Lured

A remake of Siodmak's Pièges, transposed to London, with Lucille Ball as the taxi-dancer recruited by the police to help trap a serial killer preying on girls by way of lonely hearts ads. The ambience is strangely indeterminate (contemporary London wavers between Edwardian Gothic and transatlantic chic), and the script - mostly a slavish copy of the original, with all its faults - is not helped by a fatuous 'inspiration' (doubtless intended to add a bit of French decadence) whereby the killer is said to be inspired by Baudelaire's poetry. The lighter scenes work well enough, with Ball's heroine turned into a chorus-line Nancy Drew, and the ambivalently debonair Sanders (a vast improvement on Chevalier) more plausible as both romantic interest and chief suspect. But the darker corners are sadly neglected. Siodmak's superb depiction of the killer's slow, hapless self-betrayal goes for very little here; and the wonderfully sinister, yet touching sequence involving von Stroheim's mad couturier (now played by Karloff) is truncated into crude stereotype.