Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies

by Ursini, James

  As the model wanders barefoot through the city, the doctor become engulfed by her sensual magic, the smell of her body, the rustling of her silk dress, the comfort of her huge breasts—again all redolent of the primal mother. Unable to resist her Dionysian allure, Dr. Antonio asks her to stay with him. She laughs at him, explaining she cannot be with any one man. She is a force beyond containment. The next morning the doctor is found delirious, clutching at the billboard he had earlier defamed and desecrated.

  In 1961 Ekberg plied her femme fatale skills for the adventure/historical film The Mongols with Jack Palance as Genghis Khan’s son, Ogatai. Ekberg essays the role of the slave girl Hulina who becomes Ogatai’s lover and, a la Lady Macbeth, his instigator, spurring him on by force of sex and argument to resist his father’s desire for peace with the Polish peoples.

  Maria Félix, La Doña.

  Maria Félix

  —La Doña

  The statuesque Maria Félix has been idolized in the Spanish-speaking world since her debut in Mexican movies in 1943. Called by her fans La Doña (The Lady), she epitomizes the Latin femme fatale in a series of films stretching from 1944 to 1971, the year of her retirement.

  Although restricted in the 1940s and 1950s by the heavy influence of the Catholic Church on Mexican popular culture in general, Mexican movies did try in a much more hesitant and restrained way than American or European films of the same periods to broach taboo subjects such as sex and violence. Within this self-imposed censorship by Mexican producers, María Félix specialized in “fatal women” who led multiple men on a rollercoaster ride of torment and ecstasy, often resulting in their deaths and/or moral collapse.

  Publicity portrait of María Félix.

  La mujer sin alma (Woman Without a Soul) (1944) was based on a story by the nineteenth-century naturalist French writer Alphonse Daudet. Much like Émile Zola’s potboilers of the same period (La bête humaine, et cetera), the story is a complex interweaving of characters involved in varying degrees of human corruption. Teresa (Felix) is a seamstress with dreams of wealth and all the pleasure she believes that will bring to her now dreary life. Pursued by an honest working-class suitor, Luis (Carlos Villatoro), she keeps him dangling while pursuing more promising prospects: an older rich businessman, Vincent (Andrés Soler), and even the husband of a friend, Enrique (Antonio Badu). She shamelessly taunts these men, promising nothing and only giving when she is properly gifted and supported.

  When Teresa’s tactics seemed to have reached a dead end, she convinces her godfather—Alfredo (Fernando Soler)—to marry her, thereby gaining access to his considerable fortune. While Alfred spends his days and nights slaving at his desk at the factory he owns,Teresa paints the town with Enrique who also showers her with gifts while his wife stays home with their baby.

  Teresa’s downfall is brought about by her greed when Alfredo learns that his company is almost bankrupt due to Teresa’s extravagances. In a rage, he strips her of her possessions in order to pawn them and restabilize his company while casting her out of his house. However, this femme fatale cannot be so easily forgotten or cast aside. One night when the depressed Alfredo ventures to a nightclub for a drink, he is shocked to see his wife as the featured chanteuse. Looking more striking than ever in slinky black gown, she sings a ballad while Alfredo stares in despair at his drink.

  In 1944 Félix, by now a superstar, was cast in an adaptation of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s novella Amok. Like his more famous work Letter from an Unknown Woman, the themes of obsession and redemption direct the trajectory of the story.

  The film opens on an ocean liner. A drunken man, Dr. Martell (Julian Soler), stumbles about the foggy night until he catches a glimpse of a blonde beauty in the cabin ballroom. Before him, like a vision, is the woman he blames for destroying his life—Susana Travis (Felix). A flashback commences in which we learn of the affair between Susana and Martell. The doctor is totally enamored with this imperious blonde. He follows her faithfully out of a party at an almost imperceptible signal on her part. They then rendezvous at her lavish apartment where she undresses to make herself more comfortable, one assumes, for a night of lovemaking.

  From La devoradora, Miguel (Luis Aldas) cannot decide whether to shoot or worship Diana (María Félix).

  Soft-focus close-up of pre-coital Susana (María Felix), from Amok.

  The love scene in the apartment exemplifies how the Mexican cinema fetishized the image of María Félix in film after film. The camera lingers on her long legs as she seductively removes silk stockings, on her diffused close-up in pre-coital bliss, and on her long fingers as they caress her lover. When Martell stands above his lover’s bed, about to mount it, he tells her rhapsodically that she smells “of nature,” connecting the actress and the character to primal female imagery.

  Although Susana loves Martell, she also loves wealth and fine things. And so she continues to see her rich benefactors to the great disgust of the romantic Martell. In order to keep her, he steals money from his clinic, much to the delight of Susana as it demonstrates the depth of his dedication to her. However, when she still refuses to give up her lifestyle, he leaves her and moves to India in order to forget her.

  Needless to say, Martell is unsuccessful in achieving that goal. Battling fever and the insistent rain, he sinks into despair, yearning, as he tells his native lover (Estela Inda), for those “controlling women” of his world. As if summoned by those words, such a woman appears at his clinic: Mrs. Belmont, Susana’s spitting image (Félix again) except for her raven hair. She has come to the doctor for an abortion of an illegitimate child by her lover, although those words could never be spoken in a film of this period. At first, hoping to obtain a little vicarious payback, he summons his machismo and demands sex in return. The haughty beauty, disdainful of his request, leaves immediately.

  The fetishization of Maria Félix as Susana: silken and diffused legs, from Amok.

  Once again, Martell deserts his post in pursuit of this second Susana. Repeating his past mistakes, he humiliates himself in front of her at a party. She rejects him once again. After a botched backstreet abortion, Mrs. Belmont calls on Martell to “save” her. He attends to her, but it is too late and she dies, binding him in death to a promise to keep her sin a secret from the world, particularly her husband.

  Martell does keep his promise, without reservation. When Mr. Belmont (Jose Baviera) decides to take his wife’s body back to London for an autopsy, Martell books passage on the ship. During the night, he slips into the hold of the vessel. There he pushes her coffin into the stormy seas as the image of Mrs. Belmont beckons to him. He finally joins her as he falls down a set of stairs and fatally wounds himself with his own gun.

  In La devoradora (The Devourer) (1946), Félix plays Diana, a femme fatale in the tradition of Barbara Stanwyck. Shot largely at night, the film is a Mexican film noir revolving around a crime: the suicide of one of Diana’s lovers and the disposal of his body in order to avoid a scandal. Diana not only engineers the entire scheme, but drafts her two other suitors: her fiance Adolfo (Julio Villareal) and his nephew Miguel (Luis Aldas). At night, Miguel and Diana transport the body to the woods. But when Miguel goes back to retrieve his hat, Diana drives off in a panic. However, none of Diana’s questionable actions seem to have any effect on the ardor of either man.

  As the title of the film indicates, Diana is a rapacious woman. She is fed grapes in bed by her maid; she is showered with gifts by her lovers; and she, it is implied, has an overwhelming sexual appetite. Even when she meets her end at the hands of the guilt-ridden Miguel, the camera moves over her body on the floor like a lover as she lies dead but still gorgeous.

  Messalina (1951) is of course a perfect vehicle for Félix and her diva persona. Very similar in plot to the later Belinda Lee movie, it does perpetuate yet another common slander against this Roman empress. Like the Russian Catherine the Great and the Byzantine Empress Theodosia, who were both accused of sexual perversion, Messalina is shown freq
uenting a Roman bordello where she, it is again implied, sells her own body for pleasure.

  In 1971, La Doña made her last and most extreme femme fatale movie–La generala (photographed in lush color by master cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa). Freed by the counterculture movement of the 1960s from many of the moralistic codes of previous decades, the Mexican cinema gave Félix wide breadth to sculpt her most radical femme fatale—Mariana Sampedro. Set during the Mexican Revolution, Mariana is a “demon of vengeance,” literally and figuratively. And at fifty-eight, Félix is still able to project an overpowering sexuality as well as a forbidding tone.

  After witnessing the murder of her young love by Federales, Mariana organizes a band of outsiders including her faithful servant, the dwarf Ismael (Santanón), and her love slave Rosauro (Ignacio López Tarso). With the aid of her rebels, Mariana tracks down the perpetrators of the crime as well as their comrades, executing many of them while leaving human collateral damage in her wake. For the Colonel (Eric de Castillo) who ordered her lover’s execution, she has a special form of punishment. She first seduces him and, while her minions hold him down, castrates him in a brutal and bloody scene. Then, in the final sequence, after her band has been decimated, she shoots down that same Colonel as his troops open fire on Mariana, riddling her body with bullets.

  One of the most striking and revolutionary (in terms of narrative cinema) scenes of the movie is the fantasy sequence. Mariana’s hair flares out like a lion’s mane; her lips are a crimson red; her face is painted white; and a gold serpent decorates her head (based on the serpent diamond necklace Félix had designed for herself by Cartier). The enraged Mariana sets fire to a river of oil and wails over the body of her dead love while all around her women lament, and crucified peasants burn.

  The terrifying Mariana (María Félix) from Felix’s last movie, La generala.

  Chapter Four The Post-Feminist Explosion: The Femme Fatale Comes into Her Own

  Pam Grier as the formidable Coffy takes aim at some hapless male who has offended her sense of justice.

  WITH THE RISE OF THE SECOND WAVE of feminism in the early 1970s and the third wave in the 1990s, women began to reclaim the image of the femme fatale, much as they did the word “bitch,” reclaim it from its male guardians and redefine it in their own way. One will easily notice in this final chapter how fewer and fewer of these lethal ladies are punished by the end of the movie, a resolution that was almost pro forma in American films pre-1970. With the collapse of the Production Code and the influence of the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s, attitudes toward women, marriage, sex, pleasure, food, and politics all underwent a seismic shift which even the recent turn to the religious right in the last decade has never been able to erase, only weaken.

  The feminist transformation of the femme fatale was of course slow. It began, naturally, in the area of the low-budget, exploitation film which, as we said in the last chapter, allowed more freedom due to its low profile.

  Publicity photo from American International Pictures of Pam Grier, for the release of Coffy.

  The DVD release of Foxy Brown. emphasizing Pam Grier’s body as well as her phallic force.

  Pam Grier

  — The Black Avenging Angel

  Discovered while working as an office assistant at American International Pictures, Pam Grier became a cult figure of forbidding proportions within two years (1973-1975) and three films: Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Sheba, Baby. In addition, she helped Blacks move from subsidiary, often degrading roles into parts that allowed them to take center stage as strong, fully developed characters.

  The first film in the series starring Grier, Coffy (1973), is the most noir of the trio. The film opens with Coffy pretending to be a junkie in order to trap two drug dealers. When she finds them with their stash, she blasts the head off one with a shotgun and then shoots up the other with some of his own medicine. Although this shocking level of violence is typical of Grier’s femme fatale movies, the filmmakers (including director Jack Hill, who also did the sequel Foxy Brown) take pains to justify, at least partially, Coffy’s violent actions. The film shows her visiting her catatonic teenage sister in an institution where she has been hospitalized after overdosing. After the visit Coffy breaks down emotionally, showing the audience her more vulnerable side.

  In all of Grier’s movies, she uses her sexual power as well as her physical strength and intelligence to defeat her criminal enemies. Grier gains the trust of male characters in her films by using the sexual stereotypes they project onto her and most sexy women, and then, to the consternation of the unwitting character, reverses the stereotype. In Coffy, she becomes part of the stable of prostitutes run by King George (Robert DoQui) and seduces her way into the home of Vitroni (Allan Arbus), the mob boss and main supplier of drugs for the city. Knowing he has a fetish for dark women that he can mistreat, she pretends to be, in Vitroni’s words, a submissive “nigger bitch.” But as he attempts to fulfill his master/slave fantasy, she pulls a gun from her stuffed animal and brings him to his knees, telling him, “I’m going to piss on your grave.”

  Coffy (Pam Grier), undercover as a hooker, charms a client.

  Before Coffy can make good on her threat to Vitroni, she has to undergo several more arduous tests of her courage and lethal cunning. She escapes her captors in the Los Angeles River, where they are trying to drug her up and murder her. She then steals a car and drives it into the Vitroni home, killing everyone inside. Coffy, now weary of her battles and feeling like she is “in a dream,” goes after her lover, the corrupt Councilman Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw). She finds him at his beach home with a young White girl. Outraged, she shoots off his genitals.

  With Foxy Brown (1974), the filmmakers elevate the tone. This shift in mood occurs with the titles of the film. Pam Grier, in silhouette, dances and performs martial-arts movies in various costumes against multicolored backgrounds while her theme song blasts on the soundtrack. The sequence is an obvious takeoff on the James Bond movie title sequences. Foxy, the avenging femme fatale, has become more comfortable in her role and less prone to depression and guilt. She has accepted that the city is a noir jungle in which she must right wrongs when she sees them.

  As in the earlier movie, Foxy uses her dominant sexual persona and her imposing stature as a weapon as effectively as any piece of armament. After her lover is shot down by the mob on the order of Katherine Wall (Kathryn Loder)—their gangster chieftain—she ramps up the action and infiltrates their inner circle by posing once again as a prostitute. Not only is Katherine immediately taken with Foxy’s charms, as is her lover Steve (Peter Brown), but so are her clients, particularly a prestigious judge whom Foxy humiliates by ridiculing the size of his penis and then pushing him out nude into the hallway of a swank hotel.

  Foxy’s plans to disrupt the mob’s operations come to a temporary halt when she is exposed and sent to a drug lab in the desert. There she is raped and beaten. Using her innate ingenuity, she cuts her ropes and douses the desert lab with gasoline, immolating both the shack and its inhabitants. Foxy then approaches a Black Power group to help her fight the rest of the mob. Once again shifting into her femme fatale role, she flirts with a pilot delivering drugs who then takes her to his desert rendezvous where she and her Black brothers seize the shipment and eliminate the mobsters.

  In the final film of the series—Sheba, Baby (1975)—Pam Grier’s character has finally entered the official world of detection and crime fighting by becoming a private eye. This time she is operating out of a different noir jungle, Chicago. She has a successful business in the city but finds herself embroiled again in family problems when her father calls her home to Kentucky to fight loan sharks who are threatening to kill him.

  Dyanne Thorne

  —Shattering Taboos

  Dyanne Thorne, like Pam Grier, toiled in the field of the low-budget exploitation where she made her mark as a femme fatale of unusual ferocity, largely through her series of Ilsa films.

  The fir
st appearance of the type of voracious femme fatale Thorne would become famous for was in a film called Point of Terror (1971). Written by and starring Peter Carpenter, it is the story of an amoral struggling singer, Tony Trelos, who meets his match and more in the person of record producer Andrea Hilliard (Thorne). His first vision of her is as she stands above him on the beach, a stunning blonde, Amazon-ish woman in her forties who looks him over like he is a piece of meat. She plays with this boy toy the same way, we learn later, that Tony treats the women in his life. She teases him for trespassing on her private beach while displaying her bikini-clad body. Taken aback by this unusually aggressive businesswoman, a new woman of the feminist revolution (the film is produced by exploitation maven and co-owner of Crown International Pictures—Marilyn Tenser), Tony nevertheless invites her to see him performing at a local club.

  Poster for Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.

  Hillary appears there the next night and seduces Tony with her ample charms and promises of a record contract, reversing the traditional gender roles once again. She even brings him over to her seaside mansion to make love in the pool, right under the bedroom window of her crippled husband. Her husband (Joel Marston), of course, is accustomed to this treatment, even though he rages out at her periodically for her callousness. In one such encounter, she taunts him by playing the bullfighter (much like Rita Hayworth did in Blood and Sand) and causes him to fall into the pool. While she watches him drown she whispers, “Ole.”