Glenn Ford

Glenn Ford played Johnny Farrell in Charles Vidor's Gilda, a hard young gambler newly arrived in Argentina who is about to be robbed in a dark street when a man steps out of the shadows and saves him, and who lands at that man's steering in a smart Buenos Aires casino. Asking for work there, he is taken on by Ballin with the warning that gambling and women do not mix; after Ballin is thought dead, Johnny marries Gilda and takes over the cartel. Seven years afterwards he took on the detective Dave Bannion in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, a policeman seized by revenge when his wife is killed with a car bomb. For Jonathan Lethem, writing for Criterion, Ford's gravity is matched by an icy inward seething, and Lang's whole design turns on the measure of that playing.