D and I watched Lured (1947). It was watchable, maybe even rewatchable. With a script by Leo Rosten (of Joys of Yiddish fame), I expected it to be wittier than it was. But, given that it’s about the hunt for a serial killer, maybe it’s too light-hearted as it is. The mystery was pretty transparent, even though the red herrings in the story kept getting larger and neon-luminous. But the story moved pretty quickly, took some interesting turns, and made sense more often than not.
A very strong cast: Lucille Ball as the lead (as much as a woman is usually allowed to be the lead in a mid-century crime movie) was likable and convincing. George Sanders did his George-Sanders thing which works equally well if he’s a suave hero, a shifty spy, or a man-eating tiger. Borith Karloff chewed holes in the scenery in a wonderfully weird if small role. The secondary cast was full of character actors who appeared as murderers, crooks and third bananas in Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series (e.g. George Zucco, Alan Mowbray, Gerald Hamer).
Ball plays Sandra Carpenter, a taxi-dancer who becomes involved in the hunt for the serial killer after her friend becomes his latest victim. She clues the police into the fact that the killer is contacting his victims via the personals. She’s hired by the police to answer suspicious personal ads and keep the police informed. (I know this would never happen. Please direct all inquiries and comments to Messrs. Sirk & Rosten, who are dead and won’t mind so much.)
The joke, if it’s a joke, is that she’s constantly running into schemes to exploit young women in various ways. Only one of them is a serial killer, but they’re all creeps, and the movie implies that their name is legion. It’s the most realistic note in this not-very-realistic movie.
The murderer turns out to be the guy you knew the producers didn’t hire just to say two lines in three scenes. In the end, he’s caught red-handed. And true love triumphs over all, which is a weird feature of these softer-edged midcentury crime stories.
A painless 100 minutes for me, and a decent nap for D. Not quite up to the level of Sirk’s Thunder on the Hill (1951), which I saw for the first time recently and was deeply impressed by. But good enough to keep working my way through his filmography.
I’m always a little bemused that Lucille Ball didn’t have a bigger career in film. She was beautiful, had an expressive face and voice, projected intelligence, and (I’ll go out on a limb here) she was a gifted comic actress. But maybe that was the problem: comedy was the kids’ table in the studio system, and most of the seats were reserved for men.
Also: #EverythingIsStarTrek. In case you thought I’d forgotten that.
Anyway, she has the right number of fingers.
