Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies

by Ursini, James

  —The Schizophrenic Femme Fatale

  Among the cult sirens of the 1950s and 1960s (those actresses like Chelo Alonso, Belinda Lee, and Allison Hayes who had and still have a significant and avid fan base but little mainstream recognition), English actress Barbara Steele stands as the most important. Her sepulchral, vampiric looks as well as her appearance in over a dozen horror films make her the perfect idol for the always-fanatical followers of the horror genre.

  Steele impressed the international film market with her landmark performance in Mario Bava’s horror classic Black Sunday, a.k.a. Mask of the Demon (1960). In the year 1630, the beautiful witch Asa (Steele) and her lover Javuto (Arturo Dominici) are sentenced to death for sorcery by Asa’s brother. Before being burned at the stake, Asa vows revenge and puts a curse on her brother’s descendants. A metal mask with sharp spikes on the inside is placed over the witch’s face and hammered into her flesh.

  Two hundred years later, Dr. Kruvajan (Andrea Checchi) and his assistant Dr. Gorobec (John Richardson) accidentally discover Asa’s tomb. After observing her death mask through a glass panel, Kruvajan breaks the panel to remove it. Asa’s partially preserved corpse is visible underneath, her face staring out. Kruvajan is attacked by a bat and he cuts his hand on the broken glass. Some of his blood drips onto Asa’s dead face.

  Leaving the crypt, Kruvajan and Gorobec are startled as they encounter the striking figure of a woman with long black hair and a sensual sepulchral face, accompanied by two mastiffs who might be familiars. The audience itself might be alarmed, as she is the twin of the witch/vampire Asa from the prologue, but they soon learn that the woman is indeed human and the dogs her pets. She is Katia (Steele also), the descendant of Asa.

  The witch Asa (Barbara Steele) curses her tormentors in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday.

  The mask of the demon with its nails about to be pounded into the gorgeous face of the sorceress Asa (Barbara Steele) in Black Sunday.

  Concurrently Asa is seen rising from her coffin. It is a particularly powerful scene as it expresses the sexual as well as supernatural energy of the witch as she literally bursts the confines of her coffin, leaving only bits and pieces of its remains scattered across the crypt. Asa, now partially revivified, is intent on draining the blood of the innocent Katia and returning to the world of the living to wreak her revenge on her descendants. She sends her faithful lover/servant Javuto, who is now in a zombie state, to fetch Katia.

  After several setbacks, Javuto performs his duty and Katia is brought to Asa’s lair. Gorobec—by now smitten with the dark, troubled Katia—arrives to rescue her but finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. He cannot tell which beauty is his love. This conflation of reality and illusion, of good and evil, is a theme that runs through many of Steele’s early horror films. Gorobec as he is about to stake the real Katia, under the orders of the alluring Asa, notices her crucifix. He turns to Asa, opens her robe, and sees the decaying flesh of this not-quite-revivified vampire. The villagers arrive and destroy Asa once more.

  The success of Black Sunday was both a boon and a curse to Steele, as she has confessed in many interviews. The actor found herself typecast in a long series of films that reworked her schizophrenic performance in the Bava movie.

  An exception to this stereotyping was Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). The film opens with a stranger, Barnard (John Kerr), arriving at an imposing and ominous-looking edifice, a Spanish castle on the coast. Corman immediately places the viewer in the position of identifying with the stranger who seeks the “truth.” Barnard is on a mission to discover the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his sister Elizabeth (Barbara Steele). At the door, he meets his sister-in-law Catherine (Luana Anders), who takes the suspicious Barnard to the crypts below to see Elizabeth’s tomb and to meet his sister’s widow, the neurotic Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price).

  In order to prove his affection for Barnard’s sister and his innocence, Medina takes Barnard to Elizabeth’s room, which has been preserved as a shrine. “I did it for her.” The camera then reveals her portrait at which both brother and husband stare lovingly until Medina breaks into tears. At this juncture, both the spectator and Barnard are hard-pressed to decide whether this is an elaborate performance on Nicholas’s part or a sincere expression of grief.

  Barnard’s suspicions increase when at the dinner table Dr. Leon (Antony Carbone) puts forth yet another diagnosis of Elizabeth’s fatal malady: because of the “odious atmosphere of this castle ... literally she died of fright.” By way of explanation, Medina takes the group to the torture chamber of his family, grand inquisitors of the Spanish church, or as Medina calls it, “my father’s world.” In flashback, introduced by an archaic iris and tinted an eerie blue, Nicholas explains how Elizabeth became obsessed with his father’s world. A sepulchral-looking Elizabeth inspects the items of the chamber: the rack, the Virgin of Nuremberg, the whips, and the pokers, her long fingers touching each item sensuously and slowly. He explains how the chamber was “infecting her with a fascination.” Suddenly there is a scream on the soundtrack; and the viewer sees Medina, still in the flashback, enter to find Elizabeth locked in the Virgin of Nuremberg. In a close-up, her eyes through the grating are huge with terror.

  We also learn through flashback that Nicholas also suffered a childhood trauma in that dungeon as he saw his unfaithful mother murdered by his father there. This has produced in Nicholas an obsession with the dungeon as well as influenced his choice of a wife; his Elizabeth strongly resembles his mother Isabella. Barnard now begins to understand that Nicholas’s grief is real, as does the spectator. One night during a storm, Nicholas once again hears his wife beckoning to him, calling his name, like a mother looking for her lost child. At this point, the viewer too is lost in the nightmare, unsure whether this voice or the other strange occurrences in the castle are real. The distraught Medina returns to the dungeon.

  What Nicholas finds subconsciously in his descent is a way of reliving that oedipal childhood trauma. From the coffin of Elizabeth rises the bloody figure of his “mother-wife” (he can no longer distinguish between the two) who taunts him, laughing in his face as he collapses to the ground and slips into a coma. Dr. Leon enters and Elizabeth smiles as they embrace, recreating symbolically the sexual union which drove Nicholas’s father to madness. Dr. Leon pronounces Nicholas “gone,” while Elizabeth continues to taunt him further with their plan to drive him mad. “We’ve broken you at last.... Your wife an adulteress....Your mother an adulteress,” she says, caressing him with her bloody hand. At the touch of her hand, Nicholas rises, reborn as his own father. He then kisses his mother-wife Elizabeth as he thrusts her into the Virgin of Nuremberg and locks it, this time guaranteeing the final disposition of his unfaithful wife Elizabeth.

  Even smiling, Barbara Steele looks sinister, in Federico Fellini’s 8?

  Muriel (Barbara Steele), restrained with her lover David (Rik Battaglia), berates her captor, husband Dr. Arrowsmith (Paul Muller), in Lovers of the Outer Tomb.

  In 1963 a true lover of femmes fatales as well as extraordinary actresses, director Federico Fellini, chose Barbara Steele for a part in one of his films—8?, his surreal, autobiographical tale of a director struggling to make a movie while meditating on his complicated relationship with dominant women.

  In 1964 Steele returned to her bipolar roles in Antonio Margheriti’s moody, dreamlike The Long Hair of Death. Steele plays the daughter—Helen—of a condemned witch who is to be burned alive more for her refusal to submit to the corrupt Humboldts—the lords of a fifteenth-century manor—than for any alleged acts of sorcery. In the opening sequence, we see Helen submitting to the sexual advances of the obese and slavering Count Humboldt (Giuliano Raffaelli) in order to save her mother. But, as the Count services her orally, she hears cheers of the crowd below and rises to see her mother burning to death in an execution chamber made of wood. Her mother curses the Humboldts as she dies. Humboldt then murders Helen, as defiant as her
mother, by casting her into a running river below a cliff.

  Over the next decade, a plague spreads throughout the Humboldt land. Both the Count and his son Kurt (George Ardisson) descend into debauchery and petty bickering, impotent to stop the pestilence. Kurt like his father falls for one of the daughters of the witch, Elizabeth (Halina Zalewska). He first tries to force his lust on the daughter but like her sister and her mother before her, she defies him, biting his lip savagely. Kurt then convinces his father to order Elizabeth to marry him and thereby whitewash his lust.

  Into all this melodrama glides the dark, vampiric figure of Mary (Steele also)—the spitting image of the dead Helen. She first appears during a storm, backlit by thunder and lightning. When the old Count sees her, he falls to the ground and dies of a stroke. Mary, not missing a beat, then sets about seducing Kurt. In one scene she takes him to bed while a curious Elizabeth watches, adding another perverse level to their lovemaking. Eventually Mary inspires her lover to plot the death of Elizabeth so they can rule together. Their plan seems to succeed when they drug the wife and bury her alive in a coffin.

  Ultimately, however, the plan backfires as Kurt begins to see evidence of his “dead” wife everywhere. Whether it is his conscience reifying his guilt in the form of hallucinations or whether indeed his wife has survived, we are not sure. The ironic twist of the movie occurs when the filmmakers reveal that Mary is indeed Helen resurrected from the grave. In conjunction with her sister, Elizabeth has constructed this ruse to destroy the Humboldts as their mother wished. After showing Kurt her rotting corpse, the corpse he—in reality—made love to, Mary/Helen forces him outside and into a sacrificial wicker man. She kisses and embraces him one last time and pushes him into the restraints installed in the device. There he is burned alive, and Helen is free to return to the otherworld.

  In 1965 Steele made what is probably the most sadistic horror film of her career: The Lovers of the Outer Tomb, a.k.a. The Faceless Monster. Once again Steele plays two characters. The first is Muriel, the verbally abusive and unfaithful wife of the sadistic scientist Dr. Arrowsmith (Paul Muller). After several scenes in which Muriel belittles her impotent husband, he pretends to leave on a journey. Instead he remains and witnesses his wife making love violently in the dirt with her lusty gardener David (Rik Battaglia). In a rage, Arrowsmith drugs the couple and then takes them to his dungeon where in a series of Inquisition-style tortures turns them into bloodied pulps. This long sequence of torture culminates in his electrocution of the couple as they lie in each other’s arms in their bed of blood.

  In order to secure his wife’s fortune as well as relive the obsession he still carries for the virago Muriel, he marries her twin—the blonde-haired and mentally unstable Jenny (also Steele). Locked in a double bind, the doctor alternates between amorous episodes with Jenny (who is slowly taking on the personality traits of Muriel) and callous attempts to disturb her mental stability by reinforcing her belief that her sister is haunting her.

  In the final sequence we learn that indeed her now-disfigured and spectral sister, along with her lover-slave David, has returned from the grave and is seeking revenge on her executioner. Muriel approaches her husband as beautiful as ever, her long black hair hiding one side of her face. Arrowsmith becomes aroused as she tells him, “You taught me the pleasure of torture.” Revealing her full face and her hideous disfigurement, she pushes him into a restraining device and begins torturing him. Laughing demonically, she then burns him alive, bringing this tale of sadism full circle.

  Anita Ekberg

  —The Nordic Amazon as Femme Fatale

  Named Miss Sweden in 1950, the Nordic Amazon Anita Ekberg was immediately picked up by international modeling agencies. First signed to a movie contract with Howard Hughes, then Universal, Ekberg’s talents lay fallow in roles that exploited her blonde-bombshell looks and little else.

  The first director to tap into the femme fatale persona beneath Ekberg’s glacial exterior was veteran filmmaker King Vidor (Beyond the Forest). For his 1956 international epic War and Peace, he cast Ekberg in the role of Helene—the spoiled and unfaithful wife of the protagonist Pierre (Henry Fonda). But it was German émigré director Gerd Oswald (son of the man who directed the 1930 version of Alraune with femme fatale Brigitte Helm) who in collaboration with fellow immigrant Ekberg developed her lethal qualities over a series of three low-budget movies, beginning with Valerie in 1957.

  Valerie is a Rashomon-style Western that tells the story of immigrant Valerie Horvat (Ekberg) and her marriage to war hero John Garth (Sterling Hayden) from three points of view, each presenting “the truth” or some part of it from a different perspective. In the erudite Reverend Blake’s (Anthony Steel) version, Valerie symbolizes the beauty and grace of the Old World, a goddess trapped in a marriage to a jealous bully who takes his revenge on Valerie for perceived infidelities by murdering her parents and wounding, almost fatally, Valerie herself. In Garth’s version of the story, he is the long-suffering husband of a grasping, oversexed succubus who, when she finds out he is not as wealthy as he first implied, refuses to consummate their marriage. Instead, she takes lovers, including Reverend Blake and Garth’s own brother.

  Anita Ekberg, the attack of the fifty-foot model, from “The Temptation of Dr. Antonio,” a segment from the omnibus film Boccaccio ’70.

  In the final retelling of events, Valerie presents herself as the victim. She is raped by her husband repeatedly, tortured with techniques he learned as an interrogator of prisoners during the Civil War (which includes burning her with lit cigars), and generally terrorized psychologically in order to make her a compliant wife. When she becomes pregnant, he even tries to abort the child. Valerie’s testimony and the shocking revelation of the cigar burns on her white flesh turns the sympathies of the court toward her. As Garth tries to escape with Valerie as his hostage, he is shot down by his own brother.

  In Oswald’s Paris Holiday (1958), the second film of the triad, Ekberg plays the seductive double agent Zara in this Bob Hope/Fernandel romp through Paris. Ekberg utilizes her body as well as her intelligence to confuse the Hope character, but in the end turns out to be his savior.

  Fellini apotheosizes Anita Ekberg in his paean to her in La dolce vita.

  The Mongol Ogatai (Jack Palance) cannot resist the body of his devious lover, Hulina (Anita Ekberg), in The Mongols.

  The final film in the trio, Screaming Mimi (1958), is considered by many critics as a film maudit. Cut heavily before release because of its daring content, the film stands out because of Ekberg’s subtle performance as well as the story’s perverse sexuality. In many ways Screaming Mimi, like Valerie, is a meditation on the ambiguities of the femme fatale as epitomized by Ekberg. The traumatized, murderous, and sexually irresistible Virginia sleepwalks through the movie like the somnambulist Cesar in the German Expressionistic classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. She is a femme fatale without even trying, a semiconscious Gilda. Dr. Greenwood, her psychiatrist, is mesmerized the minute he sees her, peeping in on her at night through the window of her room, even taking her to his house to see her perform one of the two blatantly erotic dances in the movie (the other is the bondage number in the club). Violating his ethics and tossing away his career, he takes on the menial job of her manager when she becomes the exotic dancer “Yolanda.”

  The somnambulist femme fatale (Anita Ekberg) and her Cerberus-like guard dog, from Screaming Mimi.

  The reporter Sweeney is her second “victim,” who becomes emotionally enmeshed when he watches her performing her bondage number at the club and then visits her in her dressing room, dropping his tough guy façade as she displays her legs, almost unconsciously, to him. The final and most perverse obsessive male is Virginia/Yolanda’s stepbrother who kills the man who attacks his sister in the shower and then obsessively works on statues of her nude and screaming (the “Screaming Mimi” statues), hinting at his quasi-incestuous desire for her. All three men circle in one way or another this semi-catatonic fem
me, trying alternately to save her and control her. But like the chains she breaks during her performance onstage, Virginia/Yolanda is a free spirit. She leaves Greenwood dead on the sidewalk, her stepbrother in despair as he destroys one of his Screaming Mimi statues, and Sweeney distraught as he watches his lover being transported back to the mental hospital.

  From Screaming Mimi, the hard-bitten reporter Sweeney (Philip Carey) finds his macho façade no match for Yolanda’s (Anita Ekberg) legs, also pictured Gypsy Rose Lee as Gypsy Masters, the club manager.

  Italian director Federico Fellini is the man most responsible for turning Ekberg into an international icon through the medium of his two films with her: La dolce vita (1960) and Boccaccio ’70 (1962). In the first film, the aimless reporter Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) covers the arrival of star Sylvia (Ekberg). As soon as this voluptuous vision disembarks from the plane, Marcello is enraptured. He follows her around from appearance to appearance. During the climax of their brief relationship,a little tipsy, Sylvia wanders out barefoot into the Roman night. Marcello, again the observer, watches in wonder as she howls back at the dogs and enters the Trevi Fountain to dance. He joins her in this orgasmic water show, hoping to gain her favor. But Marcello loses his erotic vision as she leaves him for another man.

  Virginia/Yolanda (Anita Ekberg) at the moment of the traumatic attack by a deranged admirer (Sol Gorss), from Screaming Mimi.

  In “The Temptation of Dr. Antonio” (a segment in the omnibus film Boccaccio ’70), Fellini reworks Attack of the 50 FootWoman to tell the story of a puritanical unofficial censor, Dr. Antonio (Peppino De Filippo), who becomes outraged at a billboard advertising milk which features a lascivious-looking model (Ekberg) lying on a couch with a glass of milk nestled near her gigantic breasts. As Dr. Antonio begins his campaign to have it torn down, the model comes to life in full billboard size, taunting and tempting him, offering him “a pleasure as great as death.”