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Van Upp personally produced Gilda from 1944 to 1946, supervising Hun-garian expatriate director Charles Vidor (who had worked at UFA and had directed Blind Alley and Cover Girl), cinematographer Rudolph Matę, and art directors Stephen Goosson and Van Nest Polglase. In fact, powerful fe-male star Hayworth insisted Van Upp produce the project. Gilda affirms Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn’s confidence in Van Upp as an influen-tial female executive producer overseeing other female, as well as małe, cre-ative talent. Women penned the screenplay and produced the project, and the crime film was clearly female-centered. Columbia Pictures publicity called it a “tense and realistic” screenplay based on Jo Eisinger’s adaptation of E. A. Ellington’s original story. When Van Upp sent a first draft of the script to Humphrey Bogart, he rejected the role of Johnny Farrell, consid-ering it a minor małe costar for Columbia’s headliner Hayworth in a womans picture. Ironically, a September 16,1945, New York Times article stafed that the project was initially intended as a gangster film set in the United States. Columbia and Van Upp no doubt entertained high hopes of once again getting gangsters by the Codę as the war neared its end. The un-patriotic taint of gangster pictures, however, fueled enough censorship re-sistance that the film’s setting was moved to Buenos Aires. The role of Gilda solidified Rita Hayworth as a 1940S sex goddess. Although the film was initially banned in 1944 as a gangster picture during wartime, like Mildred Pierce the female melodrama was masculinized as a noir crime narrative. Showcasing Hayworth with wild provocative musical song-and-dance se-ąuences, it also included małe camaraderie, homoerotic underpinnings, and an underworld milieu.⁵¹

On November 16,1944, following the momentum of the release of Double Indemnity (and just three days before the New York Times cited the in-dustry’s red-meat trend), Columbia’s Silvia Stein submitted the proposed story to the “Gentlemen” of the “Association of Motion Picture Producers” for PCA consideration. By November 20 Breen had rejected the story on the basis of its illicit sex and adultery without compensating morał values.⁵² Work on the project eventually resumed, however, particularly after Van Upp took over the production reins at Columbia. Revisions of the story and lyrics for Gilda were resubmitted to the PCA on August 4,1945. Two days later Breen rejected lyrics for the song “Amado Mio” because of its “sex sug-gestiveness.” (The song remained in the film anyway.) Stein resubmitted the script on August 24; Breen rejected it on September 4 as shooting began. Revisions were resubmitted on September 8, and Breen finally granted PCA approval on September 11. A few weeks later, however, he objected to Hay-worth’s linę “If I were a ranch, they’d cali me the Bar Nothing”; and by late

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October he wanted Van Upp’s assurance that a suggestive “first class rib” in-volving stockings would defuse sexual innuendo. The censor continued to haggle over sex and violence in the story through December, when filming concluded. By early December Breen banned suicide and noted Van Upps revision, “Didn’t you ever hear of a thing called justifiable homicide?” On February 1, 1946, Gilda was reviewed by the PCA—in the absence of Breen—and granted a seal of approval on February 25.⁵³ Sexually charged noir innuendo—as in Hayworth’s hair tossing and Gilda’s transgressive in-dependence and coded striptease of the glove-peeling “Put the Blame on Mamę” song-and-dance number—at once responded to and played havoc with PCA censorship. In the association between pleasure and violence Gilda wonderfully illustrates a recurring female dilemma and conflict in film noir—the clash between classical motifs of personal romance, love, and private life versus career / public life. This narrative tension related to gen-der in the ambivalent role of American women by the end of World War II, coinciding with their desire to retain careers they had begun during the war.

Gilda premiered in March 1946. Variety called Hayworth “ravishing,” noting the film’s “melodramatic” war-related espionage narrative involving “German agents demanding” her sadistic husband “return certain patents and tungsten mines.” The review also mentioned Van Upp’s prominent pro-duction role and “step upward” as female producer of the “drama.”⁵⁴ Gilda reformulated Nazis into underworld Aryan gangsters, yet its espionage slant had a uniąue spin as a female star vehicle Van Upp developed for Hayworth in her first dramatic role. The film established Hayworth as a femme fatale. Her unmistakably erotic and independent feminine character transcends “fallen women” or passive victims and becomes a “misunderstood” woman who is “wronged” but refuses to wallow in self-pity.⁵⁵ Impudent, strong, and liberated (in every sense of the word) despite a sadistic masculine power structure, Rita’s femme flies in the face of the men around her. She embod-ies a sexual threat that males in the narrative seek to contain. Not surpris-ingly, Van Upp’s involvement and authority as a female studio executive contributed to Hayworth’s strong, independent, transgressive screen diva. Columbia’s film and its sensational publicity for Gilda capitalized on the filnfs audacious femme fatale.

In appealing to men overseas and a returning combat audience, studio press books also described Ford’s Johnny as a disheveled transient—a “hard-bitten young American” on a “South American waterfrońt” who is “making his own luck with a pair of loaded dice. Attacked, he is saved by a sinister stranger” in a “gambling casino.” Promoting military małe cama-raderie, Johnny then becomes the stranger’s “trusted lieutenant.” Publicity