E-Books →Gilda (BFI Film Classics)

Melvyn Stokes's study of the film provides an in-depth account of its production history, including attempts at censorship by the Production Code Administration. He also analyses the film's characterisation and narrative, cinematography, formal devices such as the use of a voiceover narrator, mise en scène and preoccupation with sexual perversity. Stokes places Hayworth's performance in the title role in the context of her film career and star persona, focusing on her complicated ethnic identity as she evolved from being brunette 'Spanish/Latin American' dancer Margarita Carmen Cansino into the auburn-haired movie star 'Rita Hayworth'. Stokes addresses the film's political context - its setting in an Argentina that had entered the war on the Allied side, with a sub-Description involving Nazi skulduggery, and the extent to which the film responded to and reflected social concerns about relations between men and women, female sexuality and masculine identities that had been transformed by the dislocations of wartime and the anxieties of the immediate post-war period. Stokes's illuminating account of the film includes a discussion of its reception history, and its importance for film-makers, critics and scholars as well as its audiences.