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clamored that his “past is a secret” and that “a woman is the cause of his bit-terness.” In tapping into the social terrain of returnees from military duty abroad (many of them absentee husbands in hasty marriages immediately prior to or during the war), Ford’s character meets his employer’s bride: “Tension electrifies the air” as Johnny “faces the woman in his life! But their love has turned to hate as they pretend not to know each other.” Reflecting the paranoja and suspected infidelity of a masculine wartime psyche, “Gilda appears to carry on sordidly with other men, while Johnny, jealous in his own right and deeply aware of his allegiance to his boss,” a surrogate for Uncle Sam, “grimly forges her alibis.” He thinks “Gilda’s infidelity is the cause” for his friend’s death. Johnny marries her but “makes her a virtual prisoner” to “avenge” him. But she “escapes” and “becomes a cafe singer.”⁵⁶ Rarely had Hollywood narrative been so steeped in the fantasy and nightmare of a war-related psyche and cultural mythology. The film and publicity targeted an audience divided by gender at the end of the war, in both American home-front society and Allied combat fronts overseas (and even after the war with ongoing American occupation abroad, in Europę and Japan). Iii shifting from wartime espionage to cold war paranoia, 1946 publicity added: “Although the war is over, Johnny learns that the casino is a front for German business interests. A German suspicious of Mundson is murdered,” but a “government agent” later “smashes the cartel.” The war in-fluenced Columbia’s advertising campaign. The studio press book pro-moted Ford’s recent return from military service and explained that “pro-duction of‘Gilda’ took place during the nyloii shortage. As a result, Miss Hayworth’s ultra-lavish wardrobe ... included a pair of rayon—not nylon!—stockings.” It publicized Hayworth’s wartime popularity overseas after troops voted her number-one pinup girl in 1945. “GI’s began writing, telephoning and wiring the studio, saying they wanted their favorite pinup gal to sing and dance and show her legs.” A press book feature, “Glam-our Gals vs.Tanks,”evenpromoted Gildacinematographer Rudolph Mates filming of the combat movie Sahara. In “Hollywood Photographer Dis-cusses His Subjects: Rudy Matę Finds Lensing Hayworth Easy but Tank in ‘Sahara’ Worried Him for Weeks,” the famous emigre cameraman explained, “Ifs easier to photograph a glarrtour girl than it is an army tank.” Matę com-pared shooting the tank Lulubelle in the masculine, hard-hitting realism of Sahara to photographing Hayworth in Gilda—in an odd transference from weapons to women.⁵⁷ The comparatively rugged Lulubelle was the sole “woman” in the earlier Columbia war film, costarring opposite Bogart and the boys at the front. The ultimate publicity for Hayworth and Gilda was another linking of weaponry and women, with a “smart pług”—this time

Rosie the Riveter Goes to Hollywood    N. 151

on the atomie bomb. By July 3,1946, Hollywood Bureau correspondent Harold Heffernan of the Detroit News commended the film’s explosive “A-Bomb Tieup”:

Occasionally the slogan boys have their chores done for them and wholly unsolicited. This happened many times during the war wh,en GI’s branded stars with their own designations, which stuck and re-ceived wide exploitation. Probably the greatest piece of unplanned publicity ever applied to a picture and a star was the A-bomb blast for “Gilda” and Rita Hayworth, which came up from Bikini to hit every newspaper story and every radio broadcast of the proceedings last Sunday. Columbia estimates the pług will add close to a million dol-lars to the gross of “Gilda” and boost Miss Hayworth’s standing im-measurably.⁵⁸

Violence became sexy. The independent noir female screen images seen late in the war were not without hard knocks. Sensational publicity show-cased violence for sex symbol Rita Hayworth in Columbia’s Gilda—inter-estingly combined with cross-promotion for Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street at Universal, starring femme fatale ]oan Bennett. Film noir promotion strate-gies for Gilda capitalized on ads featuring the female star being “roughed up” by Ford’s Johnny. Studio press book publicity observes, “Rita'Takes Pun-ishment,” and compares the two films and female stars. The studios feature taps into inereasing gender distress, even growing labor dissension through-out the industry:

Two of Hollywoods most popular glamour girls, Rita Hayworth and Joan Bennett, are undoubtedly toying with the ideas of either donning boxing gloves and learning the art of fistieuffs, or picketing their studios with placards proclaiming their leading men to be unfair to or-ganized feminine pulchritude. Ali because of the indignities these two ladies suffered in their latest pictures. To put it bluntly, Rita and Joan get slapped around. They both are recipients of stinging blows to the face lustily administered by their respective leading men, Glenn Ford and Dan Duryea, and there’s little they can do about it at the time.⁵⁹

Ads featured seductive images of Hayworth in her strapless black gown with taglines like: “There never was a woman like Gilda”; “Now they all know what I am ... ”; and “‘Bewitchy’ is the word for Gilda!” Several of-fered an alternative photo of Ford slapping Hayworth that read, “I was true