Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies

by Ursini, James

  Gene Tierney’s personal psychological problems sometimes intermingled with her onscreen character’s conflicts to create deep depressions, on the set of Leave Her to Heaven.

  Laura (Tierney) manages her men well, at least until the effeminate Lydecker (Clifton Webb) loses his self-control and “murders” her.

  But the man Victoria truly wishes to punish is her father. For even though he spoils her with money and jewels (which she pawns to raise more money), he also tries to control her, holding her with a “gold chain” (his words). Her opportunity for revenge comes through the hands of Mother Gin Sling, who, after Sir Guy thinks he has put Victoria safely on a plane home, presents his daughter high on drugs and belligerent. When Victoria insults everyone at the dinner party and then refuses to leave with her father, Sir Guy is forced to reveal his hand. He tells the two women that they are mother and daughter. Victoria refuses to believe him and instead continues to vilify Gin Sling. In response, the humiliated Mother shoots her own daughter.

  In 1943, Tierney gave birth to a mentally handicapped child as a result of an illness she had contracted while working for the USO. From this date forward, there is a change in Tierney’s femme fatale portrayals (and in fact in all of her work). The willful, petulant princess gave way to a more thoughtful, highly guarded, and imperious figure. One can see this clearly in her portrayal of Laura Hunt in Otto Preminger’s film noir classic Laura (1944). Tierney plays an ambitious advertising/fashion director who is not above using her glacial beauty to advance her career. Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a newspaper columnist, becomes her mentor and supporter, using his influence to advance her career. Although he falls in love with her, she keeps him at a distance while romancing Carpenter (Vincent Price). At the opening of the movie, Laura has already been (supposedly) murdered; and a detective, McPherson (Dana Andrews), is assigned to the case. As he interviews her friends and servants, he slowly becomes fascinated with her. One night while in her apartment, he falls asleep below her portrait, like some acolyte at an altar. Suddenly he is awakened by the real Laura, looking as if she has just materialized from his dreams. Although he tries to resist his infatuation and even initially disbelieves her story, he cannot resist her haughty appeal.

  The film that secured Gene Tierney’s reputation among her acting peers was her next effort, Leave Her to Heaven (1945), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. Leave Her to Heaven is Gene Tierney’s apotheosis film. As in The Shanghai Gesture and Laura, Tierney dominates every scene she is in both physically, by her beauty, and psychologically, with her emotional intensity. While in The Shanghai Gesture she utilized a consciously stylized hysteria to project the image of a spoiled teenage decadent bent on shocking and then punishing both her repressive father and her libertine mother, in Leave Her to Heaven she opts for a more controlled performance which at time veers into the realm of the supernatural.

  It is no accident that several of the characters, including her husband Richard, when speaking of Ellen refer to her psychic abilities or make semi-humorous allusions to the “witches of Salem.” For there is definitely an otherworldly quality to this controlling woman who “loves too much” (her mother’s words). The audience first gets a glimpse of this remarkable and imperious woman in a club car on a train heading for New Mexico. There she meets the writer Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde). As soon as she notices him, she disconcerts him completely by staring at him without blinking for almost a minute of real time, as if she is trying to bore into his soul. After he squirms sufficiently, Ellen tells him he resembles her father, a man on whom, we later find out, she has an oedipal fixation.

  This mesmerizing scene is followed shortly by another revealing and almost mythical one. Richard finds himself staying at the same resort as Ellen and her family. They are there to spread the ashes of her dead father. Early in the morning, as Alfred Newman’s melodramatic and almost manic musical score (replete with the cadence-like rhythm of timpani) rises on the soundtrack, Ellen sits ramrod straight on her horse like an Amazon warrior, and throws her father’s ashes about her, covering both herself and the desert around her, while Richard looks on in awe. After these two key scenes, it is little wonder Richard is left without a will of his own. Ellen proceeds to dump her lawyer fiance (who, by the way, declares he will always love her anyway—which Ellen calls a “tribute”—and out of devotion is the one who prosecutes Ruth for her murder) and announce her marriage to Richard, all without his knowledge. As a doctor later on comments, Ellen seems to be able “to will” events.

  As Ellen, Gene Tierney assumes the mask, sunglasses included, before she murders her husband’s brother in Leave Her to Heaven.

  Intent on possessing Richard as she possessed her father, she gradually begins to whittle away all of Richard’s emotional connections so he can be hers totally: “I’ll never let you go ... never ... never ... never.” In a scene rather daring for Production Code-era Hollywood, we see Ellen get up from her twin bed and enter her husband’s and play with him, blowing on his face, cuddling up to him, exciting him sexually, until he is distracted by the voice of his crippled brother Danny in the next room. Although she tries initially to bend Danny to her will, he does not respond to her urgings that he attend a boarding school; and so, in another eerie scene, she takes him out to the lake for some physical therapy. Putting on her heart-shaped sunglasses and assuming a mask-like expression, she watches as he goes out too far and drowns. Of course, the most shocking moment for an audience of the period is the self-induced miscarriage, in which she stages a fall from the stairs, again in order to have no one between her and Richard.

  Gene Tierney as the inebriated Victoria/Poppy, from The Shanghai Gesture.

  Several films like Sundown (pictured here) and The Shanghai Gesture exploited Gene Tierney’s exotic, Eurasian looks to great effect.

  From Sundown, she strides through the film like an Egyptian goddess come to earth.

  Earlier in the film, before decadence overwhelmed her, Gene Tierney as Victoria Charteris, from The Shanghai Gesture.

  As the “mud honey,” Ellie May, from John Ford’s Tobacco Road.

  After Ellen realizes she has lost Richard to her foster sister Ruth, she commits suicide in order to separate Richard from his loved ones, even from the grave. She leaves a letter that implicates her foster cousin Ruth in her murder. With Ellen’s death, however, the movie is over. Even though the filmmakers do not have the courage to end the movie there and instead stage a trial which labels Ellen a “monster” and delivers Richard into the arms of the safe good girl Ruth, it all seems anticlimactic. For Ellen is such a transgressive, powerful figure that all the other characters seem little more than silhouettes in Ellen’s shadow play, unable to command the audience’s attention like Ellen had.

  Linda Darnell

  —Vulgarity with Grace

  Long-legged, “robust” (an adjective used in Forever Amber), and smoky-voiced Texan Linda Darnell was, in the tradition of Harlow and West, not adverse to mixing vulgarity with class in her portrayals of femmes fatales. Oddly enough, Darnell started her career playing virginal, good-girl roles, including opposite Rita Hayworth’s fiery Doña Sol in Blood and Sand (1941) and as the ultimate good girl, the Virgin Mary, in The Song of Bernadette (1943). However, it was her role as the music-hall singer Netta in Hangover Square (1945) that changed the trajectory of her career.

  As Netta (the name invokes the unfaithful wife in the Puccini opera Pagliacci) Darnell debuts in the film on the stage of a seedy Edwardian music hall, where she displays her languid legs as she sings a provocative ditty to an audience of drunken men. As she moves off stage to meet her lover/composer, she expresses her disdain for the men as well as the mediocre music she is forced to sing. She, like any self-respecting femme fatale, has ambition. And that ambition finds its tool in the person of the emotionally crippled classical composer George Bone (played in his last performance with great sympathy and depth by Laird Cregar). Like a siren, she keeps him in line with
promises and brief kisses. When he begins to stray to the world of his beloved piano concerto (which he is working on throughout the movie), she pulls him back with her prodigious sex appeal, sitting on his piano to obstruct his composing and convincing him to use part of his concerto as the theme for one of her music-hall ditties.

  The twist, of course, in the plot is that Bone is a murderer who commits his crimes in a trance, about which he remembers nothing. When Netta betrays him by keeping up an affair with her former lover as well as a new lover, in the person of a theatrical director who can offer her more than George, he becomes enraged. In one of his trances, he strangles her and feeds her to the bonfire set to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day.

  Stella (Linda Darnell) rubs her feet and gives the men surrounding her in the café a look of defiance and insouciance, from Fallen Angel.

  In Otto Preminger’s classic noir Fallen Angel (1945), Darnell plays Stella, a character very similar to Netta. We first see her as she enters the diner where several admirers have been waiting for her return after a longer than normal absence. She stands in the doorway, her legs apart, defiant and sullen. She sits down, crosses her legs, and takes off her shoe, massaging her feet. When the taciturn police detective, Judd (Charles Bickford), comes over to her and whispers that he knew she would be back, she dismisses him with a curt “okay.” Pop (Percy Kilbride), the owner of the café (whom by the way she steals from), then follows with a compliment and is met with a “You make me sick.”When the protagonist of the movie, the corrupt hustler Stanton (Dana Andrews), tries to pick her up later, she tells him, “Beat it.”

  Stella uses slang, walks with a swing to her hips, and has a healthy cynicism toward men on the make. When Stanton falls for her more desperately than normal (he is a player), she tells him that she now has changed her ways and will only be with a man if he can offer money, a home, and a ring. In order to win her away from her several other beaus—including Pop the café owner, a mysterious rich suitor, and (we later find out), the detective Judd—Stanton swindles the religious and innocent daughter of the town’s ex-mayor: June (Alice Faye). But Stanton’s schemes go awry when Stella is murdered and he is accused (the actual murderer, we find out in the resolution, is Judd).

  Publicity photo for the young Linda Darnell, exploiting her robust beauty.

  Amber (Linda Darnell) exhibits her delight in her new surroundings, from Forever Amber.

  A more serious Amber (Darnell), who exhibits here her determination and focus.

  Darnell’s third collaboration with director Otto Preminger, Forever Amber (1947), was again fruitful as she incarnated the role of Amber St. Clair from the best-selling potboiler of the same name by Kathleen Winsor. In glorious Technicolor, this epic melodrama was the perfect vehicle to showcase Darnell’s acting range. She begins the film the foundling of a Puritan family in England of the late 1600s. Like so many femmes fatales in the movies, she is raised by a domineering and intolerant father figure, who in simple terms represents the repressive patriarchy femmes fatales must manipulate in order to free themselves. And free herself she does. She runs away with a dashing privateer, Carlton (Cornel Wilde), whom she loves although he considers her more of a diversion.

  When Carlton is sent by the king to “plunder the Spanish Main,” Amber is left nearly broke and clearly pregnant. She is cast into debtor’s prison after losing to swindlers what money Carlton had given her. Intent on both punishing Carlton for his desertion and making him desire her more, she vows to rise up the rungs of society: “He’ll have to reach up to touch the hem of my skirt.” She aligns herself with a highwayman who springs her from prison and teaches her the trade of prostitution and thievery. When he is killed, she finally begins her ascent up the social ladder by hiding in the house of a captain of the king’s guards, Morgan (Glenn Langan), and seducing him into helping her. He secures her a job on the stage where she is noticed by nobility, including the decadent king Charles II (George Sanders).

  After Morgan is killed in a duel with Carlton who has returned briefly, Amber marries the rich Earl of Radcliffe (Richard Haydn) in order to assure her own future as well as that of her son. In order to give her character more sympathy and to assuage any judgmental tendencies the audience might have, the writers create a scene set during the plague in which Amber risks her own life to nurse the infected Carlton, even killing an old woman who is attempting to strangle the weakened Carlton and steal his valuables. For her bravery, she receives no reward as Carlton again sails off and her husband tries to imprison her in his mansion while a fire sweeps through London. She escapes the fire with the aid of her servants and becomes the powerful mistress to Charles II.

  In accordance with Production Code pressures and the middle-class morality of Hollywood, Preminger is unable to show Amber in total victory. In the final scenes she performs an act of self-sacrifice by giving up her son to Carlton, who promises to raise him in a less corrupt environment: the New World. In the final shot, the camera moves in on a close-up of Amber as they walk away, resigned as she looks from the window of her estate. For in the final analysis, she accomplished what she set out to do: she reached the pinnacle of success in society, and Carlton did have to figuratively “reach up” to touch the hem of skirt—but, in this case, in order to obtain his son.

  Again, never shy about showing her ample figure and long legs, Linda Darnell as Netta dances for the men in Hangover Square.

  Is she faithful or is she not? Doting and jealous husband Sir Alfred (Rex Harrison) will never know, as he kisses his young wife Daphne, from Unfaithfully Yours.

  In 1948 famed comedy director Preston Sturges cast Darnell as the possibly duplicitous wife of a renowned composer: Sir Alfred (Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours). Like most of Sturges’s work the fine line between reality and imagination, between truth and lie, is explored. Here he tells the story of an older man’s jealousy over the relationship between his young beautiful wife and his handsome friend Anthony (Kurt Krueger).

  By casting Darnell in the role of the wife Daphne, he plays upon audience expectations. Having seen the actress in several notable femme fatale roles in the last few years, they might assume she will be manipulative and unfaithful in this screen relationship as well. Even by the end of the film, when he decides to put aside, for now, his maddening jealousy and his plans for revenge (which we see in several daydream sequences while he is conducting the orchestra), the audience is not entirely convinced of her innocence.

  Rita Hayworth

  —The Titian Femme Fatale

  Born Margarita Carmen Cansino, Rita Hayworth was discovered by a Fox executive dancing Latin routines on stage. The studio dyed her hair red and gave her a makeover, and the Titian-haired screen goddess known as Rita Hayworth was born.

  Hayworth’s breakout film as a femme fatale was Rouben Mamoulian’s painterly adaptation of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s Blood and Sand (1941). It is notable not only for Hayworth’s performance as the slumming Doña Sol, but for the presence of two other femmes fatales—one at the beginning of her career, one at the end. A fresh-faced Linda Darnell plays the resilient and faithful wife of the protagonist—matador Juan Gallardo (Tyrone Power). While one of the first femmes fatales of the cinema—the great Nazimova—delivers a subtle and affecting performance as Gallardo’s hard-edged mother.

  Hayworth, shot lovingly in Technicolor, exhibits the same liberated sexuality as Nita Naldi did in the Valentino version nineteen years earlier. Like her predecessor, she is an upper-class woman in search of “rough trade.” In front of a table full of her friends, she defends her peasant matador by telling them that she loves the “smell of horses and bulls.” In her courtyard, she has him play the pull to her torero, an act that clearly excites her. When his wife comes to retrieve him, she calls to him by stamping her foot and calling “toro.” Gallardo enters, head bowed as if waiting for the final deathblow. The scene in which she humiliates him in public by dancing a paso doble with his chief rival, Manola (Anthony Quinn), speaks to th
e level of her sexual perversion as well as his masochism. However, much of the blatant rough sex, foregrounded in the Naldi version, is here muted, obviously due to the long arm of the Production Code Office.

  Gilda is the apotheosis film for Rita Hayworth. Her iconic image in that black silk sheath dress by Jean Louis singing “Put the Blame on Mame” has been reproduced and imitated ever since it was first seen in March 1946; the number has been referred to as a clothed striptease. The film is itself an exploration of perverse sexuality as much as a paean to the Titian goddess of the screen. This role set such a stamp upon all of her subsequent work and life that Rita Hayworth would later state in regards to her personal life, “They married Gilda, but they woke up with me.”

  Rita Hayworth as the fiery Doña Sol, dressed in negligee and ready for the sexual corrida in Blood and Sand.

  Rita Hayworth’s iconic photo from Gilda.