Unlike most movies set in Las Vegas, "The Lady Gambles" is anything but a glitzy showcase for the town also called Lost Wages. It opens with a woman being beaten up in an alley for not paying gambling debts. The woman is Barbara Stanwyck and the rest is flashbacks, which smartly include early suggestions that her character, Joan, is a woman vulnerable to excitement; e.g., the moment she and husband Davy (Robert Preston) are alone in their hotel room, her hungry arms are around him.
Vegas was really getting going in the 1940s, but there's no glamour here. We meet a hotel clerk, a bank clerk, and a pawnbroker (Houseley Stevenson), all wearily familiar with people like Joan, scrounging for a stake. We also get the mob. Bugsy Siegel opened The Flamingo on The Strip in 1946, and a menacing Stephen McNally (using more talent than I knew he possessed) is a fictional reminder of Siegel. When he catches Joan taking pictures in his casino, director Michael Gordon successfully makes us feel the threat he poses: he is positively Mephistophelean in the way he senses vulnerability, and exploits it, knowing that gambling is "the deep end, for people with no talent for living." He gives Joan a few chips, and she succumbs in short order, escalating to poker games, where she's the only woman.
Stanwyck is extraordinary. I really think this is one of her finest performances, both measured and courageous. Midway through, Joan kicks her habit, but is then left alone for a day while Davy is away on business, and Stanwyck holds the screen for long minutes without dialog, yet she projects her desperate, nerve-wracked need to get back into a game. Later, describing addiction, she tells Davy that it isn't just about winning because even when you lose there is a kind of peace, "like when you were a kid and took your punishment and you knew it was over."
The film is well served by Russ Metty's photography, which hits all the right noir notes. He keeps Preston in light, McNally in darkness, with Stanwyck caught between. The denoument is someting of a let-down, and the character of the sister who raised Joan (forgettable Edith Barrett) is little more than a plot device to let Joan off the hook because of her childhood.
But this is an unblinking look at gambling, and addiction. The doctor (a wry John Hoyt) who tends to Joan after the beating sums it up for those who try to help: "If there's anything wrong above the neck, I can't afford to notice."
Vegas was really getting going in the 1940s, but there's no glamour here. We meet a hotel clerk, a bank clerk, and a pawnbroker (Houseley Stevenson), all wearily familiar with people like Joan, scrounging for a stake. We also get the mob. Bugsy Siegel opened The Flamingo on The Strip in 1946, and a menacing Stephen McNally (using more talent than I knew he possessed) is a fictional reminder of Siegel. When he catches Joan taking pictures in his casino, director Michael Gordon successfully makes us feel the threat he poses: he is positively Mephistophelean in the way he senses vulnerability, and exploits it, knowing that gambling is "the deep end, for people with no talent for living." He gives Joan a few chips, and she succumbs in short order, escalating to poker games, where she's the only woman.
Stanwyck is extraordinary. I really think this is one of her finest performances, both measured and courageous. Midway through, Joan kicks her habit, but is then left alone for a day while Davy is away on business, and Stanwyck holds the screen for long minutes without dialog, yet she projects her desperate, nerve-wracked need to get back into a game. Later, describing addiction, she tells Davy that it isn't just about winning because even when you lose there is a kind of peace, "like when you were a kid and took your punishment and you knew it was over."
The film is well served by Russ Metty's photography, which hits all the right noir notes. He keeps Preston in light, McNally in darkness, with Stanwyck caught between. The denoument is someting of a let-down, and the character of the sister who raised Joan (forgettable Edith Barrett) is little more than a plot device to let Joan off the hook because of her childhood.
But this is an unblinking look at gambling, and addiction. The doctor (a wry John Hoyt) who tends to Joan after the beating sums it up for those who try to help: "If there's anything wrong above the neck, I can't afford to notice."