of money, forever jealous, forever seeing only part of the overall picture, even as those around him try to help him see it. MacReady plays Mundson as chilly, androgynous, aloof, confident in power he does not enjoy. The one with all the real power, Gilda, knows it and flaunts it and the movie sings when she taunts either with it.
The music stops, storywise, when Gilda loses her power to Johnny after he marries her and takes over the cartel. Johnny with power is no more imaginative or enjoyable than Johnny without, and he knows it. Both Uncle Pio and Detective Aubregon (Joseph Calleia) act as a Greek Chorus of negation, assuring him of what he already knows, that he needs Gilda, to go away with her and be happy simply that she takes him.
Even if you don't buy the cuckold idea, Jo Eisinger's script fascinates me, especially in thinking about the film afterward. Whether you take Gilda as the wife-leg of a cuckold-tripod, or as a scheming femme fatale who marries Mundson as a way back into Johnny's life, or as a con artist whose long grift pays out when Johnny asks her to take him back to the States with her, Gilda's the dominant figure throughout. Though the story is narrated by Johnny, its clear star and ultimate victor is Gilda, about which cuck-Johnny seems quite pleased. Eisinger flips the script here, allowing the traditional object of a love triangle, Gilda, to control her pursuers. Gilda, portrayed as a sexually confident woman by Hayworth, turns out to be confident with good reason - she's in control, not the men.
All of these ideas communicate themselves through dialogue. Though Vidor uses voiceover narration, by Ford, to aid exposition, it seldom says anything the actual dialogue doesn't (and better.) Virtually all vital information, plot and characterwise, communicates itself by both what is said and unsaid. Most any line serves as both text and subtext, and the viewer understands it as well as the characters. People agree to mean what they say by never saying what they mean, with the exceptions of Pio and Aubregon, whose voices are like twin Jiminy Crickets in Johnny's life, always telling him the unvarnished facts. A movie so filled with coded dialogue could be clunky or so affected as to kill spontaneity and yet Gilda's dialogue is all about spontaneity and never clunks. Through patter, repartee, banter, and badinage, Eisinger's characters speak volumes about true feelings, motives, and intentions, and it's all razor sharp and lightning fast and endlessly inventive wordplay. Gilda is one of the best-written movies I've ever seen.
Which comes through in the performances. Whether you see him as peasant or cuck, Ford's Johnny Farrell is a small man of beetled brow whose eye appears forever on the chance beside the Main Chance, an insecure man who knows everything about price and nothing of value, who becomes something better, something less weak and irresolute, with Gilda at his side. Ostensibly the hero of the piece, I didn't find Johnny Farrell a particularly likable guy. Relatable, on the other hand - yes, indeed, and to a disquieting degree. Gilda's the likable one. She could yet be a black widow, but who wouldn't die happy in her web?
Today, Gilda may be most associated with Rita Hayworth's iconic hair flip as she's introduced. It's a moment worthy of its fame, the black and white filmstock hardly checking the redness of her hair. It's the movie built around that famous introduction, however, which deserves to be known, a movie whose sexual dynamics and politics feel as resonant as 75 years ago, and whose characterization, pacing, and dialogue rival anything Tarantino and Scorsese and Coppola have put on the screen. If I ever get my revised top 100 movies I've seen officially formulated, GILDA earns itself a spot high in the upper half. What a great film.
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