Brigitte Helm, although mostly forgotten today except for her searing performance as the two Marias in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, could have been an international movie goddess at the level of Dietrich or Garbo—except for two strategic errors. She showed insufficient interest in obtaining the role of Lola Lola in The Blue Angel, which went of course to Dietrich and made her a star. And when offered the part of the bride in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, she refused. Instead, she stayed in Germany until, disgusted with the Nazis and their control of the film industry, she retired from movies and exiled herself to Switzerland.
Nevertheless, Helm’s mastery of the femme fatale archetype is unrivaled; this is best witnessed in several films that have survived from silent and early-sound German cinema. Her tall sinuous dancer’s body, blonde hair, aquiline nose, piercing eyes, and full arrogant lips inspired critics to dub her “the Teutonic Goddess.” And, in many ways, Helm paved the way for actresses like Dietrich and Garbo in their transformation of the femme fatale from vamp to goddess.
Brigitte Helm as the Whore of Babylon, worshipped by the rich of the city of Metropolis.
The robotic Maria before she is given the appearance of the saintly Maria in Metropolis, flanked by her “creator” Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge, right) and the capitalist Fredersen (Alfred Abel, left).
One need only look at the film which brought her to international attention—Lang’s dystopic Metropolis (1927). Helm portrays two parts: the religious and saintly Maria, who tries to give the upper classes of Metropolis a sense of conscience while preaching love to the oppressed workers and advising them to hold off on a revolt and wait for a “The Mediator” to unite them; and the robotic Maria who is a disruptive force, hell-bent on bringing chaos to the city and its master Fredersen (Alfred Abel). The original version of Metropolis was much longer than the existing version, over a quarter of which is believed to be lost, and only shown once at the initial premiere in Germany in 1927, so there are varying stories and theories about the original intention in the creation of the robot, who was likely meant to be male, originally, and intended to be a prototype which would replace the workers with inhuman superworkers.
In the final version, however, the alchemist and scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is commanded by Fredersen to create the duplicate robotic Maria with the intention of controlling the workers who are on the edge of revolt. Of course Rotwang has his own personal vengeance in mind (the destruction of Fredersen), but even he cannot control the robotic Maria who has a mind far more transgressive and destructive than her creator can imagine. On a symbolic level, the real femme fatale of the film in a sense is the great “M-Machine” itself, which appears to control and consume all of the male workers, a fearsome manifestation of Freud’s vagina dentata in action.
The cyborg Maria makes her debut in a hallucinatory sequence set in a decadent club. As the wealthy wait in deep anticipation, a shell rises onto the stage with slaves supporting it. From that shell, like Aphrodite, Maria, half-naked, begins to move her body with a frenzy that excites the men in the audience into a frenzy. Her snake-like dance routine, which features lascivious rolls of her hips, is intercut with Freder, Fredersen’s son who is in love with the saintly Maria, lost in a fevered dream in which the robotic Maria rides a seven-headed beast, linking her to Revelation’s Whore of Babylon.
The robotic Maria eventually inspires the workers to revolt and tear down the underground machines which run the city. She leads them in a frenzy—partly sexual, partly political—until the city is flooded and the workers find their own children threatened by the deluge. They worship this newer more exciting version of Maria even in the midst of the chaos, until her double-dealing is revealed and they turn on her.
In Alraune, a.k.a. The Mandrake (which Helm made twice, once in 1928 and then in a sound version in 1930), based on a story by the horror/decadent German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers, Helm again is the creation of an obsessed scientist who plays God. The Professor (Paul Wegener) wants to explore the nurture-versus-nature controversy by inseminating a prostitute with the semen of a condemned criminal, thus producing a real-life correlative to the mandrake root of legend. He ships the offspring, Alraune (Helm), to the safety of a convent and then observes her development from a distance.
But like Rotwang in Metropolis, the female force is uncontrollable. In the convent, she is a mischievous and rebellious child who refuses to follow rules. She seduces a young boy, and they run away. But even then, she cannot control her transgressive instincts and her desire for stimulation. Finding the boy somewhat bland, she joins a circus and there becomes involved with the owner as well as the lion tamer while the cuckolded boy becomes her hanger-on. In a particularly startling scene even for German expressionist films of the 1920s, Alraune teases one of her lovers as he pleads with her and then turns and blows smoke in the faces of the growling lions. When another lover attempts to tell Alraune what to do, she responds angrily, telling him that she does what she desires. As a demonstration, she opens the cage of the lions she had teased earlier, and stands before them defiantly and obviously sexually excited.
Poster for the sound version of Alraune.
Eventually the Professor finds Alraune in the circus and convinces her that he is her father; and if they go away together, she will have everything she desires. In the scenes that follow, the filmmakers present the couple’s relationship, as they stay in luxurious hotels and cavort in casinos, as quasi-incestuous. For even though Alraune does believe that the Professor is her father, as he said, this fact does not prevent her from tormenting him with her semi-naked body as she undresses or from taking a strange joy in his distress when she flirts with other men.
Alraune discovers the truth about her conception and birth when she uncovers the Professor’s diary and so plans a particularly appropriate revenge. She heats up her sexual allure around him and teases him with her dangling, delectable foot and with her silk-sheathed body. When he can take it no more and fears that she will run away with an attentive suitor to whom she finds herself attracted, he reveals that he is not really her father, hoping as she languishes on the bed before him that they can now have sexual relations. However, she laughs in his face, telling him that she knows about his deception. She then runs away, disgusted with his pathetic attempts to appease her.
In 1932 distinguished director G.W. Pabst (Pandora’s Box) cast Helm in his adaptation of the story of the lost city of Atlantis and its goddess Antinea: L‘Atlantide (Queen of Atlantis—English title). Set in the North African desert, Officer Saint-Avit of the Foreign Legion stumbles with his troop on the lost city of Atlantis, ruled by the narcissistic Antinea. The scenes in the city itself are staged as if the product of a hashish dream. Saint-Avit wanders through the maze-like streets in search of his friend Officer Morange. He encounters the native inhabitants covered in burkas, listening to French can-can music on a Victrola, whispering ominously, or silently sitting in circles. He meets another refugee, an alcoholic European nobleman with a ridiculous handlebar mustache who tells him about the cruel and beautiful Antinea. At several corners he runs into the huge busts of the queen, with her sensual lips and arrogant expression. In addition, on the soundtrack Pabst uses trance-like traditional music featuring woodwinds, drums, and chants—which add to the hallucinatory ethos.
Brigitte Helm’s striking face, which inspired so many filmmakers of the German cinema of the Weimar period, from L’Atlantide.
Antinea herself is presented like an icon, gazing longingly at herself in a mirror, hissing at an errant leopard, walking sinuously through her boudoir dressed in jewels and silk. When Saint-Avit first sees her she is lounging sensuously, playing chess. With a motion she invites him to play which he does without a word. She then proceeds to beat him in a game of speed chess. Soon he is under her spell but she is more interested in Morange as her newest lover. But Morange clings to his religion and refuses her. Outraged she orders the now love-besotted Saint-Avit to kill him, which he does
without hesitation. However, she still refuses to love him and he sinks into despair. Eventually a sympathetic young native girl leads him out of the city and he returns to the fort. But he cannot forget Antinea; so one day he wanders off into the desert in search of his obsession.
Greta Garbo
—The Femme Fatale as Goddess
Like Pola Negri, Greta Garbo was imported from Europe to play a vamp redolent of the old decadent world. However, what Garbo was able to accomplish, which Negri was not, was to raise the vamp to the level of a goddess. Along with fellow émigré Marlene Dietrich she changed the image of the femme fatale as much as Clara Bow had done in the 1920s, but in a completely different direction.
Garbo was the priestess of love in her films. What MGM exec Louis B. Mayer saw in her eyes when he viewed her films in Europe was not “gentleness,” as he claimed, but a sensuality verging on ecstasy. Once she was imported to Hollywood from her native Sweden in 1925, the dream factory capitalized on that sensuality and produced yet another archetype of the American movies: the femme fatale as goddess, a superior being who men cannot resist adoring.
Garbo displays the ecstatic sensuality her audiences adored as her lover John Gilbert stimulates her, from Flesh and the Devil.
In The Temptress (1926), Garbo plays a married woman, Elena. She is a femme fatale who destroys the lives of several men, including a banker who commits suicide while exposing Elena as a temptress. Manuel (Antonio Moreno), her newest lover, is disgusted but still cannot resist Elena’s passionate embraces and searing eyes. After several bouts of vacillation, he leaves for Argentina in order to forget her. She, of course, follows with husband in tow. Even though her husband is Manuel’s friend, he cannot resist her advances, which ultimately lead to the destruction of her husband and the eventual downfall of Elena herself.Years later Manuel encounters Elena in Paris. She has become a drunken prostitute. When he approaches her, she pretends not to know him in order to protect him, although she clearly still loves him. In an act of self-sacrifice, which we will see repeated in many Garbo films, she transcends sensual desire in order to touch a more spiritual plane.
In Flesh and the Devil (1926), the male protagonist, army recruit Leo von Harden (John Gilbert), first sees his eventual object of desire, Felicitas (Garbo), at the railway station when he is returning home from boot camp. She disembarks sinuously from the train coach, dressed in a fur-lined outfit and a cloche hat, and carrying flowers in her arms. The reaction shot of Leo says it all. He turns, freezes, and looks at her with bug-eyed wonderment. It is, however, his second opportunity to gaze upon Felicitas that truly solidifies his obsession. He searches for her at a party, ignoring his family and friends. As the camera scans the ballroom subjectively, the audience taking his point of view, it stops on Felicitas, now dressed in a pale chiffon gown, her eyes luminous with desire, her white skin sensuously exposed to view.
Felicitas proceeds to lead the lovesick Leo to an idyllic bower in the garden. There she erotically wets her cigarette with her lips and puts it into his mouth as a prelude to sexual foreplay. In the next sequence we see Leo happily lying at Felicitas’s feet as she reclines above him on a chaise lounge, both, it is implied, in post-coital exhaustion (the fact that Garbo and Gilbert were lovers off-screen as well undoubtedly added to the intensity of these scenes). Their rendezvous is interrupted abruptly by the husband of Felicitas. He challenges Leo to a duel. The next day Leo kills the husband in a faceoff and is exiled to the Africa Corps for five years. He promises not to forget Felicitas as she binds him with her ring.
In another overheated Vicente Blasco lbáñez adaptation, Garbo dresses to kill, literally and figuratively, in The Temptress.
Garbo’s garment leaves little to the imagination, as she prepares to bed and betray her avid young flyer (Ramon Novarro), from Mata Hari.
While he suffers in Africa, Leo’s childhood friend Ulrich (Lars Hanson), who is unaware of Leo’s affair with Felicitas, works to secure his early return while falling for the “devil” of the title. Felicitas and Ulrich marry. Upon returning home and finding his love and his best friend married, Leo tries to bury his affections for Felicitas, but with little luck. She tempts him at Mass by placing her wet lips on the communion cup exactly where his have been. She lures him to a cabin where they are to consummate their love.
In the 1930s, Garbo made a smooth transition to the sound period with a series of racy films that enhanced her star power, particularly in Europe. Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1931) posits Garbo as an innocent immigrant abused by an intolerant uncle and potential husband. She runs away and finds herself in the arms of the rugged all-American engineer Spencer (played by Clark Gable, who would reprise this role endlessly in the 1930s). They live together in bliss until her uncle finds her and she escapes with a carnival traveling through the countryside.
In order to secure her livelihood, Susan takes on the protection of the owner of the carnival while working as an exotic dancer. When Spencer finally locates her, he is outraged at her situation and calls her “gutter” trash, throwing away the engagement ring he had bought for her. Susan reacts to his intolerance by promising to use men like he assumed she was already doing, thereby lifting herself out of the gutter.
The next time Spencer meets her, it is on Susan’s terms. She has become the mistress of a corrupt politician. She invites him to a dinner party under the guise of securing him a job. Instead she humiliates him at dinner, lecturing him on men’s intolerance and cruelty.
After Spencer storms out, she has second thoughts and decides to pursue him to the tropics where he is drowning his love for her in backbreaking work and bottles of liquor. There she works a B-girl, enticing men with her hoochie-coochie dance and upper-class style, hoping one day Spencer will walk into the bar. And, of course, he does. Being Garbo, she is of course able to entice him back and overcome his bitterness, as she speaks to him metaphorically and spiritually of how they are “crippled” and only their love can heal them.
The Russian flyer Rosanoff (Novarro) follows his femme fatale around like an eager puppy, from Mata Hari.
A drunken and bitter Spencer (Clark Gable) encounters his ex-lover Susan (Garbo) in a sleazy bar in the tropics at the end of Susan Lenox.
In Mata Hari (1931), MGM presents Garbo as the famous real-life femme fatale Mata Hari, a role her chief rival over at Paramount, Dietrich, had limned the same year under the title Dishonored (not coincidentally the storylines of Dietrich and Garbo films often crisscrossed). Although the film has little to do with the real life of World War I double agent Mata Hari, it does manage to further the myth of Garbo as the priestess of love and desire. Early in the film we see Mata, dressed in a Javanese outfit, dancing erotically before a statue of Shiva, caressing his many limbs, kneeling before him lasciviously. In fact so erotic was the dance that Paramount eventually cut its length, especially the final shots in which she disrobes.
Happier times: Spencer and Susan share a meal as their love blossoms in Susan Lenox.
Watching the performance is her present lover, the Russian general Shubin (Lionel Barrymore) who is supplying her with military information for the Germans, and a young, bright-eyed Russian flyer: Rosanoff (Ramon Novarro). Rosanoff proceeds to follow Mata around like a puppy dog: buying her a ring, kneeling at her feet, and offering her his devotion. She torments him for awhile. Eventually his innocence and youth is too much for her to resist, so she takes him as a lover and then the next morning rejects him.
The Germans soon discover, however, that Rosanoff is in possession of valuable military documents and send Mata to photograph them. In a scene that epitomizes Garbo’s status as a goddess, she wanders about the room and spots an icon of the Madonna with a candle lit in devotion. She looks at this rival goddess with a bit of disdain and demands that if he truly loves her that he put out the votive candle. He resists initially as his mother had told him never to let it die. But when she refuses his embrace, this “mama’s boy” complies while whispering �
�forgive me” to the Madonna, and then begins worshipping his new idol below on the bed.
Garbo as the famous double agent Mata Hari, the morning after, examining her options.
Director George Cukor (next to the stool) sets up the a love scene in Garbo’s Camille.
Garbo’s moment of sensual/spiritual transcendence in this film occurs as she confesses to her crimes in order to save the wounded Rosanoff from testifying (she had earlier in the film murdered Shobin to protect him). In an almost surreal scene, she convinces the nuns in the prison to allow her now-blind lover to visit her on death row and become complicit in her lie that the prison is but a hospital. The two vow their love to each other as she is led away to be executed. In the last shots of the movie, she shivers ecstatically as if she has just experienced a powerful orgasm—an orgasm as spiritual as it is sensual.
Garbo’s last chance to raise sensual love to a spiritual plane was in her version of Dumas’s (fils) Camille. As in both Bara and Nazimova’s versions, she is the courtesan who uses men for their money but falls for the handsome Armand. But when she realizes that she will destroy his life and that of his family, she withdraws from him and dies of consumption.
Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies Page 4
