Lured

How's this for a wacky quartet of actors given top billing: Lucille Ball, George Sanders, Charles Coburn, and Boris Karloff. I dare say it's the only film co-starring Lucy with Karloff. This was before her TV days, 1947, when she was an ingenue, although there is plenty of evidence of her comedic gifts, even if it is a film about a serial killer.

It was directed by Douglas Sirk, who went on to make several acclaimed films, but this one somehow escaped the notice of Alfred Hitchcock, for it's right up his alley. He would have made a far better film, with at least one set piece. Sirk mainly stays out of the way, although he does make frequent use of shadows and silhouettes.

There is a killer loose in London. He murders young women, posting ads in the personal column. He also taunts the police by sending poems, in the style of Baudelaire, before he commits the crime without enough information to let them know who he's going to kill.

Ball plays a taxi dancer, and when one of her friends goes missing after answering an ad, the police, in the form of Coburn, recruits her to go undercover to act as bait. This is implausible, but a requirement for the film to keep going. She meets a few men, none of them the killer, but including Karloff in a bizarre cameo as a paranoid fashion designer who gives shows in front of an audience of dogs and mannequins. He suspects Ball of being a spy for a rival designer and attacks her with a sword. But she has an inspector tailing her, and she is rescued.

She then meets Sanders, a nightclub owner who is smitten. He wears her down and they are engaged, but on the night of their engagement party she finds a picture of her friend and her charm bracelet in Sanders' desk. There is a huge amount of circumstantial evidence, such as the typewriter used to write the poems is his. Is he being framed? The savvy viewer will have this figured out.

Lured is a so-so picture that could have been far more interesting. It just kinds of lays there, methodically crawling along to the climax. But all the performances are worth watching. My regular readers may know that Sanders is one of my favorites, and he improves any movie he's in.