Review of Gilda, directed by Charles Vidor

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m watching.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

I recently (at the time of typing this—I imagine the blog post is coming out much later due to the sheer amount of backlog I have lately) acquired a Criterion subscription for the first time in a while. I tend to go on and off with my subscriptions because they can get quite expensive in the end.

Criterion and MUBI are two I tend to toggle through especially, as they’re more pricy and I see them as less needed in the long run. I wanted to catch up on certain movies in the Criterion catalogue though, which is why I ultimately picked up the subscription for two months.

I watched Gilda during this time. A friend of mine, when I was studying abroad in South Korea, had a shirt with the movie on it, which made me remember I wanted to watch it. Lo and behold, I restarted the Criterion subscription, and there it was on the front page. So I watched it!

Let’s get into the review. I don’t want to ramble too much during the introduction, as I know these can get terribly long sometimes.

In Argentina, a newly-arrived American becomes entwined with the gambling world and a woman named Gilda.

The protagonist in this movie is Johnny Farell, and he’s an American man who’s come to Buenos Aires in search of something new. Immediately upon arrival, he gambles with some sailors and wins money, then gets robbed. He’s saved from this robbery by a man named Ballin Mundson, who informs Johnny about a big casino in the city. But there’s a warning he leaves him with: don’t cheat there.

Johnny goes straight there, and wins a round of blackjack. He’s taken to see the owner of the casino, and big surprise: it’s Mundson himself. Mundson then ends up hiring Johnny after he sweets talks him, and Johnny becomes the casino’s manager. One day Mundson comes home from the United States with a new wife, and it’s Rita Hayworth as the stunningly gorgeous Gilda.

Turns out they married after knowing each other for a day, but Johnny and Gilda know each other well. Mundson notices something is up and asks if they know each other, but then they act weird and deny it. Johnny becomes Gilda’s personal guard, and he notices she’s going off to meet with men a lot in order to piss him off, which succeeds.

At the same time, Mundson gets a visit from the Germans. Some German mob members put their accounts in Mundson’s name during the war to hide their connection to it, and now that the war is over, they want it back. He refuses to do just that, and the Argentine police are investigating. They come to Johnny for information, but he can’t give them anything because he doesn’t know about this specific matter.

Mundson then kills one of the Germans in the casino, and Johnny escorts Gilda out of there before she gets heart. They’re alone in her husband’s house, and they confess that they hate each other so much. They kiss—hate truly does mean love, doesn’t it?—and then they discover that Mundson heard everything. Johnny chases after Mundson, who gets into his plane, but then it explodes at takeoff.

Johnny thinks his boss is dead, and Gilda gets everything that belonged to Mundson. The duo gets married, but then Johnny leaves her and has his men try to ruin her life and watch her every mood. Gilda wants to get out of their marriage because of how miserable it has become, but Johnny denies her this.

The police take the casino away, then Obregon, who we met earlier in the film, admits to Johnny that Gilda wasn’t faithful to either of her husbands. He tries to find her and make peace with Gilda before departing back to the US, but then Mundson rolls up and shows them he’s still alive.

He wants to kill them both, but then one of the casino workers stabs him and successfully kills Mundson instead. When the cops and Obregon arrive, Johnny tries to take the fall, but then Obregon points out the guy was already considered dead in the name of the law from the plane explosion.

Johnny then gives Obregon the documents he needed from the safe. Johnny and Gilda then get back together after having a heart to heart moment, then return back to the United States.

Overall Thoughts

I love a good Rita Hayworth movie, which is what kind of convinced me to watch this in the first place. She was one of my favorite actresses from the 1940s, and I think she plays the role of Gilda so well. It’s an iconic movie for a reason.

For the modern viewer a lot of the tropes in the movie were overdone for this moment in time, but you have to think that in this era, film noir was just getting started. This was very original content in the 1940s, and there’s a reason why Gilda is considered to be a culturally important movie.

Some of the tropes were a tad old in the forties, too, but they were as overused as they are today. It’s also refreshing to me to see movies in black and white in 2025, as it’s a bit of a lost art form that modern movies don’t even attempt. To get the color balance right in black and white is such a feat, as you only have a greyscale to work with.

All in all, I say go watch this if you haven’t already! It’s certainly worth watching at least once in your lifetime.

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