Alone and surrounded by lascivious men, Gilda finds her problems have not gone away…
Viewed from the perspective of the early 21st Century, as (online) debate rages over the lack of sex and adult themes in mainstream Hollywood cinema, Safe in Hell feels like a defiant middle finger.
There has been a sub-set of online people talking positively about the limits of the old Production Code, and how its repressive dictates benefited the artistry of classic Hollywood.
Safe in Hell is an angry rebuke of the Production Code, which was about to become the millstone around Hollywood’s neck a few years after its release.
While it began in the early twenties, the arrival of Joseph Breen would turn the so-called Hays Code into the disruptive force in American movies for thirty years.
Sex, sexuality, race, drug use, anything considered vaguely anti-Christian/white/American/male - All became subtext, hidden from view.
By those later standards, Safe in Hell has little subtext when it comes to its subject.
What is not spoken in dialogue is rendered obvious in visual, from the literalism of the flaming title card, to the first shot, of lead actress Dorothy Mackaill’s legs.
When we meet her, Gilda is on the phone arranging a booking with a client. Mackaill’s performance in this scene - tired, hardened, blunt - grounds us in the character’s experience without the need for exposition.
Her latest client turns out to be her pimp/rapist, Piet Van Saal (Ralf Harolde). Gilda explodes almost as soon as they meet and they fight.
During this struggle, she kills him and accidentally burns the hotel down.
It is the kind of opening one would expect from a movie from the seventies.
The film, directed by action and crime specialist William Wellman, moves like a thriller, with Gilda in constant danger from men.
When her lover, sailor Carl Erickson (Donald Cook), is introduced, the film keeps the viewer off-balance: he barges into the room and leers at her with a lascivious grin.
Is he an intruder?
Their embrace undermines this image, but only briefly.
When Gilda confesses what has happened he was away, his first action is to slap her and turn to leave.
Even after guilt brings him back, his actions are possessive - hiding Gilda in a crate to smuggle her out of the country; ordering her to stay in her room and - after spying the audience of men lusting after her - he takes Gilda to a church to marry her.
“Now you’re mine,” he says before leaving.
Despite the sexual danger hanging over these scenes, the film reversed our expectations again.
Gilda quickly grows tired of hiding in her room and leaves to join the other hotel patrons at their shared dining table.
After showing her way around their favoured vices - smoking and drinking - Gilda becomes not just the centre of attention, but an active member of the group of exiles.
For a brief moment, the film feels like an early forerunner of To Have and Have Not, with the collection of crooks becoming a chorus of comical knaves.
Instead this is merely a setup for revealing another irony. While Carl saw the hotel’s guests as dangerous, Gilda knows how to wrangle them.
The real threat to our lead is the chief of police, Bruno (Morgan Wallace), who does everything in his power to make her his sexual slave.
The film makes a point of showing Bruno’s plans early - he confiscates Carl’s letters, so Gilda thinks she has been abandoned.
He then gives her a gun for protection and then leaves to write up a warrant for her arrest for carrying an illegal firearm.
Bruno’s character is also reflective of the film’s more overt racism. Miscegenation was one of the major themes repressed by the Hays Code, and Safe in Hell is more explicit in its fear for white womanhood.
Repeated reference is made to the fact that she is the only white woman on the island. And even though Gilda is a ‘fallen’ woman, her whiteness must be protected.
That vein runs through the third act, reorienting Gilda’s eventual execution as an escape from non-white sexual desire.
It also feels like the bleak demise the movie has been foreshadowing since the beginning.
When confronted with Bruno’s proposal of sexual servitude, Gilda chooses the death penalty. After being under the thumb of so many other men, death is the only escape for Gilda.
Gilda is damned by men’s desires, not her own.
This is American cinema stripped of all the innuendo and repression of the Hays Code. Sexuality, desire and violence are all present, unencumbered. And there is no moral certainty to the ending - at least on the terms of the Code.
As she awaits execution, Gilda keeps up a pretence to see Carl one last time (and let him escape from Bruno).
After he leaves, she ends the movie lighting her own cigarette and striving off into the sun.
While Bruno is defeated in his scheme to control Gilda’s body, no reference is made to a punishment for Bruno.
From a 2023 perspective, Safe in Hell is not that explicit visually, but thematically and narratively, it is unrestrained.
Characters are not bound by a set of cinematic leg irons.
Safe in Hell is not an example of ambiguity and complex human characterisation, but it does feel more honest about human impulses, from love to sex to economic imperatives.
If it expresses a view of humanity, it is pessimistic, but it is not hidden or softened.
I cannot say I want to watch it again, but I am encouraged to watch more pre-Code Hollywood films.
Watch this space.
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