The Making and Unmaking of the Femme Fatale
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Often considered the first American film noir, John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon features the femme fatale figure front and center, but not yet fully formed. The film opens on Jack Spade, P.I., played by a confident and competent Humphrey Bogart. His secretary enters his office and announces a possible client. She assures Spade, “You’ll want to meet her anyways. She’s a knockout.”
In comes Mary Astor, breathless and desperate, sporting one of several fake names her character will try on throughout the course of the film. Astor’s character embroils Spade in a tapestry of lies and deception, the primary structural role of any femme fatale. But Bogart’s no dope. The male hero is not quite ready to give up his privileged agency over the narrative. Their romance is always tempered by Spade’s distrust, knowing this woman’s act is deadly, and he’s not afraid to call her out on it. Spade’s failure to play the fool to this prototype of the femme fatale allows him to always stay one step ahead and escape the foul play that’s afoot unscathed.
If only all film noir protagonists were so lucky.
Double Indemnity (1944)
Throughout the development of film noir as a distinctive genre, the femme fatale came to take on characteristics that are nearly cartoonish in their exaggeration, a kind of Black Window of the male imagination. Few places is this hyperbole more evident than in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity.
Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) has full narrative control over the film, dictating the events as he recalls them into a recorder. In his telling, Barbara Stanwyck’s sultry Phyllis Dietrichson is the criminal mastermind behind everything. Meanwhile, as Neff tells it, he’s simply a quick-wit with a sharp tongue who just so happens to be a sucker for long legs. What’s a guy to do, right?
But Wilder’s sly direction punctures a few holes in Neff’s narration. When he and Dietrichson share the frame for the first time, they catch each other’s gaze reflected in a mirror, a doubling created by perspective. Neff can’t see her without seeing a slice of himself reflected back. And the woman he does see in the mirror wears an outrageous blonde wig, one that no viewer could ever mistake for Stanwyck’s real hair. She’s clearly costumed to play a part. Perhaps it’s Neff who has dressed up Dietrichson with his imagination, cast her in the role of his own personal femme fatale, a dangerous woman poised to take advantage of a straight-shooting guy and lead him down a destructive path of murder and ruin.
Detour (1945)
The woman who figuratively leads a man astray goes literal in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour. Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is on a cross-country trip to reconnect with his sweetheart, when a run of bad luck threatens to spoil his plans. But Roberts doesn’t know the true meaning of “bad luck” until he picks up a female hitchhiker, Vera, played by Ann Savage. Roberts describes Vera as having a beauty that is “homely,” not “the beauty of a movie actress” or “the beauty you dream about when you’re with your wife.” In this taut 67-minute thriller, there’s no need to complicate things with a fatal attraction. Things are just pure fatal.
Vera has a tongue like a dagger, and she puts it to good use. The mild-mannered Roberts can’t get a word in edgewise, and, when Vera isn’t just plain bullying him, she’s threatening to pin a murder on him and rat Roberts out to the cops. It’s Vera who takes control of this ride, until Roberts is finally able to quiet her down once and for all.
Roberts relays his encounter with Vera in the past tense, so, in a sense, he has regained the power of his own voice, but will there ever truly be any turning back from this lethal detour?
Scarlet Street (1945)
Taking a man off his proper course is one of the most common motifs surrounding the femme fatale figure, and, in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, that wrong turn is given an address. Demure, soft-spoken Christopher Cross, played by a simpering Edward G. Robinson, decides to walk home one rainy evening across the city. In an unfamiliar part of town, he runs into a guy roughing up his girl. Cross intervenes, but soon it will be they who intervene in Cross’ life.
Kitty March (Joan Bennett), motivated by her pimp-like boyfriend, Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), dupes Cross into an infatuation that sucks him dry of his money, his job, and his marriage. In his old life, Cross felt as insignificant as an insect—unseen, unheard, and unrecognized. March offers him beauty and inspiration, excitement and freedom. But, it’s all an impossible dream, and it ends as an impossible nightmare.
In Scarlet Street, Joan Bennett’s femme fatale is alluring and seductive, but there’s a naiveté to her character. There’s a man behind the scenes, pulling the strings, manipulating her as she manipulates another. Her femme fatale is just a weapon deployed by another.
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
As the femme fatale became such a recognizable figure, variations on a theme developed, undermining expectations. When Lizabeth Scott appears onscreen in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, she has all the sure signs of ready ruin—blonde hair, tight skirt, bedroom eyes, and a smoky voice. Then, we find out she’s fresh from the slammer…
But there’s another woman vying for space in this film, and no one is going to keep Barbara Stanwyk out of the spotlight. There’s more to Stanwyck’s Martha Ivers than just some dame trying to fool a guy out of his money. Ivers has money, and power, and a husband, taboot. She may still have murder on her mind, but it comes from a deeper, sicker source than the run of the mill girl just trying to run a hustle. If you can’t see it on Stanwyck’s face at first, look for it on her husband’s, played by Kirk Douglass in his show-stopping debut role. There’s something toxic in Iverstown.
Pitfall (1948)
Pitfall sounds like another guy-getting-thrown-off-course story, and, in a sense, it is. Three guys to be exact, all of whom fall for Lizabeth Scott’s Mona Stevens. Scott is given a chance to go full-on fatale after her fake-out in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, but again she plays coy with the role. Sure, the guys fall for Stevens, and, sure, they fall hard, and it leads to theft, fights, and murder, but the one who really takes the fall is the woman.
Pitfall is an entanglement of masculine pride and privilege, where if a guy lays eyes on a girl or buys her a ring, he thinks she’s his for life, and he’s willing to take a life to prove it. Stevens might look the bait, but it’s the male ego that acts as the lure. Once the fish are fried, take note of who’s the one getting cooked. At this point, are women playing the role of the femme fatale, or is the role playing them?
In a Lonely Place (1951)
Nicholas Ray can always be counted on to subvert a genre, and In a Lonely Place is no exception. Bogart’s back in the familiar confides of a film noir as Dix Steele, a double-entendre of a name that needs no explaining. This Dix is no private eye; he’s a screenwriter. He’s got an imagination for murder and a reputation for violence.
Gloria Grahame, plays his counterpart, Laurel Gray. She’s got the look and the attitude, but this girl’s heart is in the right place. Only Steele can’t see it. He has a jealous mind. After a career of writing crooks and harlots, he can’t help but cast Gray as a double-dealer. But the only path to ruin in Steele’s life is the one he paves himself.
Ray’s film makes it clear: it’s not the woman who created the femme fatale; it’s the movies. And it’s a man who writes the parts.
