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movie review of Lured (1947), starring Lucille Ball, George Sanders, Charles Cobern, Boris Karloff

Kino Video - Douglas Sirk's rediscovered thriller - Lured - Lucille Ball, George Sanders, Boris Karloff - DVD
When I think of Lucille Ball, I tend to think of comedy, since that’s what she’s most famous for—however, she also made several serious films, and Lured is a good example of that. She stars as Sandra Carpenter, an American dancer in London, England—where her friend has been murdered by a serial killer, who has been luring young women to their doom through ads in the personal column in the newspaper. Lucy is soon acting as bait, answering various personal ads and reporting suspicious activity to Scotland Yard. Along the way, she has several vignettes, such as meeting a young boy who’s substituting for his older brother, and finds several dangerous people—including Boris Karloff, who plays a semi-dangerous madman; but he’s not the killer that Scotland Yard is looking for.

Along the way, she falls in love with George Sanders’ character, Robert Fleming. He, however, becomes a suspect in the murder—after Lucy has fallen in love with him, and become engaged. There is much evidence pointing to his guilt—too much so, in fact, and the cagey Scotland Yard inspector, played by Charles Coburn, suspects that he’s being framed. It becomes plain to the audience by this time who the real murderer is, but that’s all right; the movie was a pleasant surprise to watch, and I hope you enjoy it as well.

Editorial review of Lured starring Lucille Ball, courtesy of Amazon.com

Lucille Ball is in fine pre-TV form--still more the glamorous redhead than the slapstick comedienne--in Lured, Douglas Sirk’s elegantly handled low-budget whodunit. Ball plays an American nightclub dancer in London, recruited by the police as a decoy for a serial killer--a maniac who finds his victims through the newspaper personal ads. The guilty party isn’t difficult to guess, but the script by Leo Rosten is more literate than most such endeavors, and it’s fun to watch our out-of-place heroine brazen it out in the London fog. George Sanders is the most cultivated of her suitors, and there’s a weird sequence featuring Boris Karloff as a dress designer with crackpot designs on Lucy. Maybe best of all, the film has a crowd of good character actors: Charles Coburn (as a Scotland Yard inspector who becomes protective of his amateur agent), Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Mowbray, Joseph Calleia, and especially George Zucco, a frequent movie villain in a sympathetic role as an avuncular cop. Sirk brings his Germanic precision to the details, and cameraman William Daniels (Greta Garbo’s favorite) no doubt had a hand in making Ball look good. Lured was subsequently re-titled Personal Column, much to Sirk’s annoyance. --Robert Horton

Trivia for Lured

The title was changed to Personal Column midway through the original U.S. theatrical release because staff at the Production Code Administration thought the word “lured” sounded too much like “lurid”. Director Douglas Sirk felt the title change confused potential audiences and led to the film’s box-office failure.

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About the Author

Tom Raymond, aka. Raynbow the Clown, is a professional clown working out of Madison, Wisconsin, and is available for ministry events, conventions and conferences.

Posted by Tom Raymond, aka Raynbow on 10/16 at 10:14 PM
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