The Lady Gambles

Despite a brutally violent opening scene in a back alley, Michael Gordon’s The Lady Gambles emphasizes drama over action, its story illuminating the ravages of addiction even when no chemical substances are involved, showing how easily compulsive gambling can descend into a “dirty” life of crime. Barbara Stanwyck plays the addict, Joan Boothe, and Robert Preston plays her saintly husband David, the spouse everyone deserves, whose commitment to saving Joan from herself leads him all over the country even as she fraternizes with frauds and gangsters (“she tied up with Frenchie at ten percent”) and hops between taxi dancing jobs (aka prostitution under the Production Code). Narrating through flashback, David’s devotion may also be a form of guilt since he’s the one who had introduced Joan to the casinos when she accompanied him on a Las Vegas business trip. Once the rush kicked in, Joan almost instantly started lying and stealing to get another fix, separating herself from David and developing a dubious relationship with casino manager Horace Corrigan (Stephen McNally), David’s polar opposite who later uses Joan as part of a racetrack bookmaking scheme with his criminal associates (with a horse ironically named Happy Girl), eventually abandoning her in the middle of nowhere. Edith Barrett plays Joan’s neurotic sister Ruth, whose emotional dominance over Joan may be connected to her compulsiveness, or so we’re led to believe. Despite some stumbles in the script, the film effectively tells an all-too-common story (the pawnshop owner displays two entire shelves of tourist cameras like Joan’s, hocked to pay for gambling fixes), Metty’s camera capturing noir atmosphere whenever possible, like when Joan first approaches Corrigan for a loan in his dark, menacing office as if she’s bargaining with the devil.