Une femme joue son bonheur

From 1949, The Lady Gambles stars Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Preston, and Stephen McNally.

Stanwyck plays Joan Boothe, who accompanies reporter husband David (Preston) to Las Vegas where he is working on a story about the Hoover Dam. Left to her own devices, she becomes interested in gambling to the point where it becomes an addiction. Though she tries to fight it, she can't, and ultimately loses her husband and falls into the clutches of Horace Corrigan, who runs the casino and has her number.

Stanwyck does well showing Joan's downward spiral. The film dabbles in psychology in Joan's relationship with her older sister Ruth (Edith Barrett) for whom she takes responsibility, though her husband objects.

Good performances all around, as well as some brutal and scary moments. Definitely keeps your interest.

Watch for Tony Curtis in one of his first speaking roles as a telegram delivery boy. The director told him, "All you want is a tip." He's adorable.

There were three primary reasons for wanting to see 'The Lady Gambles'. The biggest one being the wonderful Barbara Stanwyck, despite her filmography being hit and miss her performances were a lot more consistent and helped make the misses just about watchable. Two being my love of classic film. And the final one being the subject, it is always worth addressing any kind of addiction on film and that is including gambling (big at the time and still a big problem now).

Despite the potential, 'The Lady Gambles' doesn't completely live up to it. It starts off very well and had all the makings of a great film, but the second half or so is less good or compelling with the very late stages feeling like a different film. 'The Lady Gambles' is definitely worth the look and Stanwyck, as expected, makes things a lot better than it had a right to be, but this was an interesting and heavily flawed affair as an overall whole.

Stanwyck is the best thing about 'The Lady Gambles', she did steely and vulnerable better than a lot of actresses at that time and to this day long after her death she remains one of the best ever at those. Both of those can be seen to intense and moving effect and she really does give it everything she's got. The other acting standout is the genuinely intimidating Stephen McNally, goodness does that man have a menacing presence here and the drama does really come alive with him. Enough of the direction is competent.

It is a well shot film and Frank Skinner's music avoids being overly-melodramatic and is not sugary. 'The Lady Gambles' starts off very well with an intriguing and suitably tense first half, that has edge and one does care about how things are going to go.

Which is why it was a shame that to me 'The Lady Gambles' wasn't as compelling later on, where the film became rather predictable and lacked the tension it should have had. Where the dialogue can be on the soapy side and it gets very melodramatic.

As does Robert Preston's performance, which does get too over the top, and his character is too naive that one wants to give him a shake and scream "wake up" in his face. The ending is very corny and far too soft for the subject, like the film had run out of ideas or something.

Concluding, worth seeing for Stanwyck but could have been more. 6/10

In this B-picture that shows a woman's discovery of gambling, Barbara Stanwyck shines in the leading role. Released the same year as Gregory Peck's gambling movie The Great Sinner, this is the female version of the dangers of gambling. Robert Preston costars as the long-suffering husband, and Stephen McNally is a very realistic villain who entices Barbara to start trying her luck. If you keep your eyes peeled, you can catch a very young Tony Curtis in his third film appearance! He plays a bellboy and is onscreen for less than ten seconds, but he has an interaction with the legendary Barbara Stanwyck; not bad!

The opening scene is incredibly engaging and shocking. Barbara walks out into an alley, then gets beaten by a group of thugs and left for dead. Next, Robert Preston runs into a hospital, demanding to know how his wife is. He tells the doctor in charge, and the audience, the story of how she ended up this way. While the storytelling method is a little cheesy, Barbara's performance more than makes up for it. She's fantastic, and completely in her element as she's given the opportunity to show off every human emotion throughout the film. She's innocently curious as she tags along on her husband's business trip to Las Vegas, and her slow descent into addiction is riveting. She's deceitful, ashamed, devious, desperate, and completely unable to stop. Her eyes light up when she wins, and she feels like her life's over when she loses. If you've never seen a Barbara Stanwyck movie, this is a great place to start.

Stanwyck's was a curious career. The highest-paid woman in pictures -- actually, in America -- for a while, she made her share of workaday, forgettable pictures. The Lady Gambles is among them, except that it stars Stanwyck. Married to Robert Preston, a reporter doing a feature on Las Vegas, she agrees to help out by getting in on the action. Soon, she's hooked, playing recklessly and compulsively even as her marriage is disintegrating. There's one brutal scene when she's beaten up by thugs in an alley -- not a scene often filmed with a top actress as victim. The film has a historical interest as one of the first to be set in that new Babylon in the desert, Las Vegas. (In the 30s, the only Nevada location was Reno; Vegas was still a chicken run.) Despite its semi-documentary approach, The Lady Gambles sustains interest; as a look at abnormal gambling, it's better than Gambling House (with Victor Mature) or The Las Vegas Story (with Mitchum and Jane Russell).

It is very evident that Barbara Stanwyck was able to adapt to any sort of role or character in each of her pictures. In this one, she plays a businessman's wife who becomes addicted to gambling after a trip to Las Vegas. This isn't a bad character study, and probably one of the earliest ones dealing with this sort of obsession. It is also interesting to see how the Vegas strip looked in over 50 years ago. A young, unknown Tony Curtis has a cameo as a bell boy.