The Lady Gambles (1949)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) Poor Barbara Stanwyck. Or rather: poor character played by Barbara Stanwyck, as she gets swept up in gambling addiction after a trip to 1940s Las Vegas and eventually loses everything she’s got. A rather unusual (and progressive, in its own way) film dealing with social issues, The Lady Gambles aims to be a procedural drama chronicling how someone (a woman, unusually enough—most of the time, even well into the twenty-first century, gambling addiction is portrayed as a male issue) can gradually become seduced into increasingly high-stakes gambling from a little taste of Vegas. Much of the film (which is already fairly thin to begin with) probably wouldn’t work without Stanwyck—in her hands, the character is not a meek woman who gets taken despite herself, but an imposing presence who gradually succumbs. Robert Preston has the good role as the ex-husband who gets to extract the story in flashbacks, while Stephen McNally plays a Lucifer-like figure further tempting the lead character. The result is not always smooth, limited as it is by its exploitative vision, and the limits of the Production Code at the time—sure, you get to see Stanwyck’s character being beaten up in an alley, but the censorship in place prevents the film from going too deep in her implied prostitution. Still, the film remains interesting even as it plays things conventionally—The Lady Gambles has aged well after decades of further understanding of how gambling addiction works (or has even become something celebrated—the Las Vegas of 2022 is not the one portrayed in 1949) and Stanwyck, as she often did, took on roles that still make her one of the smartest actresses in film history.