The Femme Fatale

By Julie Grossman

Ostensibly the villain, but also a model of female power, poise, and intelligence, the femme fatale embodies Hollywood’s contradictory attitudes toward ambitious women. But how has the figure of the femme fatale evolved over time, and to what extent have these changes reflected shifting cultural attitudes toward female independence and sexuality?
 
This book offers readers a concise look at over a century of femmes fatales on both the silver screen and the TV screen. Starting with ethnically exoticized silent film vamps like Theda Bara and Pola Negri, it examines classic film noir femmes fatales like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, as well as postmodern revisions of the archetype in films like Basic Instinct and Memento. Finally, it explores how contemporary film and television creators like Fleabag and Killing Eve’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge have appropriated the femme fatale in sympathetic and surprising ways.
 
Analyzing not only the films themselves, but also studio press kits and reviews, The Femme Fatale considers how discourses about the pleasures and dangers of female performance are projected onto the figure of the femme fatale. Ultimately, it is a celebration of how “bad girl” roles have provided some of Hollywood’s most talented actresses opportunities to fully express their on-screen charisma.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9780813598260

Book preview

THE FEMME FATALE

QUICK TAKES: MOVIES AND POPULAR CULTURE

Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture is a series offering succinct overviews and high quality writing on cutting edge themes and issues in film studies. Authors offer both fresh perspectives on new areas of inquiry and original takes on established topics.

SERIES EDITORS:

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Willa Cather Professor of English and teaches film studies in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies and professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Transgender Cinema

Blair Davis, Comic Book Movies

Jonna Eagle, War Games

Lester D. Freidman, Sports Movies

Steven Gerrard, The Modern British Horror Film

Barry Keith Grant, Monster Cinema

Julie Grossman, The Femme Fatale

Daniel Herbert, Film Remakes and Franchises

Ian Olney, Zombie Cinema

Valérie K. Orlando, New African Cinema

Stephen Prince, Digital Cinema

Dahlia Schweitzer, L.A. Private Eyes

Steven Shaviro, Digital Music Videos

David Sterritt, Rock ’n’ Roll Movies

John Wills, Disney Culture

The Femme Fatale

JULIE GROSSMAN

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Grossman, Julie, 1962– author.

Title: The femme fatale / Julie Grossman.

Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020. |

Series: Quick takes: movies and popular culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019052763 | ISBN 9780813598246 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813598253 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813598260 (epub) | ISBN 9780813598277 (mobi) | ISBN 9780813598284 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Femmes fatales in motion pictures. | Femmes fatales.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.F44 G65 2020 | DDC 791.43/6522—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052763

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by Julie Grossman

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

AS ALWAYS, FOR PHIL AND SOPHIE

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Theda Bara and Barbara Stanwyck’s Baby Face: Exoticism and the Street-Smart Vamp

2. Wartime and Postwar Film Noir, Neo-Noir, and the Femme Fatale

3. Tracy Flick and Television’s Unruly Women

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Works Cited

Selected Filmography

Index

About the Author

THE FEMME FATALE

INTRODUCTION

Intelligent, witty, able to role-play and perform, deceptive, enraged, frustrated, mercenary, seductive, overtly sexual, fearless and tough as nails, physically self-confident with a striking appearance: these are the qualities we associate with the femme fatale. The figure is commonly understood as a beautiful woman who seduces a male protagonist into criminality and a web of deceit, causing his demise and, when film-industry production codes required, her own death too. The femme fatale has always been perceived as a staple of classic film noir (generally thought to date from The Maltese Falcon [1941] to Touch of Evil [1958]), the dangerous dame seen as a counterpart to the slick and cynical male detective.

As many people are aware, classic film noir refers to the series of brooding post–World War II films characterized by low-key lighting, an emphasis on urban anonymity and alienation, the seductions of criminality, and cool-cat highly metaphorical language drawn in part from the hardboiled fiction of James Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway penned a quintessentially dark exchange in his short story The Killers: ‘What’s the idea?’ Nick asked. ‘There isn’t any idea,’ returns one of the hired killers (217). This kind of playful riff on nothingness becomes endemic in film noir, which sleekly adapts a literary vernacular and melds it to compelling character patterns. In Out of the Past (1947), Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) tells a cabbie, I think I’m in a frame. . . . I don’t know. All I can see is the frame; in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) says to Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried. While the focus in film noir has habitually been on the beleaguered tough guy, for whom the irony in such language becomes a defense against the fear of living meaninglessly, women in noir share this world-weariness, despite viewers’ and critics’ conventional focus on the hardboiled male and the women’s part in adding to the troubles of men. Indeed, a close look at film noir’s ingrained character patterns reveals the classic femme fatale brandishing many of the qualities we associate with the male noir protagonist. In The Big Heat, Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame) comments as she enters the barren hotel room of the detective Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), I like it. Early nothing. Debby’s line alludes to the visible boundaries of nothingness, and that angst-ridden insight, while traditionally associated with men in noir, is crucially important for understanding noir’s modern women as they strive to find meaning outside of oppressive social roles.

The hardboiled women in noir show their rage or malaise differently from how postwar fraught masculinity is expressed, where tough leading men are more able to sublimate their unease and disappointments into a workable cynicism and an appealing cool demeanor that complements their masculine competence. For women, displaying such cynicism breaks the conventional gender mold, threatening the cultural idolatry of mothers and virgins. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) tells Sherry (Marie Windsor) in The Killing (1956), You like money. You’ve got a great big dollar sign there where most women have a heart. Bad boys have always been more easily adapted into accepted social types; bad girls, however, are demonized and often punished for their resistance to social norms.

One of the main ways that film noir’s classic femme fatale has rebelled against social conventions and pushed against boundaries is by role-playing. There is, as I suggest throughout this volume, an abiding relevance in the practice and notions of performance embedded in the idea of the classic femme fatale, not only because cinema’s fatal women are so often portrayed by strikingly charismatic actors but also because the theme of performance captures the double bind that active and rebellious or transgressive female characters find themselves in: they perform roles sometimes to escape objectification or the rigid or socially sanctioned positions that oppress them, but then when they assume or perform unconventional or unprescribed roles, their ambition to find fulfillment outside of convention constitutes them as bad actors, as deceptive, inauthentic, or spider women.

Putting on a show, performing femininity while charting the damage done to women because of predatory men and institutional biases, is trademark femme fatale. A serious rejoinder to institutional sexism, the most compelling femmes fatales show two paths taken by women as a result of their privation and sense of loss, violation, or unfulfillment: desperate grabs for power or happiness, or a mocking vengeance against those who have contributed to their desolation. Both avenues usually involve criminality. This book attends to the stories of femmes fatales, delineating their words and behavior as insurgencies against conventional gender categories that are insidious. The figures addressed in this book are dangerous women whose sly rebellions against the status quo offer images and portraits of strong, defiant women.

Viewers’ obsession with the femme fatale replicates the noir men’s fascination with and dread of the powerful woman. Indeed, female badness is ripe for exploitation as a theme with a ready audience. We find over the centuries a deeply rooted cultural habit of glomming onto the titillating icon of the bad woman, the Eve or Lilith figure that threatens patriarchy and individual men whose loss of control can then be blamed on the woman: as Rita Hayworth sings in Gilda (1946), first rebelliously, then plaintively, Put the Blame on Mame. With its sex and glitter, the icon can blind us from evaluating nuanced representation that is crucially inflected with vibrant female performance. For example, none of Lauren Bacall’s roles in classic film noir included a badness associated with the idea of the deadly female. When Bacall first exploded onto the Hollywood scene in 1944, the Motion Picture Daily Review captured this powerful and misleading dynamic by associating Bacall’s seductiveness with villainy: "Her deportment has a decided ‘come-hither’ look and her brand of acting is purring and tintillating [sic] in the slow-cooking manner: She is the bad girl" (Kann, review of To Have and Have Not). A pickpocket in To Have and Have Not (1944), Marie Browning (Bacall) lives on the edge to survive, but the focus here on the threat she poses is part and parcel of the cultural dynamics that determine and continually reinscribe the role of the femme fatale. Further, there is a moment in To Have and Have Not when Bogart comments on Marie’s manipulation, You’re good. You’re awful good, a judgment that speaks to the woman’s powers of artifice.

This is a theme that recurs in this study: female characters branded as femmes fatales perform roles in order to survive, to seduce, or to manipulate others in order to get what they want, yet any pretense to better their position is received as immoral and invites male scorn. Female dissimulation means that Marie is a good performer, but that makes her untrustworthy. Because Marie’s role as femme fatale is subordinate in her noir films to Bacall’s partnership with Bogart, her characters are rewarded with romance and happy endings. But the exchange about how awfully good she is exposes an ideology of mistrusting women that sends a message that women are bad even when they are good, and this is because they are not in these cases good as a gendered ideal—angel in the house, domestic savior—but good at something, such as performance or work in general. It is then when they are often perceived as threatening. Marie’s sarcastic comment to Steve later in this conversation is thus fitting: Who was the girl . . . the one who left you with such a high opinion of women? Marie’s exchange with Steve offers a kinder version of Devlin’s (Cary Grant) disdain for Alicia’s (Ingrid Bergman) performance as Alex Sebastian’s (Claude Rains) wife in Notorious (1946)—Dry your eyes, baby; it’s out of character—or Jeff Markam’s cynical repetition