Film noir, according to scholar James Naremore, “can refer to an amorphous set of films, a dead period, an ongoing tradition.” Noir’s a loosely-defined group of works linked by similarities or critical agreement. Femme fatales, crime, black and white cinematography, bleak endings—noir can have one or all or even none of those characteristics, depending on the viewer.
Michael Gordon’s The Lady Gambles (1949) is a film which shows up in discussions of noir (like Eddie Muller’s Dark City) even though you could make a strong argument that it’s more of a woman’s melodrama or (to use a later category) an exploitation picture. There isn’t exactly a femme fatale, the narrative arc bends towards salvation, and the seamier side of existence is mostly there as an opportunity for sanctimonious moralizing. Nonetheless, Barbara Stanwyck’s desperate performance almost pulls the film into noir by itself.
The film opens with its most noir moment; Joan Booth (Stanwyck) is caught in a back alley cheating at dice and is then beaten unconscious by two expressionless tough guys who she was trying to swindle. The rest of the film’s dedicated to explaining and containing that eruption of violence. Journalist David Booth (Robert Preston), Joan’s earnestly bland husband, finds her in the hospital. He tells the story of How Things Went So Wrong to her largely indifferent attending physician, Dr. Rojac (John Hoyt).
Booth explains that around a year and a half ago, he and Joan came to Las Vegas so David could work on a story about Boulder Dam. Joan was taking pictures of gamblers to try and sell to a magazine. But thanks in part to the machinations of casino owner Corrigan (Stephen McNally), she tries gambling and becomes addicted. Soon she’s pleading, stealing, and scamming to bet more and more at craps and poker as she chases the big win and/or tries to recoup her losses.
Compared to some of the best-known noirs, the sleaze and depravity is tame. David’s unfailingly gallant and understanding—there’s no suggestion that the knight in shining armor might be broken and twisted himself, as in films like Laura.
Joan’s descent is also relatively gentle. Sex work is only hinted at; the consummation of her relationship with Corrigan is scrupulously avoided; she doesn’t end up on the street; she isn’t beaten, except for that once. The sort-of femme fatale isn’t a cunning seductress, but Joan’s clinging older sister Ruth (Edith Barrett) who raised Joan and bullies her, blaming her for the death of their mother who died in childbirth. That sister’s vanquished without too much trouble by David and the doctor, who pull Joan back to safe patriarchal order, which (supposedly) saves her from her own destructive impulses. Without the structure provided by men, women spiral into chaos, self-loathing and suicide; with that structure, all’s well.
The narrative’s pat, the moralism obvious, the conclusion foreordained. Films like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Born to Kill present a terrifying/desired vision of the law and reason upended; chaos and lust eat away at righteousness; when criminals are punished, it’s generally at the wrong time for the wrong crime. The Lady Gambles, though, is narrated by the nice, stable dude who’s going to set all to right. This is a story about fixing what’s gone wrong—madness, women in authority, illegality—rather than reveling in it.
Or it would be, if not for Stanwyck’s performance, which keeps threatening to smash both narrative and moral framing devices. With David, she’s all vapid good cheer and bland flirtation, her sensuality carefully tucked away. When she’s in the grip of her addiction, though, she’s a fugue of hesitation, self-loathing, and duplicitous seduction, eager to please one moment, entirely selfish the next. And when she’s at the dice table, she’s transformed, radiating feral hunger, all mundane concerns and domestic duties thrown across the table in a grasping high. She doesn’t look like she wants to destroy herself. She looks like she wants to consume the world.
Gambling’s a brutal addiction; it’s debilitating, humiliating, and demeaning. Stanwyck shows that at times. She all but grovels before a pawn shop owner; she runs around the apartment trying to distract herself from the locked money box with her husband’s money that she knows she’s going to crack open. But her passionate, indisputably sexual excitement at the table is so much more charged than the rest of her performance that a viewer has to wonder if the pain is worth the pleasure. What would the movie be without these moments of Stanwyck unleashed, clawing herself out from the dour dampening of husband, sister, would-be lover?
If the film’s noir, I think that’s why it’s noir. Not because it’s about crime, addiction or uncontrollable women, but its condemnation of those things is contested by its portrayal, and by the performance of the lead. Are you rooting for Joan to return to her dull husband? Or do you want her to roll the dice one more time?