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"The klnd ofWoman most men want-BUT shouldn’t have!" )oan Crawford as the epony-mous Mildred Pierce. Warner ńtps., 1945-

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Rosie the Riveter Goes to Hollywood

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seding Turney’s creative concerns as a female writer. But at Columbia an-other woman reversed this power dynamie. By 1945 Virginia Van Upp achieved tremendous creative power—perhaps morę than any other female contemporary—in actually rising from writer to studio executive. Along the way she also produced the film noir Gilda.

Virginia Van Upp and Gilda

Gilda is another classic noir film that combines female gothic melodrama with a hard-boiled, gangster-detective crime narrative. Set in Buenos Aires, Gilda features a South American locale as the war began to wind down and combat-hardened veterans began to return home. Like wartime London in Ministry of Fear and French Martiniąue in To Have and Have Not, Hollywood śound stages doubled for exotic locations abroad. Actor Glenn Ford, recently home after four years of wartime duty, plays a scrappy, war-scarred antihero, Johnny, renegade American exile-turned-bum-turned-gangster, who mixes with the underworld, working for a Nazi-turnęd-international-espionage-cartel-boss Ballin Mundson (George Macready) after gambling (and presumably living) on the Street. He finds his former lover, Gilda (tan-talizingly pórtrayed by Rita Hayworth), married to his Aryan employer. Mysterious and disreputable, Mundson hires Johnny to run his gambling casino and keep an eye on his beautiful, defiant, sexually independent wife. Argentinean police detective, Óbregon (Joseph Calliea), seeking to break the illegal Axis cartel, pursues Johnny and Mundson, who conveniently fakes his death in the middle of the movie. Fiercely loyal to Mundson, yet jealously conflicted over his relationship with Gilda, Johnny marries her to possess, control, punish, and seek vengeance via psychological abuse and by confining her in an effort to tamę her strong persona and transgressive sexuality. Cold-blooded Mundson menacingly reappears from the “dead” to complicate matters and threaten the dysfunctional couple. In the end Mundson is killed, the police detective arrests his German underworld co-conspirators for breaking antitrust laws, the casino is taken over by the gov-ernment, and Johnny and Gilda can finally fly off to America together.

Rita Hayworth’s bold performance as sex siren translates into one of the all-time great femme fatales. Gilda, a woman with much bravado accentu-ating her smoldering sensuality, was also terribly vulnerable and had been treated sadistically. Hayworth’s charismatic heroine was an alluring role “manufactured” and emphasized by a powerful creative executive woman involved in the production of the film, producer (and former writer) Vir-ginia Van Upp, who was also head of production at Columbia studio be-ginning in early 1945. As Hąyworths real-life marriage to Orson Welles un-