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Lured

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Lured, starring Lucille BallLured (1947) starring Lucille Ball, George Sanders, Boris Karloff, Charles Coburn, Sir Cedric Hardwicke
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Lured (1947) starring Lucille Ball, George Sanders, Boris Karloff, Charles Coburn, Sir Cedric Hardwicke

Synopsis of Lured

A serial killer in London is murdering young women whom he meets through the personal columns of newspapers. He announces each of his murders to the police by sending them a cryptic poem. After a dancer disappears, the police enlist her American friend to answer advertisements in the personal columns and so lure the killer.

Officer Barrett (George Zucco) meets the undercover Sandra Carpenter (Lucille Ball) at the park

Cast

Editorial review of Lured, courtesy of Amazon.com:

Lucille Ball and the delightfully mad Boris Karloff in "Lured"

Lucille Ball is in fine pre-TV form — still more the glamorous redhead than the slapstick comedienne–in Lured, Douglas Sirk’s elegantly handled low-budget whodunit. Ball plays an American nightclub dancer in London, recruited by the police as a decoy for a serial killer — a maniac who finds his victims through the newspaper personal ads. The guilty party isn’t difficult to guess, but the script by Leo Rosten is more literate than most such endeavors, and it’s fun to watch our out-of-place heroine brazen it out in the London fog. George Sanders is the most cultivated of her suitors, and there’s a weird sequence featuring Boris Karloff as a dress designer with crackpot designs on Lucy.

Sandra Carpenter (Lucille Ball)

Maybe best of all, the film has a crowd of good character actors: Charles Coburn (as a Scotland Yard inspector who becomes protective of his amateur agent), Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Mowbray, Joseph Calleia, and especially George Zucco, a frequent movie villain in a sympathetic role as an avuncular cop. Sirk brings his Germanic precision to the details, and cameraman William Daniels (Greta Garbo’s favorite) no doubt had a hand in making Ball look good Lured was subsequently re-titled Personal Column, much to Sirk’s annoyance. –Robert Horton

(Updated July 30, 2021)

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