The primary draw of the 1946 serial-killer detection melodrama is its plucky red-headed star, Lucille Ball, looking very glamorous, even at the start when she is a tax-hall dancer (men pay for dancing with the women), an American stranded in London when a musical revue failed. Sandra Carpenter is much more streetwise than the ditzy and naive Lucy whom American loved on television in the 1950s and beyond. Ball had played a plucky heroine the year before in "The Dark Corner" and Katharine Hepburn's chic friend in "Without Love" (a movie that I like less than "The Dark Corner"). These were all black-and-white movies, so that her red hair was not actually on display.

"Appearances are often deceiving" is a leitmotif of the movies directed by Douglas Sirk,* especially the 1945 "A Scandal in Paris" that had the same suave, self-satisfied caddish George Sanders in the male lead. In "Lured" Sander played a nightclub owner who samples the talent "merchandise," and is intrigued by the brassy self-confidence of Sandra Carpenter, who want to try out for a job dancing in a club he is opening.

Before her audition, her friend from the taxi hall goes to an assignation arranged in the personal columns (the movie was renamed "Personal Column," which had been the name of a 1939 movie starring Maurice Chevalier directed by fellow German refugee Robert Siodmak that Leo Rosten adapted for the screenplay of "Lured." Sanders played a jewel thief who became Paris police commissioner in "Scandal." In "Lured" he played a womanizer accused of being a serial killer, though Robert Fleming (Sanders' part) does not fit the profile of a serial killer at all.

Is it what he does not seem is a question that cannot be answered without "plot-spoiling." Sandra Carpenter as a police employee definitely is not what she appears to be, which is what makes her effective bait. Before she attracts the serial killer, she has a very funny rendez-vous on a park bench that nets her a bouquet and a wild encounter with a deranged Boris Karloff (who got third billing for what is only a large cameo part and appears on the DVD cover with Ball).

The tail supplied by Scotland Yard (George Zucco) is not immediately obvious to Sandra or the viewer. They meet and have an entertaining exchange in a taxicab. As Dr. Moryani, Joseph Calleia (Algiers), is clearly a shady character, and Charles Coburn (The Lady Eve) is a genial father figure as well as a senior Scotland Yard official (casting akin to Jules Dassin casting Barry Fitzgerald as a homicide chief detective in "The Naked City" a few years later). The cast also included Sir Cedric Hardwicke (Wilson), Alan Napier (Hangover Square, Ministry of Fear), Alan Mowbray (My Man Godfrey, My Darling Clementine) and Robert Coote (The Rogues, my favorite tv series ever).

There are some German expressionist shadow play, shot by  William Daniels, who shot most of the best Greta Garbo movies, including "Queen Christina" and "Ninotchka," won an Oscar for the noirish-looking police procedural  "The Naked City" and was nominated for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" in which Elizabeth Taylor was showcased. And Frank Sinatra movies from the late 1950s (Some Came Running) the mid-1960s (Assault on a Queen). (Plus "Valley of the Dolls" and "In Like Flint.")

I don't think that Sirk was particularly interested in making a "Whodunit?" The suspense is elsewhere (and it does exist). I find it difficult to understand anyone being charmed by George Sanders. He was the romantic lead in a number of 1940s movies (even winning Ingrid Bergman from Robert Montgomery in "Rage in Heaven" (1941).  Perhaps it is impossible for me not to see him through the lens of his caddish if debonair Addison DeWitt in "All About Eve" (1951).

The Kino DVD has no bonus features, less-than-great sound, but a pretty good but not pristine print.

* Sirk is most remembered for over-the-top Technicolor melodramas starring Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman, Robert Stack, and Lana Turner from the 1950s of which "Tarnished Angels" (based on Faulkner's Pylon) is my favorite. He had made Zora Leander vehicles in Germany before fleeing to the US, and his first American movie was "Hitler's Madman" (with John Carradine in the title role).

©  2009, Stephen O. Murray

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