There is no discernible or worthwhile philosophical, psychological or emotional truth in Douglas Sirk’s Lured (1947), often labelled a film noir but aside from a couple of striking expressionist shots involving suspicious characters lurking in the shadows there is nothing to suggest any of the moodiness, doom, existential crisis normally associated with the genre.
Indeed, if the film is characterised by anything then it’s its light-heartedness and breeziness, as if Sirk can’t quite come up with anything dark and meaningful to say in the script he’s been given to work with. Having comedienne Lucille Ball in the female lead doesn’t help with trying to give the film an air of gravitas or darkness.
In fact, the best scenes are those that have some comic appeal, particularly those involving Boris Karloff, who plays a deranged ex-fashion designer who has lured Ball to his flat and dressed her up as if she’s about to appear in a fashion show, only for Karloff to pull back the stage curtain to reveal an audience consisting of a dolorous canine and a mannequin.
How Ball has ended up at Karloff’s tells us something about the plot of the film. She’s got there after a friend of hers at the nightclub they both work at as dancers has gone missing – and is presumed the latest victim of a serial killer stalking London. The ‘poet-killer’, as the murderer is known, taunts police by sending them Baudelaire-inspired poems on death and beauty announcing he’s about to strike again.
Inspector Harley Temple, played by Charles Coburn, enlists Ball as an undercover detective to answer lonely hearts ads in the newspapers in the hope that she will flush out the killer. The killer’s modus operandi is to use newspaper advertisements to lure potential victims. Karloff is one of several eccentrics she encounters via the ads before she gets closer to uncovering the homicidal maniac.
The film boasts a stellar cast – as well as Ball, Karloff and Coburn, the film features George Sanders and Cedric Hardwicke – and is set in London, though it’s a London of the Hollywood set and not the real thing, which is a shame, since we get no sense of post-war London and all the social, economic and psychological conditions of the time that would have made for a far more interesting film. Instead, we get the impression that Sirk is going through the motions, delivering less a film noir and more a far-fetched police procedural and whodunnit.
