Sex. Gambling. Psychological abuse. Ah, the good ol' days!

There is an enduring and irritating myth that all old movies - "old" typically referring to anything made before 1960 - are clean, naive, prudish family fun, and that Hollywood has since morphed into a wholesale distributor of corruption and degenerate morals. This myth was front and center in the reviews for Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney's fantastic '40's-noir throwback, The Good German (2006), which drew a lot of criticisms for vulgar language, amongst other things. One usually level-headed reviewer lamented how the film was a perversion of the good ol' wholesome noirs; specifically, Casablanca, which was great for the whole family. All I can say to that is, I must have seen the unrated version. Of course, Hitchcock is always conspicuously absent from critical and audience laments for the days of clean and pure film. At any rate, whenever I get into such a conversation, I like to bring up George Vidor's Gilda, a film that lacks the sort of swearing, gore, or nudity that's par for the course these days, but proves that you don't need any of the above to make a picture that's about as adults-only as it gets.

Made in 1946 and starring Rita Hayworth in the title role, Gilda is one of those films that, like Chinatown, raises the ambient temperature a few degrees, but not for pleasant reasons. Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) is a small-time hustler living in Buenos Aires whose luck runs out one night when he finds himself at the business end of an armed robbery. Fortunately, luck rears its head in the form one one Ballin Mundson, a cold, mysterious dandy who carries a cane with a switchblade in the tip. Mundson invites Johnny to an illegal casino, where he promptly cheats his way to a tidy sum before being escorted up to the owner's office - the owner, of course, being Mundson. Mundson could use a man with Johnny's skills, and in a flash-forward we see that Johnny's become Mundson's right-hand man. The two men live by one fixed rule: gambling and women don't mix. Of course, it isn't long before one of them breaks that rule, and Mundson returns from a vacation with not only a wife, but a wife whom Johnny knows and hates (and vice-versa). What started out as a content existence of organized crime soon devolves into a cycle of torment, power struggles, and revenge that's split three ways as Mundson seeks to retain his control of Gilda and Johnny both.

In short, Gilda is the story of two people trying their best to destroy each other, under an angry megalomaniac's watchful eye. Gilda's weapon of choice is sex; Johnny's, psychological abuse; Mundson's, fear. The film is quite wordy, and the dialogue is rife with double-entendres as well as words too blunt to not be taken literally. It proves quite well that one can be harsh, vulgar, and downright dirty without uttering a single f-word. As well, sex is front and center. There are strong suggestions that Mundson is at the very least bisexual, and possibly experimented with Johnny at some point. It's implied that Johnny met Gilda when she worked as a stripper and, possibly, a whore, and while she's terrified of the fallout should Mundson learn of this, she's also not ashamed to keep living as if she were still a working girl. In one very famous scene, she dances the beginnings of a striptease while singing a song called "Put The Blame On Mame"...and though all she removes are her long black gloves, I've seen films with nudity that went to the point of simulated sex, and were much less sexual than Gilda. If anything, Gilda is the Theiss Tittilation Theory come to life, twenty years early. For those of you wondering what the heck I'm talking about, the Theiss Tittilation Theory is so named for original Star Trek costume designer Bill Theiss, who reasoned that not showing "the naughty bits" was sexier and more enticing than showing them. He put this theory into play by creating sexy alien-girl outfits that, say, fully covered the breasts but revealed, with asymmetrical draping, the stomach and navel...in other words, Theiss believed the tease can be more sexual than the actual reveal, and teasing is Gilda's stock in trade. These days, the Canadian and American film industry/audience/censor boards are often criticised for being overly lenient on violent content whilst being overly restrictive on sexual content. When I think of some of the old films I've seen, it often feels like this standard was once reversed. Yeah, there was the infamous "number of seconds a kiss can last before it's dirty" rule, but it seems like although filmmakers couldn't show whatever they pleased, they could say just about anything, so long as it had more (or less) than four letters and didn't support Communism.

I know, I know, I'm really not selling this picture as something anyone would want to watch. I can't deny that it's an unpleasant story. However, I also can't deny that it's a very good film, and more than a little interesting. It also raises some good questions as to what constitutes adult content, and provokes a re-examination of the belief that media being "clean" or "dirty" all depends on visuals and swear words. It also proves why Rita Hayworth was once the most bankable female star in Hollywood. And, on top of all that, it serves as a good reminder that humanity didn't make some sudden, unprecedented slide into corruption and vulgarity in just fourty short years - we just altered the way we express it.