Critics reviews

I had never seen a Rita Hayworth film until this month. But now, deep into my downright unglamorous isolation, I found myself longing for a particular kind of panache that only she could provide. It being my first time, the effect of Gilda’s entrance on me was exponentially greater—I nearly jumped out of my seat.

Gilda is not meant to be clear. It is meant to plunge the audience into an atmosphere so emotionally claustrophobic that even Johnny's voice-over can't provide escape or enlightenment... [The ending] leaves an uneasy impression, similar to the final scene in Notorious. In neither ending does it feel like "love has triumphed." It's more like a criminal getaway. That confusion, so rich, so tormented, so surreal and true, is a huge part of Gilda's fascination, its enduring draw.

The characters are certainly sadomasochistic ("Hate is a very exciting emotion," says Ballin), but the film suggests that audiences, too, must share in similar sources of conflicting desires given that no audience member can actually possess Gilda either.. Gilda is best appreciated as an intelligent back and forth on the fantasy of possessing another.

Part of Gilda‘s fascination is the way that it complicates the idea of the femme fatale… Gilda's director, Charles Vidor, isn't generally considered much of a stylist, but the way he shoots this creepy exchange, which begins as a close-up of Gilda on the left side of the frame and then shifts to place her horizontally on the right side, with Ballin out of focus in the foreground as he speaks, is extraordinary in the way that it visually mirrors the viewer's shifting loyalty.

Gilda‘s banter defines its tangled, mostly superficial love/hate ménage a trios between Hayworth's petulant titular plaything ("If I was a ranch, they'dve named me the Bar Nuthin'"), Macready's distant and vindictive jilted lover Ballin ("Women are funny little creatures…odd things are important to them"), and Glenn Ford's baby-faced protégé/other man Johnny ("Pardon me, but your husband is showing").

Andre Bazin reportedly once hypothesized that if Hollywood were the court of Versailles, Gilda (1946) would have been its Phedre—which may just be a fancy way of pointing out the enduring greatness of a campy melodrama that, from certain points of view, isn't even very good.

Gilda – written by a woman, starring a woman, produced by a woman – suggests that women know better than men what men are looking at when men look at women. They know that such looking – a function of blindness – is not seeing. In effect, Rita Hayworth exists fantastically for Macready and Ford within the so-called "male gaze".

Good-badness was Rita Hayworth's Gilda—her (apparent) promiscuity, her (apparent) betrayal, a figure so extraordinary one wondered if it, too, were apparent. Elliott Stein once suggested a clue as to a possible reading of this movie. The direction of Charles Vidor gives little guidance or unity to a plot that makes less sense than "The Big Sleep" when he indicated that the advertising tag line, "There never was a woman like Gilda," should be taken literally.