Lured Reviews

An engaging thriller featuring Ball in a surprisingly good dramatic performance. An American taxi-dancer working in London, Ball loses her friend Chandler to a mysterious killer who advertises in the newspaper for attractive, lonely young ladies. A fan of French poet Baudelaire, the killer taunts Scotland Yard with clues written in verse about his next victim. Ball agrees to help the investigators catch this madman by acting as a decoy. One suspect, Karloff--in a red herring role as a dress designer--proves to be crazed, but not the murdering type. Another suspect is Calleia, who is involved in trafficking white slaves between England and South America. In the meantime Ball has fallen for Sanders, a womanizing nightclub owner who wants to marry her. His friend and business partner, Hardwicke, is a quiet, repressed man who, of course, turns out to be the killer Scotland Yard is looking for. Hardwicke nearly beats the law by attempting to pin the crimes on Sanders and kill Ball in the process. By the finale, however, London streets are once again made safe. Somewhat lengthy at 102 minutes, LURED succeeds because of a pair of fine performances by Ball (whose singing voice is dubbed by Annette Warren) and Coburn (as a police inspector), both better known to the public as comedy stars. As familiar as the plot may seem, LURED proves to be a reliable crime melodrama in the classic Hollywood vein--complete with a top-notch cast of players and Sirk's sure-handed direction in the days before he became synonymous with the term melodrama. It was based on Robert Siodmak's 1939 French film PIEGES (SNARES), which starred Maurice Chavalier and Erich von Stroheim (in Karloff's role). Sirk insists that he never saw that film and that it must have been screenwriter Rosten's idea to adapt it.