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Blackout

to one man once ... and look what happened!" Another showed a smug, satisfied Rita leaning back with a cigarette under the linę “ ... now I do what 1 please, when I please!” A few included Ford towering over Hayworth as she clung to him from the floor below: “Johnny, let me go. Please let me go.

1 can’t stand it any morę ...” Others revealed a laughing siren in a white beaded two-piece with a slit-skirt flashing a bare leg and open waist: “Gilda used men the way other women use makeup!” Columbia’s press book splashed images of its star: “Rita Hayworth a success story ... who madę something of an atomie impression on all the Grs.” It announced, “Hollywood Actors Return from Wars to Renew Careers. The movie Johnnies are back home from the war, and the actors who have replaced them in Hollywood films will have to fight hard to retain their new positions.” Promo-tions included a “gallery of Hayworth art” and clamored: “Editors Today Want ‘Cheesecake’ to Offset Serious News—These ‘Gilda’ Photos Will Sell Tickets and Newspapers!” It described Rita as “‘Luscious,’ ‘seductive,’ ‘glam-orous,’‘alluring’—and an extra ‘hubba hubba’ for good measure.” Drawing on Hąyworth’s Cover Girl and wartime pinup appeal, “From Dancing Glam-our to Success in Drama!” compared Rita to Ginger Rogers and Joan Craw-ford in Mildred Pierce as joining “Ranks of Former Dancers Who Won Famę In Straight Roles.” The piece “They Madę Good by Playing Screen ‘Mean-ies’!” called Hayworth “bewitchiest,” “glamorous,” and “tantalizing” and also mentioned Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, as well as Bette Davis, Vivian Leigh, and Joan Bennett making a “startling impression ... switched to being a minx” in Woman in the Window.

Publicity for Gilda reproaches strong, independent women as responsi-ble for violent małe behavior. Columbias press book indicts Hayworth:“Af-ter leading Glenn Ford a torrid chase through most of the picture, she fi-nally enrages him to the point where he hauls off and lets her have it.”⁶⁰ It blames women and autonomous, unrestrained female sexuality—shown in Ritas wild abandon in Gilda’s famed “Put the Blame on Marne” number— as the caiise for małe anger and then justifies it as a “natural” claim, describ-ing women as the “previously” so-called “fairer sex.” In such films, drawing on sex and violence, the noir crime trend became a highly successful and profitable narrative cycle in the transition and reconversion from wartime to postwar culture, economy, and industry in the United States and evolved into distinctive cinematic style even before French critical recognition in 1946. This sexy, crime-oriented marketing strategy related to an initial move by Hollywood studios to target returning małe veterans exposed to inordi-nate amounts of violence in wartime combat. The trauma of several years

Rosie the Riveter Goes to Hollywood

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Rita Hayworth as quintesserjtial noir femme Gilda. Columbia, 1946.

of bloodshed, death, and devastation had left pronounced battle scars— psychically, as well as physically.

Following Gilda, Hayworth began work on the noir film The Lady from Shanghai (1947), written, costarring, and directed by the sfars ex-husband Orson Welles, in the midst of futile reconciliation efforts at marriage be-tween star and director. To appease Columbia studio boss Harry Cohns ob-jections to Welles, Van Upp contributed uncredited writing. The close rap-port between Hayworth and Van Upp, coupled with distress at home,