Rita Hayworth, Film Noir, and Tex[t]-Mex's Unwritten Chapter

When it takes you sixteen years to finish a book, you can't imagine the relief when you finally see that baby in print--and now, with the first anniversary of the publication of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America, I am just getting around to thinking about some of the things I left out, forgot, or screwed up in writing the book. This Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog is part of that process of rectification, illumination, re-invention, and revision.

While I am pretty happy with the chapter on Margarita Dolores Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth, "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential" (witness the number of times I have come back to it in these "pages"), the one thing about it that does bother me is the short shrift it gives to Hayworth's noir classic Gilda. In my web spelunking, I happened across a page on noir and Charles's Vidor's film that I found useful for its quality AV assortment (the Turner Classic Movies embedded trailer for Gilda is first-rate) and archive here for future reference even though the author's preachy sermons ("Gilda! Don't strip") I could do without.

More on Gilda in the future.