francois@yale.ARPA (Charles B. Francois) (06/24/85)
After missing it repeatedly in the past, I finally got a chance to see
Charles Vidor's "Gilda" on television the other night, and was left
astounded by its absurd denouement, ten minutes that seemed to have
precious little to do with the great stuff that preceded them. I
mean, I could have sworn that the film had spent all its energies
saying one thing about the relationships binding the kinky
Hayworth-Ford-Macready triangle, while the resolution said something
*completely* contradictory. This ending was emphatically *not* a case
-- as in say "Casablanca" (of whose conclusion it's much too strongly
reminiscent), "Lucky Lady", or even "Suspiscion" -- where things could
have swung one way or another. Instead, it looked, at least to me,
like some sort of pressure (either self-applied or externally imposed)
prevented the filmmakers from going through with another, more
"natural", if more provocative and less crowd-pleasing ending.
My question then is: Is my imagination hyperactive (more like wishful
thinking, I guess), or was there ever another conclusion planned for
the film? Does anyone know what that conclusion would have been and
why it was not incorporated in the final version. Was it ever filmed?
In fact, I would go so far as to suspect that there were some bits
added to the earlier parts of the film to (weakly) support the current
ending. I'm really curious about this, and any ideas would be
appreciated. Granted, Rita does a terrific job with her shimmying
"Put the Blame on Mame", but I suspect it would take more than that to
turn Glenn Ford's character from whatever had brought the couple so
much grief, "that night" long ago...
--Charles B. Francois {...,decvax}!yale!francois