Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies

by Ursini, James

  Hayworth strikes a pose for the camera on the set of Gilda.

  The movie revolves around a love triad consisting of Ballin (George Macready), his wife Gilda, and Johnny (Glenn Ford), Ballin’s right-hand man and Gilda’s bitter ex-lover. Ballin is the patriarch of the trio, referring to both Gilda and Johnny as his “little friends”—a term he also used for his overtly phallic sword-tipped can. Ballin sees all three as his possessions, to be used as defenses against the hostile post-World War II milieu of political intrigue and violence.

  Italian poster for The Lady from Shanghai.

  On the set, Orson Welles, the magician, always on the prowl for a clever twist, reverses personalized chairs with his wife Rita Hayworth, an act that reflects the role reversals of the film itself—The Lady from Shanghai.

  Although Ballin claims to be mad about his trophy wife, the glamorous Gilda, he seems equally fond of Johnny—who, like Gilda, he picked up out of the gutter. Although his meaningful looks imply that he suspects that they were lovers once, he does not attempt to act upon his suspicions until the final scene. On the contrary, he pushes them together, ordering Johnny to be her caretaker as she continues to see other men while Ballin stays home or at the office with his third “little friend” (a none-too-thinly-veiled reference to masturbation).

  Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles) lost in the many images of his siren Elsa (Rita Hayworth), from The Lady from Shanghai.

  Ballin’s inability or unwillingness to satisfy his wife sexually puts Johnny in the uncomfortable position of masochist to Gilda’s sadist. They are angry toward each other often but clearly still in love. Johnny degrades himself out of some internal need to submit to her or out of devotion to Ballin, maybe both. Gilda takes every opportunity to cuckold and humiliate both of them in different ways, even bragging to one stranger who ogles her: “If I’d have been a ranch, they’d have named me the Bar Nothing.” She tells another amorous stranger what her home phone number is after sharing a dance, but advises him loudly to hang up if a man answers. Regardless, Johnny, who is afraid of what punishment they might suffer from his boss, quietly picks her up from dates with handsome men, watches her strip in front of an audience as she performs a number, and sullenly dances with her during carnival as she dons the garb of a gaucho, her whip placed tellingly at the nape of his neck. (Ballin: “I see you are going to carry a whip. Did you warn Johnny?”)

  In the coda of the movie, it is Johnny who finally caves in after trying to imprison her in her apartment after the supposed death of Ballin. Like a frightened child, he begs Gilda to let him go away with her: “I want to go with you. Please take me.” And she, of course, consents. After all, Hollywood was still looking for a happy ending.

  In 1943, Hayworth had married the wunderkind of Hollywood: the egomaniacal director/writer/actor Orson Welles. In 1947 Welles decided to cast his wife in a new film noir—The Lady from Shanghai—and at the same time unsettle the audience (a trick Welles always relished from War of the Worlds on) by dyeing the Titian goddess’s hair blonde, much to the chagrin of studio head Harry Cohn. But a new dye job did little to alter the lethal power of this femme fatale.

  Welles, in his typically baroque style, enhances the victim dimensions of his protagonist—Michael O’Hara (Welles)—while aggravating the sadistic qualities of his femme fatale Elsa (Hayworth) by surrounding them both with imagery both dreamlike and mythological. After his first meeting with Elsa in Central Park, where he saves her from a gang of muggers, O’Hara almost immediately begins to act like a zombie, unable to stick by any decision and led along on a metaphysical leash by the seductive Elsa. Although he at first rejects her offer to join her on a cruise when he finds out she is married, he cannot even hold to that simple moral resolve. Once he sees her dressed in tight shorts, captain’s hat, and man’s coat (symbolizing her internalization of both male and female characteristics), standing aboard her luxurious yacht (appropriately named Circe, after the sorceress in The Odyssey), he is hooked: “From then on I did not use my head much except to think about her.”

  Elsa (Hayworth), a femme fatale with multiple personalities and dimensions, from The Lady from Shanghai.

  As their voyage progresses through the Panama Canal and then up the Mexican coast to San Francisco, Michael (like the other males on the trip, including her crippled husband) spends a good deal of time staring at Elsa as she bathes on the rocks like a mythical siren or lies out on her lounge, absorbing the feminine power of the moon. In order to please Elsa, Michael even becomes involved in a convoluted scheme with her husband’s law partner and then in a murder trial.

  The climax and resolution of the film reinforce, as if it was needed, Elsa’s supreme power over her puppet Michael. On a nod from Elsa in the courtroom, Michael swallows some pills she gave him and effects an escape when he is carried from the room in a daze. Awaking later in a carnival “crazy house,” Michael wanders through a maze of expressionistically distorted rooms to a hall of mirrors that looks like the mythical entry to the underworld. There Elsa and her husband (Everett Sloane) are multiply reflected, which aggravates Michael’s hallucinatory state further. They shoot it out with Michael as a helpless bystander. Only with her death can he break her psychic and emotional hold on him, although never completely. For as he says in the final scene, maybe if he lives long enough, he will forget her or die trying.

  Rita Hayworth, with the perfect gypsy look, plus she can really sing and dance, publicity still from The Loves of Carmen.

  Carmen (Hayworth) teases and torments the morally correct young soldier Don José (Glenn Ford), from The Loves of Carmen.

  In 1948, Hayworth made a stab at one of the classic femme fatale roles: Carmen. In The Loves of Carmen. Hayworth plays the temptress with a harder edge than her other femme fatale roles. She spits at whomever offends her and gets into a brawl with several other characters who stand in her way. She truly enjoys torturing the scrupulous soldier Don José, who ultimately gives up his honor and rank for her. Even in the final scene, when he breaks down and begs her on his knees to take him back, she replies with disgust at his weakness, “You are like a worm: cut him in half and still he crawls.”

  Hedy Lamarr

  —Ecstasy and the Femme Fatale

  Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, a.k.a. Hedy Lamarr, was born in Austria to Jewish parents. Always rebellious, she left her comfortable home to pursue an acting career. In 1933, she starred in a Czech film called Ecstasy, a movie which would catapult her into worldwide notoriety and eventually into the arms of MGM studios.

  Ecstasy in many ways reflects the personality and destiny of its star (it is no coincidence that she uses her real name Eva in the film). It is the story of a young woman who marries a rich, rigid older man (Hedy married a much older industrialist and Nazi sympathizer that same year and escaped from his clutches—jewelry in hand—a few years later) who is incapable of satisfying the sexual needs of his wife. On their wedding night the husband is shown dawdling about the house, occupying himself with minor chores, while Eva lies on the bed in her nightgown, breathing heavily and longing for the ecstasy denied her.

  Seeing that he will not be able to satisfy her, Eva leaves her husband and returns to her father’s horse ranch. Once there, the filmmakers create a series of montages (influenced heavily by the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein) which last throughout the movie and associate Eva (read: Eve, the first woman) with nature. She is stimulated by the breeding of horses; she swims nude in the river; and her image is repeatedly intercut with pollinated flowers. During one of her nude outings, her horse, responding to the smell and call of a female horse, runs off, Eva’s clothes strapped to his back. She then chases the horse and meets the inevitable young and virile love interest of the film—appropriately named Adam. Offended by his look of lust as she cowers in the nude, Eve takes an immediate dislike to Adam. She beats him with a switch and then slaps his face, but this seems to stimulate Adam even more. As he caresses and bandages her foot, which she has sprained in t
he run, she becomes stimulated by his touch. A telling scene also occurs when Adam hands her a flower with a bee on it, letting her blow on the flower and set the bee free. This is a stark opposition to an earlier scene in which her husband takes great pains to crush a spider underfoot that has innocently been crawling across the open ground at an outdoor gathering.

  Hedy Lamarr in Samson and Delilah.

  The first love scene between Eva and Adam is staged in such graphic detail (for the 1930s, that is) that the film was censored and banned in various countries. The filmmakers concentrate on Eva’s reactions to Adam’s adept lovemaking. When he goes down her body out of frame and begins performing oral sex on her, her head falls back into frame and registers one of the first orgasms ever seen in mainstream cinema.

  Eventually Eva’s husband shows up at her father’s ranch to ask her forgiveness but, as she tells him, it is too late. She dismisses him with a flick of a tendril from a plant hanging nearby. The distraught husband later kills himself in a hotel in which Eva and her lover are staying. Eva then sadly decides to leave her lover and live on her own. In the final scene, we see Adam wistfully watching a ranch worker carrying a child as he fantasizes about Eve breastfeeding a baby as femme fatale becomes Mother Nature.

  Reclining sensually, Delilah (Hedy Lamarr) tempts Samson to give up his secret in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah.

  An angry Eva (Hedy Lamarr) stares down Adam as he gazes lustfully at her nude body, from Ecstasy.

  Delilah (Hedy Lamarr) is intent on gaining power over the womanizing and often unresponsive Samson (Victor Mature), from Samson and Delilah.

  After escaping her husband in 1937, the real Eva was signed to a contract at MGM, and Mayer personally changed her name to Hedy Lamarr. Her early roles exploited her exotic beauty by casting her as a desirable foreigner in distress. Her femme fatale qualities, however, did not surface in American films until Boom Town (1940), where she plays the seductress who temporarily steals Clark Gable away from his loving wife. But it was not until White Cargo in 1942 when she mouthed those immortal words, “I am Tondelayo,” that her full sexual power was unleashed in American films.

  Tondelayo, the half-breed African native (in order to avoid the taboo of miscegenation,the film halfway through reveals she is actually Egyptian), does not even appear until one-third of the movie is over. But she is discussed. At a dinner table at the rubber plantation, the men’s lively conversation comes abruptly to an end when someone mutters her name and the rest repeat it like they are chanting the name of a native goddess. Her power over them becomes clear as the minister defends her as a child of God and the embittered magistrate—Witzel (Walter Pidgeon)—excoriates her as their newest employee—Langford (Richard Carlson)—listens in wonder.

  Covered in silk and bangles, her favorite gifts, the native girl Tondelayo (Hedy Lamarr) becomes a subversive force in the imperialistic ethos of an African rubber plantation, from White Cargo.

  With all this buildup, Lamarr’s first appearance on the scene cannot help but have mythical overtones. She emerges from the jungle like a panther, her skin dark, her beloved bangles jangling, her thin skirt rustling. By the time she tells Langford, “I am Tondelayo,” he is already primed for seduction. White Cargo is in many ways a low-rent Joseph Conrad, a tale of the dangers of imperialism and the lure of the “heart of darkness.” And Tondelayo is at the core of that heart. She pits Langford against her ex-lover Witzel and wins out temporarily. Langford marries her, unable to resist the feel of her manicured (yes, manicured) nails in his back, or seeing her languishing about with a whip in her hand.

  Jenny (Hedy Lamarr) seduces her husband’s son (Louis Hayward), trying to inject him with some of her own strength of will.

  As long as Langford continues to buy the childlike Tondelayo more “bangles and silks,” she is content. But when he becomes more resistant to her demands, she decides to get rid of her husband and move on. She poisons him slowly, and almost succeeds in her objective, until Witzel discovers the potion and murders her by forcing her to drink the concoction.

  The Strange Woman (1946) (like Leave Her to Heaven, based on a novel by Ben Ames Williams) is director Edgar G. Ulmer’s most impressive example of the “deadly female” subset of noir. Jenny Hager in The Strange Woman is a finely drawn characterization replete with intriguing contradictions and complex neuroses (undoubtedly part of this is due to the presence of star Hedy Lamarr as producer on the film). When we first see Jenny, as a child, she is already attempting dominate all those around her, ordering her best friend Meg around and pushing into the water the pusillanimous Ephraim. When her drunken father comes to fetch her, she dawdles by the river, staring at her reflection in the water and stating her very modern post-feminist motto: “Just as soon as I grow up [I’ll] have everything ....”

  Jenny does grow up, as we see in the very next sequence, to be a stunning and intelligent beauty who turns the men around her into love slaves with very little effort. Soon she is married to the richest man in town, Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockhart), while romantically linked to his handsome but weak-willed son Ephraim (Louis Hayward), from whom she demands “love and obedience,” even to the point of murder. Although Ephraim almost bungles the murder of his father in the river, Jenny does obtain what she wants: freedom from control and total power. As a wealthy widow, she takes over her husband’s lumber company, even winning over the men who have qualms about working for a woman, including the stalwart John Evered (George Sanders).

  As mentioned, Ulmer and his writers insist on presenting Jenny as a multidimensional character, who is not just a mass of murder, incest, and manipulation. Early in the film, Ulmer shows Jenny being beaten by her father and her initial pleasure at it (indicating her history of sexual/physical abuse), thereby providing possible motivation for her attempts to control the other men in her life. In addition, she is driven to perform acts of mercy over and over again: pledging money to the church when the men refuse to and then inspiring the other women to do the same; giving the abused Lena a cabin in which to live; visiting the sick; and becoming a leader in the Temperance League (in reaction, one may assume, to her father’s alcoholism). To the town of Bangor she is nothing less than an angel of mercy. Even in her final demise is shown with great sympathy. Thrown from a wagon as she races to what she supposes is the location of a tryst between her lover John and her friend Meg, John runs to her side and declares his love for her, even though she has admitted her complicity in the murder of Poster. As the camera focuses tenderly on her radiant face, she tells him, “I wanted the whole world ... but it was really only you.”

  In 1949, Cecil B. DeMille cast Lamarr as the Biblical seductress Delilah in his epic Samson and Delilah. Delilah begins the story as a feisty Philistine beauty who throws rocks at the macho Israelite Samson (Victor Mature) when he comes to court her sister. Even though the father begs Samson to take Delilah off his hands instead, he refuses. Delilah does not take well to being spurned, and causes a scene at the wedding ceremony.

  Angry with Samson for not submitting, she takes some Philistines’ generous offer to act as a double agent and find out the source of Samson’s strength. She seduces the initially recalcitrant Samson and relates the secret to her employers. They cut off his hair (the source of his strength), blind him, and chain him to a mill. Although Delilah has her revenge, this is a Hollywood movie, still subject to the Production Code rule of retribution for the guilty. So she repents her sins and helps Samson destroy the temple of the Philistines—an ending which totally contradicts the one in the Bible.

  Ava Gardner

  —A Touch of Class

  Unlike debutante Gene Tierney who only played a white-trash vixen in Tobacco Road, Ava Gardner lived that life. Born in Grabtown, North Carolina, in the heart of tobacco country, Gardner spent her life, like the character she played in The Barefoot Contessa (which was based partially on Gardner herself), “half in the dirt and half out.” She lost her thick Carolina accent with the help of M
GM, improved her mind through self-education, and became worldly by associating with the rich and literate. By the time she appeared on the scene as a star in The Killers (1946), she had mitigated her animal sexuality and proclivity for verbal vulgarity with a touch of class.

  After playing small parts in a series of minor films, Gardner landed the role of Kitty Collins opposite Burt Lancaster in the Universal noir classic The Killers. Based very loosely on an Ernest Hemingway story (Gardner would soon become a lifelong pal of Hemingway’s), the film tells the tale of Ole (Lancaster), a down-and-out boxer who we see taking a brutal beating in the ring early in the film—a beating which acts as a metaphor for the psychic and emotional beating he will eventually take at the hands of the femme fatale Kitty.

  Kitty mesmerizes Ole from the moment he meets her at a party where he ditches his fiancée to gaze helplessly at the sultry, smoky-voiced Kitty as she sings a ballad. (Or as his friend characterizes the scene: “Poor Ole. When he had to fall, it had to be for dynamite.”) For this raven-haired siren, he becomes a thief. For her he takes the fall and goes to prison, where he spends his leisure time fondling her green scarf and wondering why she never writes. Even after Kitty has realigned herself with the more successful crime boss Big Jim (Albert Dekker), Ole participates in a risky payroll heist simply on a signal movement from Kitty’s naked foot as she lies curled up on Big Jim’s hotel bed like the animal after which she is named.