Yvette (Bardot) lies to her benefactor while indulging in her need for rough trade, Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi), from Love Is My Profession.
The final scene of the movie And God Created Woman, Juliete lets loose with a primitively sensual dance.
For help she turns to the amoral and wealthy lawyer, Gobillot (Gabin). Initially Gobillot refuses to help the impoverished thief/prostitute, until she raises her skirt and reveals her long legs. Her sexual availability coupled with her emotional neediness brings out the knight errant in the lawyer. He wins her case and sets her up in a series of apartments.
As much as Yvette shows genuine affection for her “protector” (at one point she tries to sell drugs in order to pay Gobillot back), she warns him as Juliete did her husband-to-be in And God Created Woman that she cannot be restricted: “I wasn’t made to live with one man.... I’m a girl who must be allowed to do as she pleases.” He agrees and she continues to see younger lovers, particularly an obsessive medical student—Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Although his paternal/sexual relationship with this volatile gamine gives him great pleasure (as opposed to his distant relationship with his wife), Yvette ultimately becomes a disruptive force in his bourgeois life. He is threatened with disbarment for perjuring a witness in order to save Yvette. He is stalked by Mazzetti after Yvette becomes pregnant, and he moves her to an apartment unknown to the student. Even his wife begins to demonstrate her distaste for his relationship more openly. Nevertheless, he is willing to risk it all for this mad love.
But as Yvette predicted, she cannot be with one man. So she finds Mazzetti and has sex with him in his hotel room. When she refuses to stay, he murders her. The authorities inform Gobillot of the crime and he visits Yvette one last time. As the police remove the sheet from her nude body, he sees her covered with blood. The camera lingers on his reaction shot. Although there is no visible response, Gabin manages to convey the weight of his grief and sadness through his bent posture and sagging face. Neither he nor Mazzetti could control this wild child; and so instead, she was destroyed.
In 1973, Bardot retired from films. But before that, she made one last memorable appearance, this time directed by her most perceptive collaborator—Vadim. Don Juan (or If Don Juan Were a Woman) is based loosely on Bardot’s philosophy as well as her many affairs. She plays Jean, a feminist in a futuristic society, who has taken on the traditional male role of Don Juan. She tells a handsome priest of her sins of seduction and revenge in order to demonstrate to him that, as Bardot had said in many interviews, “Men are the real beasts, not animals.” In no other film is the philosophical basis for Bardot’s disdain and aggressiveness toward men in her movies more blatant, a disdain that many critics who called her a “sex kitten” never understood. For, as Simone de Beauvoir says in her book Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, the lady was at her core “intimidating.”
Bardot retired from films to devote herself to animals. She has raised millions of dollars over the years through various charitable organizations.
Belinda Lee
—The Historical/ Mythological Femme Fatale
British actress Belinda Lee began her career at Rank Studios playing one-dimensional blonde bombshells in the tradition of that 1950s popular stereotype. She was even promoted as the chief rival to starlet Diana Dors, another blonde sex kitten. Lee languished in those stifling roles until 1956 when she left the provincialism of England for the more exciting and liberal atmosphere of the Continent.
Lee’s voluptuous body, sculpted face, and arched eyebrows led European producers to cast her in a series of films in which she portrayed larger-than-life femme fatale figures from both myth and history. The first movie was Goddess of Love, a.k.a. La Venere di Cheronea, in which she played the model for the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles’s renowned statue of the goddess Aphrodite. Whether on display seminude or in a short chiton, Lee becomes the object of several men’s obsessions, including the Macedonian soldier (Jacques Sernas) who Praxiteles (Massimo Girotti) is hiding from the Greek authorities. Her imperious attitude and sensual beauty led many of the men in the film to conflate her with the real goddess of love and thereby inspire plot complications.
Belinda Lee, a photo from her early British period.
Henet (Belinda Lee) revels in a massage from her new slave, Joseph (Geoffrey Horne) in Joseph and His Brethren.
In 1959, Lee was cast as the Italian Renaissance princess Lucretia Borgia in The Nights of Lucretia Borgia. Once again, as we have seen so often in this study, a powerful woman from history (who in achieving that power was no more ruthless and often less so than her male counterparts) is defamed and transformed into an evil succubus, using sex and violence to achieve her ends. In this case, Lucretia—besides plotting with her corrupt brother Cesare (Franco Fabrizi) for political power—also lusts after a young, handsome swordsman (Jacques Sernas). Her campaign to steal the young man from his innocent love (Michele Mercier) knows no limits.
With the German film She Walks by Night, a.k.a. Die Wahrheit über Rosemarie, (1959), Lee decided to move back into the contemporary setting. The film, based on a true story, follows the exploits of a young prostitute on the rise. Shot on the streets, the film reflects the influence of Italian neo-realism while exploiting Lee’s body for its iconic value. Rosemarie, as portrayed by Lee, is no ordinary streetwalker. She seems in many ways closer to a dominatrix, which would be natural considering the types of roles Lee was playing in the continental half of her career. Rosemarie treats her clients with great disdain and sarcasm. The impotent foreigner who saves her from a police raid at the beginning of the movie and sets her up in a comfortable apartment is dismissed as another man trying to control her in a speech she delivers while framed by the symbolic bars of her bed’s headboard. Refusing to remain faithful to him as he asked, she leaves his care and strikes out again on her own.
Messalina (Belinda Lee) seduces her assassin in Messalina.
Rosemarie takes great pleasure in the hunt for new clients and in their ultimate submission to her, a submission which often leads to obsession and then anger on their part. To a pimp who stalks her, she threatens to blind with a bottle of acid. To a reluctant store clerk who resists her advances, she appears nude under an expensive fur he has brought for her to try on. She is a woman sure of the power of her body, that raising her skirt above her knees can bring her the money and gifts she desires as well as the sense of dominance she needs over these many men in her life.
The next year, 1960, Lee returned to the world of sword and sandal films—by now a successful genre worldwide. The next femme fatale film she starred in was the Biblical epic Joseph and His Brethren. Lee portrays Henet, the frustrated wife of the mad and effeminate merchant Potiphar (Robert Morley). Potiphar loves his wife with his “heart,” as he says, but he cannot love her physically. She retaliates by accusing him of keeping her as a trophy wife, valuable for her great beauty. When Potiphar brings the slave Joseph (Geoffrey Horne) into the equation, inevitably the love-starved Henet becomes attracted to this multitalented Hebrew. He massages her body with a method he devised; he ferments wine of the highest quality; and he advises Potiphar, now seemingly as enamored with Joseph as his wife.
Henet makes several attempts at seduction, but is rejected by the moralistic Joseph. In a rage she accuses him of rape, and Potiphar has him cast into prison. When she finally admits to Potiphar that Joseph never attacked her and that she loves the Hebrew rather than her mentally unstable husband, he strikes her, killing her accidentally. Potiphar, still in love with Henet, takes up her body and immolates himself and his beloved.
The high point of Lee’s short career (she died in car accident in 1961) was the epic Messalina (1960). Messalina was a part Lee had been groomed to play over the prior four years. Based very loosely on the reign of the Roman empress Messalina, the woman behind the throne of the weak and elderly Claudius, the film predictably emphasized the sensationalist and negative aspects of the empress in order to paint th
e portrait of a monstrous villain.
We first see Messalina in the garden of the Vestal virgins. She is dressed in white from head to toe in order to emphasize her supposed vocation as a virginal priestess. But this “virgin” has no interest in confining herself behind walls. Instead she plots with Gaius Lilius (Arturo Dominici), an older Roman patrician who expressed his devotion to her by acting as the emissary who proposes a marriage between the emperor (Mino Doro) and the beautiful and haughty Messalina. Rebuffing Lilius’s advances in the garden and sending him on his way to perform his task, Messalina finds sexual satisfaction in the arms of the virile soldier Lucio (Spiros Focás), who has climbed the walls of the Vestal sanctuary repeatedly just to get a glimpse of his red-haired temptress.
Once Messalina gains power through Claudius, she proceeds with her agenda of land redistribution and pacification of the plebeians by means of “bread and circuses.” At the same time she maintains a retinue of lovers, including the devoted Lucio, who is now a member of her guard. She demands complete devotion and submission from all around her, including the man who brokered the marriage deal. When Lilius tries to exercise his manhood and demand that he be her “emperor” in spirit, she has him exiled from the court.
Although there are plots against Messalina, she survives them as did the real Messalina—again utilizing her keen intelligence and political savvy. The filmmakers of course emphasize the sexual side of her power over the political, dwelling on sensual nude scenes in which she taunts men as she bathes in milk or dresses behind a semitransparent screen. In one particularly effective sequence, she seduces a young assassin sent to murder her and then decapitates him in the morning like a female praying mantis.
Isabel Sarli
—A Woman on Fire
Although Argentine actress Isabel Sarli is relatively unknown in the United States except among Latino audiences, she was for almost two decades the Argentine femme fatale of soft-core erotic films. A former Miss Argentina, Sarli began her career as an actress at the age of twenty, when she was cast by producer/writer/director/actor Armando Bo in his film Thunder Among the Leaves (1956). This was the beginning of a professional and romantic partnership that lasted until Bo’s death in 1981 and Sarli’s subsequent retirement.
In many ways Sarli’s films are precursors of the quirky films of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her, Matador, et cetera), who has expressed his admiration for Sarli. Although they lack Almodóvar’s sense of irony and humor, they too explore women in the pressure cooker of overheated sex and perversion. For example, in La mujer de mi padre (1968), Bo (who very often in these films played the older, cuckolded lover/husband) portrays a rancher who falls for a gangster’s moll (Sarli). She returns his passion, but when he becomes sexually overwhelmed by her desires, she turns to his young son (Victor Bo, Sarli’s own stepson in real life).
However, Fuego (1969) and Fiebre (1970) are the two films many Sarli aficionados consider most typical as well as most polished. The plots for most of Sarli’s films are repetitive, even ritualistic in narrative and style. In Fuego, Sarli plays Laura, a rich and independent woman who has no desire to be tied down by any man but has, as she herself says, “a sexual fire inside” that she must quench but rarely can satisfactorily. We first see her from a distance, bathing nude in a lake as the camera lingers worshipfully on Sarli’s voluptuous body. She is the object of the awestruck gaze of both a man and a woman.
In fact, most of Sarli’s films feature long sequences like this, with men, or in this case a woman, inevitably falling on their knees before Sarli and kissing her body as she writhes in pleasure. She is also frequently linked with elements of nature as she is shown making love near lakes, in snow and forests, even near fires, as if her sexuality is a force of nature in itself. In this way, Bo reinforces over and over again the iconic power of the erotic superstar while bringing the films back to their main subject, the disturbing sexual power of the femme fatale.
Sarli in a publicity pose for Fuego.
In a pose typical of many Sarli films, which played out like familiar rituals, Sarli, a Latin Venus in furs, seduces a bewildered stranger.
In Fiebre, Sarli and Bo push the envelope further by mixing bestiality with insatiable female sexuality. In this film Sarli’s character falls for a tormented loner who offers both love and incredible sex, while her aging husband can only supply money. Unfortunately, the husband commits suicide and the lover dies, possible due to his strenuous efforts to service her. In a wildly surreal turn of the plot, Sarli’s character begins to fixate on horses, believing that one particular stallion is somehow connected to the spirit of her dead lover. The numerous scenes of Sarli caressing her body in a masturbatory way, while she watches her horse copulating with various mares, are shocking even today and fairly graphic as well. Sarli’s character eventually sheds this obsession and settles down with a man, although the audience members of the period who were familiar with their diva knew that this was not the end of their beloved femme fatale’s adventures.
The Argentine diva of erotic films, Isabel Sarli.
Allison Hayes as the sorceress Tonda, performing one of her sensual dances from The Disembodied.
Allison Hayes
—The 1950s Exploitation Film and the Femme Fatale
The one area in which American femmes fatales were allowed to survive, at least on a small scale, was the low-budget exploitation film, or what critic Manny Farber called lovingly, “termite art.” Because these films flew under the commercial radar, often having limited releases in places like drive-ins, they did not for the most part draw the fire of the guardians of morality.
The most important of the exploitation stars of the 1950s is Allison Hayes. Her notoriety reached cult status based on one film in particular: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958). But long before that, Hayes was playing femmes fatales in a series of low-budget films, some of them for major studios like Universal and Columbia. In Sign of the Pagan (1952), she portrayed the seductive slave girl Ildico who turns her sexual allure into a murderous vengeful spirit as she assassinates the Attila the Hun (Jack Palance), a feat many males before her had tried. In Chicago Syndicate (1955), Hayes is cast as Joyce Kern, a.k.a. Sue Morton, another woman with vendetta in mind. She is the daughter of a slain bookkeeper who worked for mobster Arnie Valent (Paul Stewart). She instigates Valent’s passions for her as well as those of the undercover agent, Barry Amsterdam (Dennis O’Keefe), in order to effect the destruction of the crime boss.
Two of Hayes’s best femme fatale films were made for low-budget master Roger Corman. The first was Gunslinger, a feminist Western in which Corman purposely reverses gender roles. The hero is a female sheriff—Rose (Beverly Garland)—and her nemesis is the saloon proprietor—Erica (Hayes). Although Erica dresses more seductively than Rose (who takes on the clothes of a male), she remains as strong a character and Rose’s equal in determination and cunning. Erica is an acute businesswoman, buying up all the land in town in order to sell it to the railroad, whose tracks are slated to cross through the town of Oracle. In addition, she dominates the men around her like Rose does, particularly the servile Jake (Jonathan Hayes), whom she demeaningly calls “little man.” Erica is in total control of her destiny. Sexually both these females are aggressive as well. When Erica hires Cane (John Ireland) to kill Rose, she has no qualms about mixing business with pleasure as she leads the hesitant gunfighter up the stairs to her bedroom.
In Corman’s The Undead (1957), Hayes plays the medieval sorceress Livia. Livia is the evil witch of this horror fairytale, told as a flashback from the point of view of a troubled prostitute, Diana (Pamela Duncan). Livia uses her spells, her sexual power, and even a stray act of brutality (she decapitates the gravedigger in an early scene) to ensnare her victims and achieve her goals. In numerous scenes, Corman poses Livia provocatively on tree limbs, reclining erotically on beds, or lounging sensually in chairs in order to convey her primal appeal. It is Livia, in fact, who motivates the plot by accus
ing Helene—the past incarnation of the prostitute Diana—of witchcraft in order to gain the sexual favors of Pendragon (Richard Garland), Helene’s betrothed. Pendragon finally dispatches Livia with a knife to her ribs, causing her to turn into her familiar, a black cat.
In The Disembodied (1957), Hayes showcases her erotic dancing skills as the voodoo priestess Tonda who finds herself married to an impotent, aging doctor who supplies her little relief either sexually or emotionally. Rather than killing her husband outright, the frustrated Tonda performs various rituals that include dances in revealing leopard-skin outfits with the ultimate aim of slowly torturing her husband to death. Into this domestic nightmare marches virile Tom Maxwell (Paul Burke), who becomes the new object of Tonda’s considerable sexual desire. Tonda is eventually undone by one of her own, a jealous native girl who stabs the voodoo queen to death.
In 1957, Hayes made yet another voodoo film, this time called The Zombies of Mora Tau. In it she is the vulgar gangster’s wife Mona who spends the first part of the film taunting the men on this jungle treasure hunting expedition with her biting sarcasms and ample displays of her body. In one scene indicative of the arrogance inherent in most of Hayes’s femme fatale performances, she lies in a bathing suit, sunning herself on the deck of the ship while the distracted crew tries to suit up the divers who are attempting a dangerous mission to retrieve a stash of diamonds. In another sequence, after her husband promises to cover her body in diamonds, she dangles her foot in the men’s faces and says provocatively, “Now what would I do with diamonds on my toes?” Even when she is kidnapped by the zombies, a point at which the audience might think that this predatory female is about to receive her comeuppance, she turns into the queen of the zombies,leading them in an attack against her former comrades.
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