Looking at Gilda as an example of a lousy tale that is a great tale
I was thinking about the Rita Hayworth movie Gilda this morning. This is one of the great films noir of the 1940s. The movie takes place in Argentina or some other South American country. Glenn Ford plays a down on his luck adventurer who is rescued by a mysterious nightclub owner. The nightclub owner is played by George Macready in a cold, sinister fashion. He has three things he values in his life:
- His nightclub
- His new bride (Gilda, played by Rita Hayworth)
- His plans to corner the market in some metal (I think it might have been tungsten)
Glenn Ford’s character is taken in by the nightclub owner as his assistant, in charge of the club and also in charge of Gilda, who takes a lot of looking after. It’s clear as soon as we see Gilda and the adventurer meet up, that they have met before – even though they deny it to the nightclub owner.
Gilda proceeds to drive the adventurer half crazy trying to keep up with her. She makes a show of taking up with every man who asks her, and Glenn Ford’s adventurer he sure she’s fucking every one of them (although we in the audience are not too sure – we never see any evidence of it, and most audience members feel that Gilda is only putting on an act for the adventurer’s sake).
The story then proceeds along two tracks: first the love triangle, and the jealousy dance; second, the mystery of what the nightclub owner is really up to with his connections to former Nazis and the Consortium that seeks to corner the market on tungsten.
Glenn Ford’s character narrates the story in voice over. The voiceover is the only thing that preserves even the semblance of sanity or rationality in the storyline. The voiceover is overwhelmed by the visuals – the crisp, beautiful black-and-white cinematography and the musical set pieces as Gilda sings and dances and practically performs a striptease in the nightclub just to madden Glenn Ford even more.
These set pieces are what the movie is all about. Your impression of the movie a day or so after you’ve seen it consists solely of these set pieces. They linked together like the scenes in a nightmare or some erotic dream. There is a sense and a rationality somewhere about the movie, but even if you consider the voiceover, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
What makes this work, and makes Gilda a great film (or at least an unforgettable one) is that the cinematography and the music and the chemistry between the stars is so powerful. Basically, what makes it work is that the audiovisual aspects of film provide us in the audience with enough entertainment and enjoyment that the storyline, which is held in the weaker, subordinate verbal aspect of the film, isn’t even important.
A movie consists of these two elements: the emotional and poetical photography and music (or sounds) and the verbal. This is the only thing that makes a movie like Gilda possible. It allows the movie to entertain us while at the same time defying all rational explanations and analysis.
I’m not sure that this would be possible in a story that exists as text only. It would be possible in a play (which isn’t that different from a movie) or a radio play (which lacks the visual aspects of plays and movies, but has the audio aspects as well as the performance of the actors).
I think the closest the text only tale can come to this sort of defective talesmanship is in a narrative poem. The narrative poem tells us a story, but it can also include elements of lyrical poetry and it can be sung with a beat or a rhythm. Think, if you will, of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic: this poem tells a story (several of them in fact) with a strong beat and a rigid, inflexible rhyme scheme. Even reading the Kalevala silently, you can’t help but get caught up in the rhythm and fall into a kind of trance – the kind of trance that destroys your sense of time like a good marching song. I’ve read that the Kalevala was chanted by two men while they sawed wooden logs – back and forth the saw would fly, and the men would sing out the staves back-and-forth likewise.
But this is a far cry from the seductive powers of the movie Gilda.
(Composed by dictation Friday 12 September 2008)
