There Rosa makes another attempt to fit in, becoming pregnant and passive like the rest of the women in the town. However, this ends as soon as Latimer bursts in on a birthday party to announce to her he wants to take her away. In order to join him she must first silence the woodsman Moose, who has discovered the affair. She shoots him while they are hunting and is exonerated during an inquest. She then aborts her child by jumping off a cliff. The fever that results from the abortion, however, leaves her enfeebled and bedridden. Refusing to be restricted even by a deathly illness, she gets dressed and heads for the train tracks, the symbol to her of freedom and the big city. As the train passes by, she falls to the ground and dies as her faithful husband arrives.
Barbara Stanwyck
—Longevity and the Femme Fatale
Barbara Stanwyck’s career as a femme fatale stretches over three decades, longer than any other actress. Like Bette Davis, she was able to transcend the often-restricting archetype of the femme fatale and establish herself as an A-list actress, nominated four times for an Oscar and a recipient of numerous other acting awards. In all of her performances, Stanwyck projected a cool toughness coupled with an ability to switch gears and explode emotionally, giving her performances a truly modern feel.
Stanwyck’s first significant femme fatale role was in Darryl Zanuck’s controversial pre-Code Baby Face (1933). Playing in the film a tough working-class character named Lily, with a background not unlike her own (Stanwyck grew up as an orphan who was shuttled from one home to another), Baby Face, like many of Warner Bros. Depression era films (e.g., The Public Enemy, Little Caesar), takes a journalistic approach to this ironic, feminist twist on the Horatio Alger myth. The filmmakers set the theme early in the film, as a self-taught immigrant, Cragg (Alphonse Ethier), preaches to Lily about the philosopher Nietzsche and how she should use her own still latent power to succeed rather than wallow in poverty and misery as a barmaid in her pimp/father’s speakeasy. After a few fortuitous fires which destroy her scurrilous father (Robert Barrat) as well as her home, she moves on, accompanied by her African-American friend and coworker Chico (Theresa Harris)—a rare example of Black and White friendship in early Hollywood films, and finds herself in the “big city,” ready to put her new Nietzschean philosophy into practice.
Standing outside a phallic high rise, housing the headquarters of a multinational bank, Lily decides to conquer this symbol of American patriarchal capitalism by means of her intelligence and sexual appeal. Working her way up the corporate ladder in one of the few ways open to young women in this period of time, she shatters the glass ceiling, leaving in her wake two deaths and an attempted suicide. With remarkable detachment, the filmmakers manage to document her acts of sexual terrorism and even allow her (at least in the original uncensored version of the film, now available on DVD) a quasi-happy ending where she finds love with the new director of the bank (George Brent). Riding with him in an ambulance (he too attempted suicide after an indictment—the men in this film are portrayed as singularly weak), still decked out in furs, she reassures her lover about the future—one which might or might not include pawning all the gifts her gave her.
Stanwyck as the manipulative Martha Ivers, from The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.
Potsie (Gary Cooper) beginning to lose his academic detachment to the fiery Sugarpuss (Stanwyck), in Ball of Fire.
In 1941, Stanwyck made two comic femme fatale classics: Ball of Fire and The Lady Eve. Written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett and directed by Howard Hawks, Ball of Fire is a screwball comic gem. In a cynical but ultimately sweet take on the fairytale “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the filmmakers turn the pure Snow White into a red hot stripper named Sugarpuss O’Shea—a gangster’s moll who hides out from the authorities with a group of cuddly, absentminded professors who are working on an encyclopedia of knowledge.
The youngest of the academics, Professor Potts (“Potsie,” to the sassy Sugarpuss), played affectingly by Gary Cooper, becomes the object of Sugarpuss’s tease-and-denial tactics as she flaunts her dancer legs (Stanwyck worked briefly as a Ziegfeld girl) while an awkward and innocent Potts tries to maintain his professional distance as he collects examples of American slang supplied by the worldly Sugarpuss. Sugarpuss is the archetypal transgressive force in this ivory tower of academia, unsettling its denizens and ultimately leading even the grumpiest to the realms of pleasure.
Lobby card for Baby Face as Lily (Barbara Stanwyck) puts her Nietzschean will to power to work.
A cool Phyllis in dark glasses surreptitiously meets an increasingly conflicted Neff at Jerry’s Market on Vermont Avenue.
The Lady Eve can be considered the most classical of director/writer Preston Sturges’s impressive string of 1940s comedies (Sullivan’s Travels, Hail the Conquering Hero, et cetera) in that it successfully combines allegory and humor with an Aristophanes-like blending. By means of the opening titles, which depict a grinning snake slithering vulgarly through every opening at hand and around several strategically placed apples, the audience is cleverly prepared for the humorously allegorical elements that follow. As the titles end, Sturges takes us into the deepest Amazon à la the Paramount back lot to witness the emergence of a naive and wealthy explorer named Charles Pike (Henry Fonda). Here is the perfect Biblical Adam in the ideal Garden of Eden. After a tearful farewell to his cohorts, he boards a small craft and sails for civilization.
Adam’s first encounter with his eventual nemesis is on a luxury liner bound for the States. As Charles boards the mammoth liner, a beauteous Eve (Stanwyck), looking down from one of the upper tiers, playfully drops an apple on his head. His next significant encounter with his Eve (here named Jean) is as she trips him with a winsome ankle. From this point forward, the gold-digging Eve bewilders and bedazzles her victim with a twisting of his hair or a revelation of flesh. Pike ultimately rejects her after he discovers she is a card shark. But Jean is not finished with her victim.
Reincarnating herself as an English lady named Eve, she once again sets out to capture this weakling called “man.” She not only convinces him she is a different person (yes, males around femmes fatales are pathetically dim), but marries him, tormenting him on their wedding train ride with a recitation of her long list of past lovers. Pike runs away at the next stop and books passage on a liner. There he meets Jean again (she trips him, of course). He falls into her arms, ecstatically. By this time the frazzled Pike is totally clueless about Jean’s identities, but he also knows he no longer cares. Jean: “You still don’t understand.” Pike: “I don’t want to understand.... All I know is I adore you.”
Many critics consider Stanwyck’s performance as the duplicitous Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity as the apotheosis of the noir femme fatale. Based on the seamy novella by James M. Cain and co-written by hardboiled legend Raymond Chandler, the film is narrated in noir style by the dying insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), who falls for a vision of sex, love, and wealth in the form of the blonde-haired siren Phyllis. When Phyllis first appears on the second-floor landing of her Spanish-style mansion, wrapped in only a towel, Neff is awestruck. When she comes down later to indulge in a bit of classic double entendre, Neff cannot keep his eyes of her dangling foot and its “honey of an anklet,” symbolizing not only her sexual power over him but also the wealth for which he so yearns. When, in a second visit, she subtly proposes an insurance scam in which they can collect on a double indemnity policy on her older, neglectful husband, Neff is caught in the web of this remarkable noir spider woman.
Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) and Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), murderers and lovers both, live an existence overshadowed by fear and suspicion, in Double Indemnity.
In 1946 and 1950 respectively, Stanwyck created her two most manic femmes fatales: Martha Ivers and Thelma Jordon. In The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Martha inherits a factory as well as a considerable fortune after murdering her aunt with the knowledge of her future husband Walter (Kirk
Douglas). She and her weak-willed spouse (he eventually becomes district attorney) become leading figures in the small Midwestern town in which the film is set. All goes well until a figure from the past, Sam Masterson (Van Heflin), with whom Martha has fallen in love, returns to his home and begins to ask questions about the original murder. Martha seduces him and even tries to convince him to murder her alcoholic husband. He refuses and leaves the couple and the town in disgust.
In The File on Thelma Cordon, Stanwyck incarnates the mentally unstable title character who charms the assistant district attorney Cleve (Wendell Corey) into defending her in a murder case involving her aunt. Although he is the prosecutor in the case, he plans her defense; and, of course, the defense wins. However, he soon learns that Martha was involved in the murder as was her lover, gangster Tony Laredo (Richard Rober). Although attached to Cleve, Jordon decides to flee with the sexually charged Tony. While on the road, she has a change of heart. She takes the car cigarette lighter and presses it into Tony’s face, forcing the car off the road and causing the death of both passengers.
At the age of fifty, while the femme fatale had almost disappeared from the American cinema, Stanwyck made one last foray into that by then taboo territory. Gerd Oswald’s Crime of Passion (1957) is a mordant critique of the Eisenhower 1950s, particularly the suburban lifestyle valorized by government, industry, and media. Kathy Ferguson (Stanwyck), a successful San Francisco journalist, falls passionately in lust with a malleable cop: Los Angeles police detective Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden). Against her better judgment, she tries to assimilate into the suburban ethos of the San Fernando Valley where Doyle makes his home. But after a brief period of sexual bliss, implied by her pose at the bedroom door of their home and by Kathy’s comment that she will not need any clothes for awhile, Kathy finds herself suffocated by the mundane details of her new life. In a memorable party scene, Kathy moves back and forth between the clearly demarcated worlds of men playing poker in the kitchen and women gossiping in the living room until a montages of diffused close-ups and overlapping inane dialogue externalizes her frustration as she runs from the room to the refuge of her bedroom.
In order to counteract this deepening sense of alienation, Kathy begins an affair with another outsider, the erudite police inspector Tony Pope (Raymond Burr), another unique individual who has repressed his more creative interests (symbolized by a file which he keeps on crimes of passion) in favor of the comfortable suburban life. As their relationship develops, Kathy decides to use her influence over Pope to advance the career of her easygoing husband. Eventually the illicit relationship begins to implode due to the illness of Pope’s wife. As a result, the inspector reneges on his promise to name Doyle as his replacement when he retires. Like any self-respecting noir femme fatale, Kathy first tries seduction; and when that fails, she turns to violence. She shoots Pope, hoping that his death will lead to her husband’s promotion. It does not, and she is arrested by her own husband.
The expressions say it all in Preston Sturges’s screwball classic, The Lady Eve.
Chapter Three The Femme Fatale Is Silenced in the U.S.: The Rise of the International Femme Fatale
THE FEMME FATALE WENT INTO REMISSION by the early 1950s. Several factors, which we have already alluded to, led to her virtual disappearance on the scene of the American cinema. The anti-Communist witch hunts and the resulting blacklists decimated the talent in Hollywood, obviously affecting those artists with more critical points of view. In addition, the government under President Eisenhower, in conjunction with an industry (Hollywood included) intent on making a successful transition from wartime boom to peacetime boom, promoted a vision of American which centered on the nuclear family housed safely in suburban housing with a highly paid husband and a stay-at-home mom intent on purchasing the numerous new products produced by peacetime factories. So sex objects like Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield replaced strong, dominant noir females, while the rest of the female population were portrayed on television and in film as virginal prizes destined for the role of happy homemaker—no matter how they might initially resist à la Doris Day.
The dangerous teenage bride Juliete (Bardot), from And God Created Woman.
Into this breach came an array of international stars who filled the need for strong female characters.
Brigitte Bardot
—The French Lolita
“In her role of confused female, of homeless little slut, B. B. seems to be available to everyone. And yet, paradoxically, she is intimidating.”—SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Brigitte Bardot burst upon the international scene not long after the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s scandalous tale of pedophilia: Lolita. Like Nabokov’s Lolita, Bardot, in real life as well as on the screen, was a child-woman who drove men to distraction, or as one of the characters in her first international success—And God Created Woman (1956)—put it, “She was born to destroy men.” Bardot’s fabled penchant for nudity, world-class pout, mane of tousled golden hair, petulant and demanding attitude, and voracious passion left world audiences breathless, particularly those in the U.S. who by 1957 were starved for true femmes fatales of her stature.
And God Created Woman is then-husband Roger Vadim’s paean to his young wife. Based—according to Vadim himself—on Bardot’s own personality, the character of Juliete established the image of B.B. as well as set the pattern for many of Bardot’s vehicles to follow. The film opens with what would become Bardot’s trademark: a nude scene in which she lies on her stomach with her golden rear and svelte legs upright. Carradine (Curd Jurgens), a rich middle-aged admirer, enters the shot and makes a reference to the troublesome Eve of Biblical fame and her apple. The teenager Juliete responds flirtatiously, obviously proud of her body and the effect it has on men.
Juliete is a devastatingly desirable orphan who defies her foster parents by flaunting her body about the town of Saint-Tropez. Men become fools as she walks by, her hips swinging to some internal rhythm. No one is immune; even her elderly foster parent watches surreptitiously from his wheelchair as do the two brothers of the story: the awkward Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and the macho Antoine (Christian Marquand). She is a free spirit who walks barefooted through the dirt, plays affectionately with her beloved animals, and fires shots with a gun at her beaus. She is, in short, the uncontrollable female force.
Wealthy businessman Carradine (Curd Jurgens) cannot resist this appealing Lolita (Bardot), no matter the chase she leads him on, from And God Created Woman.
After a brief and unhappy affair with the womanizer Antoine, Juliete decides to accept the offer of marriage tendered by his shy brother Michel, even though she warns him that she will bring him “misery.” For Juliete’s wild nature cannot be tamed but momentarily. Although she does however make an effort to bring happiness to her new husband, largely through constant sex, Juliete strays once again, having sex with Antoine once more and flirting with Carradine—who faithfully waits for her to join him on his yacht.
Juliete (Bardot) has warned the reserved Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant) about her wild nature, but he does not listen, from And God Created Woman.
In the final scene of the movie, which would be repeated in various forms in other Bardot vehicles, Juliete leaves her husband to get drunk at a local bar. While there she dances uninhibitedly, jumping up on the bar with her skirt unbuttoned to the waist, before the patrons and band. Michel, driven to distraction like so many of Bardot’s fans, enters with a gun. He threatens her, but her protector Carradine takes the bullet for her. Michel then slaps Juliete, more out of despair than anger. Impressed with her husband’s demonstration of mad passion, Juliete, as the film fades out, returns home with him, at least for now.
In 1958, Bardot followed in the footsteps of femme fatale icon Dietrich in essaying the role of the deadly female lead from Pierre Louys’s La femmes et le pantin. Eva Marchand (again the allusion to that difficult Eve) is the daughter of a Frenchman living in Seville. A married rancher, Don Matteo (Ant
onio Vilar), falls for her as soon as he spots her walking through the heat-drenched town in her tight skirt and dancing slippers. Like the trained dancer Bardot was, she moves as if choreographed, sensually and without pretense.
Brigitte Bardot becomes an icon of feminist power in her 1973 film Don Juan.
Eva resists Don Matteo’s aggressive pursuit of her, returning his gifts, even ripping up a sizable check he writes her. For like most of Bardot’s characters, she will only accept love and sex on her terms. In addition, like the child-woman she often portrays, she enjoys the push and pull of the sexual dance. When she does finally agree to stay at Don Matteo’s hacienda, with her father as a chaperone of course, she taunts him further by luring him into bed and then knocking over a lamp, awakening her father. Don Matteo then flees with a serious case of coitus interruptus.
In order to prove his devotion to her, which is what she desires, Matteo becomes her attendant on a dance tour. At one point she even dances nude in a private show for tourists, knowing that he will be there. He of course becomes violent, slapping her before he himself is beaten and cast out into the dirt. Only when Don Matteo has suffered indignity after indignity does Eva relent and allow him into her bed. Although much as in the ending for And God Created Woman, the audience is never sure that this privilege will be a lasting one.
Love Is My Profession, a.k.a. En cas de malheur (1958) (co-written by noted screenwriter Jean Aurenche, as was La femme), paired Bardot with French cinema legend Jean Gabin. Bardot plays Yvette, a gamine who botches a jewelry-store robbery that results in the death of the one of the owners.
Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies Page 10
