Rent Lured (1947)

Hollywood on Thames - Lured review by CH

Based on a pre-war French film with Chevalier, this American re-make lights upon a purported London as the setting for a serial killer who taunts the police with verses which allude to Baudelaire each time he is about to strike. It is hardly a film noir, and stays in the mind as a film of three parts, including a love story which fills the middle section (and a sequence with Boris Karloff could have become a film in itself).. Lucille Ball, as the dancer for hire who agrees to work undercover, is a star turn, and George Sanders is wonderfully, creepily sleek as a man about town whose line in patter has obviously worked in his favour before now. Not a typical Sirk film but shows some of his path to the Fifties dramas for which he is best known.

Detective Thriller. - Lured review by Steve

Entertaining comedy thriller set in what seems to be '40s England, but is more identifiable as a Hollywood fantasy London of cobbled streets and gaslight. A wisecracking American taxi dancer (Lucille Ball) gets entangled in a Scotland Yard investigation into a serial killer who contacts his victims through personal columns, while taunting the Inspector (Charles Coburn) with provocative verses.

So Lucy is recruited by the cops to meet up with oddball lonely hearts. Ball may lack the glamour her character is assumed to possess, but she's fine at this broad comedy. As she closes in on her dangerous quarry, the film actually becomes effectively suspenseful. Douglas Sirk makes an exciting whodunit with an attractive expressionist look, even if the plot gets a little crazy.

There's a wonderful cast of British expats in support, with George Zucco fun in a rare comedy role. Poor old Boris Karloff plays a whispering nutcase who meets Lucille in order to feature her in the fantasy fashion show he intends to stage in his deranged imagination. George Sanders contributes his usual droll, cynical libertine to good effect.

When Sanders gets banged up in error, it's possible to wonder if Lured is making a modest point about the unreliability of circumstantial evidence. But it never gets that serious. This isn't one of Sirk's classic melodramas, but it is the sort of hugely enjoyable froth that the major studios of the golden age produced so reliably.