, on a gambling trip to Reno, incurs a large debt-payable in fealty to a casino owner and his small daughter.) "In The Lady Pays Off we have an opportunity to see Douglas Sirk using his melodramatic vocabulary to comic ends. Mirrors, doorbells, 'natural' retributions and telltale objects-devices which usually depict entrapment, degradation or impotence-here are transformed into jokes. Sirk is smiling at melodrama; perhaps it's a twisted smile, but by now we should be used to some ambiguity in his films. In fact, it may not strike some that this is a comedy at all; the opening scene should cause real concern for Linda Darnell's sanity. However, by shifting the contents of subsequent scenes, Sirk aficionados will find that, indeed, we have a comedy here, and one which will repay close study-in spades, as it were-as a film of reshuffled values and usages." Jerry Hiler