Gilda on AllMovie

Columbia's lush and lavish film noir Gilda offers one of the strangest romantic triangles in any 1940s film. Played by Rita Hayworth in her considerable prime, Gilda is the sexy wife of mysterious, crippled casino owner George Macready. She is also the former love of gambler Glenn Ford, who takes a job as a croupier in Macready's Buenos Aires casino. Realizing that there is some sort of sexual tension between Hayworth and Ford, Macready goes out of his way to throw the two of them together by ordering Ford to act as Hayworth's bodyguard. One has the feeling throughout that Macready lusts after both Hayworth and Ford, but he is obviously harboring rather dark and buried motivations and laying the groundwork for some fairly serious double-dealing and a seemingly endless series of twists and turns. In the film's most famous sequence, Hayworth defies both Ford and Macready by performing an overheated rendition of "Put the Blame on Mame" in front of the panting male casino customers; film historians take note: she was actually dubbed, in this sequence, by Anita Ellis.