Editor’s Note: Freeline Media critic Mike Fried looks back at a 1947 thriller starring famed comedian Lucille Ball. Can Lucy handle a good mystery? Read on!
By MIKE FRIED
LURED
When Sandra, an American dime-a-dance girl, finds her dancehall friend has gone missing, the police recruit her as a junior detective to act as bait because there have been similar disappearances of women who have answered a personal column … never to have been seen again.
We, of course, are treated to the sight of a gloved hand mailing a personal column in to the newspaper and a poem to the police.
While she is second-billed, this is Lucille Ball’s movie and while it is a taut mystery thriller noir and police procedural, her very presence and demeanor gives this movie a bit of a sense of humor. This is my favorite movie performance of hers. She owns this movie. “What is it tonight? A sweepstakes for zombies?” Sure, this is a dramatic thriller; but Lucy’s serious face just looks funny. I’m sorry but it’s true.
Making it creepy is the short appearance — despite above the line credit — of Boris Karloff as a dress designer whose personal ad Lucy answers. He is just terrific, in one of his first “mature” roles and certainly his first semi-comic role.
The actors are uniformly well-cast, including a very suave George Sanders as a man who owns a more high class dance hall and Sir Cedric Hardwicke (and his bad toupee) as his partner. Rounding out the main cast is Charles Coburn doing his best Charles Laughton-lite impersonation as the Scotland Yard Chief Inspector who recruits Lucy as the bait. George Zucco, usually a villain, takes a humorous turn in this film. And Allan Mowbray is on hand as one of the usual suspects.
There is a whole plethora of suspects which is part of the charm of the film, especially as Sandra starts finding clues. Of course, the way it’s constructed, there’s no shortage of suspects and that furthers its charm.
It’s another UK set movie filmed in Hollywood and, unfortunately, one can tell from the generic London sets. A film like 1948’s Kiss the Blood From My Hands that actually created blocks of sets on the Hollywood backlots made them more realistic. But this only marginally detracts from the story, which is terrifically directed by legendary film director Douglas Sirk, who had not yet made his mark on Hollywood with his lush 50s melodramas.
It’s a shame that this movie was not filmed in Technicolor as Lucy’s bright red hair and blue eyes would have made this a wondrous looking film. As it is, despite the generic sets, Sirk conveys London mood with a good deal of fog.
Alan Napier, who played Alfred the Butler on the show Batman (which had Neil Hamilton playing Commissioner Gordon), plays a police inspector named Gordon here.
This film got shafted by the studio when halfway through its release the name was changed from “Lured” to “Personal Column” – the name of the French Original – because the title sounded to much like “Lurid.” The box office dropped when this occurred — blame the Fucking Hays Office.
It’s not the greatest of noirs but it is a fun one and goddammit, I Love Lucy!
WATCH IT!
4/5
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
