Rita Hayworth’s Artful Indecency

By the time Hayworth first appeared in front of a camera, she had been performing for years but as a dancer, not as an actress. She had her first lessons when she was four years old. She was a graceful and meticulous dancer, confident enough to tackle intricate tap work, elegant in a ballroom hold, and of course completely at ease in the kind of Spanish-influenced steps she first performed in public. Watching her dance reveals her at her very best, and right until the end of her life, when she was in the grip of Alzheimer’s disease, she found solace in music—and movement. That dance training gave her an enviable background for screen performance: impeccable deportment and precise control of her body, from head to toe. She was always wonderful to watch but never what you might call natural. 

Early in Hayworth’s Columbia career, in You’ll Never Get Rich (1941), a giddy Astaire musical that otherwise doesn’t make the most of her, she played a chorus girl who purposefully, but undetectably, fluffs her rehearsal so that she can benefit from a one-on-one tutorial from the dance director (Astaire). Later in the film, when she flawlessly performs “So Near and Yet So Far” with him, she looks like elegance itself, gliding in his arms, but the memory of the earlier scene reminds us that her moves are the product of labor, talent, and choice, not divine grace. The song’s lyrics, about a girl who blows hot and cold with her beau, sum up the persona of an actress who could turn seduction on and off with the flip of a switch perfectly. Her craft was a kind of craftiness itself.

She’s better—more complex and more sexual too—in her second pairing with Astaire, You Were Never Lovelier (1942). In this musical remake of an Argentinian rom-com, Hayworth’s character seems to have been inspired by The Taming of the Shrew: a cold-hearted beauty, resistant to romance but not to sex, has to be married off before her sisters can walk down the aisle. She makes another risqué entrance here, dashing into a room brandishing a garter, “something blue” for a bride’s wedding day, and later confesses “Nice girls don’t feel the way I do.” She has a sensual solo number, singing “Dearly Beloved” alone in her bedroom, dressed in a negligee (a languid forerunner of Pal Joey’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered”), as well as three great routines with Astaire: the title song, “I’m Old-Fashioned,” and the swing number “The Shorty George.” It swiftly became an open secret that Hayworth’s singing voice was dubbed, but the dancing is all hers, and it’s exquisite.

With the self-consciousness of Hayworth’s persona in mind, The Lady from Shanghai, the 1947 film she made with Welles amid the dying embers of their marriage, becomes a yet more important title in her filmography. Hayworth is stunning in this intoxicating, obliquely photographed tale. She plays a femme fatale, Elsa Bannister, who lures Welles’s Michael into a trap laid by her husband (Everett Sloane). From Hayworth’s chopped and bleached hair to the punishing close-ups and the shattered hall of mirrors in the famous climax, this Brechtian noir is often read as a deliberate destruction of Hayworth’s immaculate Columbia-shaped image. Cohn certainly thought so when he saw the haircut, telling Hayworth, “He’s ruined you.” Whether she is posing like a pageant model on a yacht singing “Please Don’t Kiss Me” or facing the repeated replications of her image in the funhouse finale, the film highlights the inherently inauthentic allure of Hayworth the pinup. That song was added at Cohn’s insistence, as were several of her close-ups, inserted in postproduction—but arguably in vain. Hayworth’s icily ironic performance, just as much as Welles’s tilted camera, ensures that there’s little here that recalls the healthy, straightforward sex appeal of her studio pinups. Hayworth had been chipping away at that picture for years, creating a femme fatale out of her own star image—a beautiful but deadly siren. 

“I’ve never really thought of myself as a sex goddess,” Hayworth once said, “more as a comedienne who could dance.” With the flip of her hair or the blink of an eye, Hayworth had a witty way of reminding you that she was more than a pretty face on a poster, a symbol of someone else’s desire. It’s this duality that makes her musical comedies so rewarding and her noirs so lethally exciting. To echo the tagline on the posters for Gilda, there never was a woman like Rita.

A series of films starring Rita Hayworth are playing now on the Criterion Channel.