Lured

Raised on TV, I grew up with Lucille Ball -- until I was 25, one of more of her television shows was in constant re-run rotation.  Lucy's persona was well-established:  she was a wacky, feckless redhead, unsuccessful in love and constantly at war with the physical world around her.  The actress was a rara avis --a female slapstick comedian as well as probably the inventor of the modern sitcom.  (She pioneered the techniques of recording shows before live studio audiences, using multi-camera systems designed by the great German expressionist photographer, Karl Freund.)  The past always presents itself as fait accompli -- that is, gradual revelation of things that are preordained.  But, in fact, no one, including herself, knew that Lucille Ball would be come one of the most powerful and, even, feared businesswomen in Hollywood and that Desilu productions would establish norms for TV comedy that are still relevant today.  Douglas Sirk's 1947 thriller Lured is a reminder that things might have taken a completely different direction for his leading actress:  in the mid-forties, Lucille Ball was improbably beautiful, a "stunner" as the pre-raphaelites would have said, and, indeed, similar in appearance to Dante Gabriel Rosetti's muse, Elizabeth Siddal:  porcelain skin with flaming red hair.  (Sirk is shooting in black-and-white but has characters refer to Lucy's hair-color at least four or five times:  at one point, there is a close-up of a metro police identification cart -- she is working as a "female detective' -- that trumpets that her hair-color is "red".)  Lucy's red hair, pale skin, and enormous eyes suggested that she should be cast as a victim, someone always about to raped or strangled and, in fact, Sirk uses her this way in Lured.  But the actress' toughness and independence is also evident -- Lucy is a pre-Raphaelite Madonna with a big mouth, a line of cynical patter, and a world-weary vein of tough-talking cynicism.

Lucy is named Sandra in Lured and she plays a taxi-dancer marooned in a seedy London ballroom.  The customers openly solicit the women and fight over them and the girls are proudly disdainful of their pathetic patrons.  When one of the girls is killed answering a personal ad, Lucy, who was friends with the murdered woman, is recruited by the police to act as lure, bait for the psycho-killer.  The murderer taunts the police with poems based on the form and rhymes used by Baudelaire in Flowers of Evil.  The film had trouble getting approved by the Hay's Code censors and, in fact, the first half of the picture is memorably kinky.  Sandra responds to a number of salacious advertisements, putting herself in harm's way, while an older undercover cop (Charles Coburn) sneaks around the margins of the frame spying on her.  Even her audition for the part of detective is sexually suggestive -- the chief of police makes her close her eyes and, then, describe him "with complete frankness".  Sandra is used to ploys like this and, when she closes her eyes, she says something like "So now it comes" -- expecting, of course, the inevitable grope and kiss.  There's a sexual charge to Sandra's walk on the wild side and, in fact, she almost gets recruited into white slavery and shipped to South America.  These episodes don't go anywhere but they end with a bizarre confrontation with the cadaverous Boris Karloff playing a fashion-designer gone wholly berserk -- it's like a nightmare version of The Phantom Thread and one wonders whether the equally cadaverous Donald Day Lewis studied Karloff's performance in Lured.  The fashion-designer, driven mad by the plagiarism of his patterns by a competitor, forces Sandra into a stiff evening gown and, then, makes her strut in front of an audience of empty chairs, one ancient bull dog, and nonchalant-looking mannequin.  One of Sandra's wooers is a nightclub owner played with icy insolence by George Sanders.  This character answer the phone and sets up trysts with other women while embracing his current mistress -- he declares himself "an unmitigated cad."  After the buzz of its kinky first half, Lured peters out.  The mystery has to be solved and Sandra's romance with George Sanders develops into a problematic love story that leaves the viewer baffled.  Leo Rosten's script (a lifetime later he became famous for the best-seller The Joy of Yiddish)  is ornate with many flourishes and highly literate, but the pace slows with the love story and massive amounts of misdirection that Sirk has to introduce into the film's last hour primarily because the audience knows the identity of the killer at midway without any doubt.  It's always disappointing when a crime film takes forty minutes to solve a mystery that the audience has already figured-out.  Sirk gets distracted by décor:  the night club is filled with weird phallic curlicues and odd-looking pillars surmounted by lyres, smashed Corinthian capitols, and stucco antlers.  Sirk was a highly cultured man and he inserts a concert sequence involving Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony."  There are gorgeous images of London after midnight, wet cobblestones, and, during the first ten minutes, such a plethora of cleverly deployed shadows that I suspect that Sirk's intent was to parody German and film noir expressionism.  The film's problematic ending shows Sandra about to marry Sanders' night-club entrepreneur.  But Sanders is such a thoroughly unregenerate character that we really can't regard the ending as a happy one.  It's as if the snowy-complected red-head were to marry some kind of Latin-American lothario -- also, I remind, you affiliated with night clubs, perhaps, even the director of a Cuban dance band.  (Sanders is Desi Arnez with a British accent; Desi Arnez is Sanders with a Cuban accent.)