Spielfieber

In this B-picture that shows a woman's discovery of gambling, Barbara Stanwyck shines in the leading role. Released the same year as Gregory Peck's gambling movie The Great Sinner, this is the female version of the dangers of gambling. Robert Preston costars as the long-suffering husband, and Stephen McNally is a very realistic villain who entices Barbara to start trying her luck. If you keep your eyes peeled, you can catch a very young Tony Curtis in his third film appearance! He plays a bellboy and is onscreen for less than ten seconds, but he has an interaction with the legendary Barbara Stanwyck; not bad!

The opening scene is incredibly engaging and shocking. Barbara walks out into an alley, then gets beaten by a group of thugs and left for dead. Next, Robert Preston runs into a hospital, demanding to know how his wife is. He tells the doctor in charge, and the audience, the story of how she ended up this way. While the storytelling method is a little cheesy, Barbara's performance more than makes up for it. She's fantastic, and completely in her element as she's given the opportunity to show off every human emotion throughout the film. She's innocently curious as she tags along on her husband's business trip to Las Vegas, and her slow descent into addiction is riveting. She's deceitful, ashamed, devious, desperate, and completely unable to stop. Her eyes light up when she wins, and she feels like her life's over when she loses. If you've never seen a Barbara Stanwyck movie, this is a great place to start.

Robert Preston (David) tracks down his wife Barbara Stanwyck (Joan) in hospital after she has been beaten up. He pleas with John Hoyt (Dr Rojac) to let her go home with him after she has been treated rather than hand her over to the police where she has several outstanding charges. In flashback, we watch the story of her descent into gambling addiction after a visit to Las Vegas.

The film is interesting to watch for the location settings. I actually bought it specifically for the Las Vegas setting as it is where I got married earlier this year and I wanted to make a comparison with 1949. The story was incidental. As it turns out, the story is OK if predictable. Stanwyck carries the film with good support from gangster Stephen McNally (Mr Corrigan). Robert Preston changes his tune during the course of the film as he swings from rejecting her to accepting her while the role of Stanwyck's sister Edith Barrett (Ruth) is pretty annoying and some sentimental pop psychology is dragged into the proceedings.

I'm sure that the inspiration behind the Las Vegas section of the film was Bugsy Siegel and his Flamingo Hotel which paved the way for the notoriety of the Strip. The main body of the film is set in the Pelican Hotel (a bit similar?) and McNally has an interest in a horse racing scam just as Bugsy did.

The film ends in a disappointingly corny way after a funny moment when John Hoyt shows us what to say to someone when they are about to jump off a window ledge. I dare you to try it some day! As for the film's climax, we have to hopefully imagine that everything will go downhill again once they return to Vegas and hit the casinos.

Stanwyck's was a curious career. The highest-paid woman in pictures -- actually, in America -- for a while, she made her share of workaday, forgettable pictures. The Lady Gambles is among them, except that it stars Stanwyck. Married to Robert Preston, a reporter doing a feature on Las Vegas, she agrees to help out by getting in on the action. Soon, she's hooked, playing recklessly and compulsively even as her marriage is disintegrating. There's one brutal scene when she's beaten up by thugs in an alley -- not a scene often filmed with a top actress as victim. The film has a historical interest as one of the first to be set in that new Babylon in the desert, Las Vegas. (In the 30s, the only Nevada location was Reno; Vegas was still a chicken run.) Despite its semi-documentary approach, The Lady Gambles sustains interest; as a look at abnormal gambling, it's better than Gambling House (with Victor Mature) or The Las Vegas Story (with Mitchum and Jane Russell).

From 1949, The Lady Gambles stars Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Preston, and Stephen McNally.

Stanwyck plays Joan Boothe, who accompanies reporter husband David (Preston) to Las Vegas where he is working on a story about the Hoover Dam. Left to her own devices, she becomes interested in gambling to the point where it becomes an addiction. Though she tries to fight it, she can't, and ultimately loses her husband and falls into the clutches of Horace Corrigan, who runs the casino and has her number.

Stanwyck does well showing Joan's downward spiral. The film dabbles in psychology in Joan's relationship with her older sister Ruth (Edith Barrett) for whom she takes responsibility, though her husband objects.

Good performances all around, as well as some brutal and scary moments. Definitely keeps your interest.

Watch for Tony Curtis in one of his first speaking roles as a telegram delivery boy. The director told him, "All you want is a tip." He's adorable.

It is very evident that Barbara Stanwyck was able to adapt to any sort of role or character in each of her pictures. In this one, she plays a businessman's wife who becomes addicted to gambling after a trip to Las Vegas. This isn't a bad character study, and probably one of the earliest ones dealing with this sort of obsession. It is also interesting to see how the Vegas strip looked in over 50 years ago. A young, unknown Tony Curtis has a cameo as a bell boy.