For some reason LURED has not shown up on television very often. I don't know why, as it is well acted and directed. Possibly because of a flaw in the 1947 telling of the story that would be handled differently today. The villain is killing women because he cannot attract them like other men, and sees that they are at their most beautiful when they are dead (which oddly enough would have been the viewpoint of Reginald Christie, the Rillington Place strangler who was alive in 1947 and killing). But today the character would probably be latently homosexual. There are signs of it in his intellectual interests and even his use of poetry, as opposed to the other males in the film (especially the hero). I think that might have made the film a trifle more believable.
LURED is based on a 1939 French movie that starred Maurice Chevalier, and possibly gave that great entertainer his meatiest dramatic role. The cast here is damned good one, with Lucille Ball as an American dancer in London who is searching for a missing friend. She is recruited by Charles Coburn (as a Chief Inspector from Scotland Yard) to assist him, Alan Napier, and Robert Coote in trying to find her friend and solve the disappearance (in two years) of eight other woman. She is supposed to be bait for the criminal - to lure him into a trap. Lucy is given the personal columns and is to answer all that pertain to some man seeking a woman as a companion.
Ball is good - first as a tired American down on her luck (she is now a taxi dancer). She is hard boiled, but she seeks to improve herself. She does get a chance by answering an invitation to work for a nightclub owned by George Sanders and Cedric Hardwicke. But then her friend vanishes, and she finds her sense of public duty overcoming ambition.
Except for one thing. Fate keeps throwing her and Sanders together, and the latter (from his phone call with Lucy earlier) has been very interested in her. Slowly they are falling in love.
But she is determined to help Coburn. And the screenplay allows Douglas Sirk to go to town here. Sirk was brilliant at using the riches of materialism to manipulate his audiences (best shown in the 1950s in his color films). But in black and white he is just as effective, illustrating the situations Lucy finds herself in by his use of sets and costumes.
First the meets Boris Karloff, a well dressed man who seems to be offering her a modeling job. He is. But(in a switch for Karloff) he is an insane couturier (ruined years earlier by unscrupulous competitors), and he is putting on his greatest show (with Lucy wearing a twenty year old (1920 style) gown for a non-existent audience of blue-bloods (the main seat supposedly for a Princess has a British bull dog growling in it!).
Next she answers an ad for a maid in a banker's house. Interestingly this involves Lucy with a gang run by Joseph Calleia and Alan Mowbray (as a crooked butler - Topper's butler would not have approved). The gang is also causing young women to vanish, but for commercial reasons. Again the script is forced to change what is probably going on: the women, in the finished film are being shipped to become thieves working for Calliea in South America. In reality they would probably be turned into prostitutes in a white slavery ring down there. Again Sirk manages to translate a vision of the danger Lucy is in by the claustrophobic lower kitchen of the house where she is alone with a suspicious Calleia and a dumbfounded Mowbray.
Finally Lucy agrees to marry George, and everything seems headed smoothly ahead, except for the mysterious criminal sending another poem to the Yard that seems to aim at Lucy. Then she finds disturbing items in Sanders' desk. And the story takes us back to the serious elements we saw earlier when Lucy was trying to find her missing pal.
The film is quite good, and bears good comparison to later Sirk masterpieces like MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION and IMITATION OF LIFE. I only wish to add what several have pointed out: the performance of George Zucco as a Scotland Yard Lieutenant who works with Lucy, and is brave, but is also a perfect comic partner for her. Watch his interest in crosswords, and how she unconsciously helps him on them.
LURED is based on a 1939 French movie that starred Maurice Chevalier, and possibly gave that great entertainer his meatiest dramatic role. The cast here is damned good one, with Lucille Ball as an American dancer in London who is searching for a missing friend. She is recruited by Charles Coburn (as a Chief Inspector from Scotland Yard) to assist him, Alan Napier, and Robert Coote in trying to find her friend and solve the disappearance (in two years) of eight other woman. She is supposed to be bait for the criminal - to lure him into a trap. Lucy is given the personal columns and is to answer all that pertain to some man seeking a woman as a companion.
Ball is good - first as a tired American down on her luck (she is now a taxi dancer). She is hard boiled, but she seeks to improve herself. She does get a chance by answering an invitation to work for a nightclub owned by George Sanders and Cedric Hardwicke. But then her friend vanishes, and she finds her sense of public duty overcoming ambition.
Except for one thing. Fate keeps throwing her and Sanders together, and the latter (from his phone call with Lucy earlier) has been very interested in her. Slowly they are falling in love.
But she is determined to help Coburn. And the screenplay allows Douglas Sirk to go to town here. Sirk was brilliant at using the riches of materialism to manipulate his audiences (best shown in the 1950s in his color films). But in black and white he is just as effective, illustrating the situations Lucy finds herself in by his use of sets and costumes.
First the meets Boris Karloff, a well dressed man who seems to be offering her a modeling job. He is. But(in a switch for Karloff) he is an insane couturier (ruined years earlier by unscrupulous competitors), and he is putting on his greatest show (with Lucy wearing a twenty year old (1920 style) gown for a non-existent audience of blue-bloods (the main seat supposedly for a Princess has a British bull dog growling in it!).
Next she answers an ad for a maid in a banker's house. Interestingly this involves Lucy with a gang run by Joseph Calleia and Alan Mowbray (as a crooked butler - Topper's butler would not have approved). The gang is also causing young women to vanish, but for commercial reasons. Again the script is forced to change what is probably going on: the women, in the finished film are being shipped to become thieves working for Calliea in South America. In reality they would probably be turned into prostitutes in a white slavery ring down there. Again Sirk manages to translate a vision of the danger Lucy is in by the claustrophobic lower kitchen of the house where she is alone with a suspicious Calleia and a dumbfounded Mowbray.
Finally Lucy agrees to marry George, and everything seems headed smoothly ahead, except for the mysterious criminal sending another poem to the Yard that seems to aim at Lucy. Then she finds disturbing items in Sanders' desk. And the story takes us back to the serious elements we saw earlier when Lucy was trying to find her missing pal.
The film is quite good, and bears good comparison to later Sirk masterpieces like MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION and IMITATION OF LIFE. I only wish to add what several have pointed out: the performance of George Zucco as a Scotland Yard Lieutenant who works with Lucy, and is brave, but is also a perfect comic partner for her. Watch his interest in crosswords, and how she unconsciously helps him on them.