Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies Read online

  B. B. in all her iconic glory.

  Copyright © 2009 by Dominique Mainon and James Ursini

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

  Published in 2009 by Limelight Editions

  An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

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  Printed in China through Colorcraft Ltd., Hong Kong

  Book design by Damien Castaneda

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mainon, Dominique.

  Femme fatale : cinema’s most unforgettable lethal ladies / by Dominique Mainon and James Ursini.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  9780879107253

  1. Femmes fatales in motion pictures. 2. Sex in motion pictures. 3. Feminism and motion pictures. I. Ursini, James. II. Title.

  PN1995.9.F44M35 2009

  791.43’6522-dc22

  2009018618

  www.limelighteditions.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One Pre-Code Femmes Fatales In The Early American Cinema: From Liberation To Repression

  Chapter Two Film Noir’s Deadly Female: Subversion And Transgression

  Chapter Three The Femme Fatale Is Silenced In The U.s.: The Rise Of The International Femme Fatale

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

  Angelina Jolie emits the femme fatale aura in this publicity photo.

  Introduction

  “As this man has done to me, so I will henceforth to all men. My heart is ice, my passion consuming fire. Let men beware.”

  —La Giocanda (Theda Bara) in The Devil’s Daughter

  THE FEMME FATALE is such a quintessential part of our collective imagination expressed in art, literature, and media that some of her earliest appearances can be found as far back as the Judeo-Christian Bible. The very first woman, Eve, is a femme fatale herself as she entices Adam to sin, and Adam becomes the first man to begin making excuses to God that SHE made him do it. The early Christian “father” of the Church Tertullian would later condemn all women as the first sinners, proclaiming to them: “You are the devil’s gateway.”

  The French phrase “femme fatale” literally means “deadly woman,” which understates the human embodiment of lust and peril, that intoxicating allure of sex and death that makes these creatures so fascinating. The femme fatale is a sleek and sensuous creature, dangerous either physically or emotionally to her victims. Unlike the more overtly aggressive warrior-woman archetype (see our book The Modern Amazons), the femme fatale’s weapons are more covert and elusive. She would often use poison instead of a knife and employ intelligence and sexual prowess to further her quest for power. But although femmes fatales differ from warrior women, at times they overlap in that they too assault the patriarchy, albeit from behind the scenes and more to fulfill their own personal needs or transgressive desires rather than any ideals. They are Mata Haris, as opposed to Boudiccas. A femme fatale slowly drains her victims of their morals, values, their friends, and often their money. She is sexually insatiable, and may even love her victims in her own way, but it doesn’t stop her from driving them to obsession. The male’s resulting exhaustion leads to confusion and inability to make sensible or rational decisions. Men who pursue the femme fatale risk being cuckolded, humiliated, and driven to poverty and despair in the pursuit of her attention.

  Nineteenth-century painting of Empress Theodora at the Coliseum by Benjamin-Constant.

  Sixteenth-century portrait of Lucrezia Borgia by Bartolomeo Veneziano.

  Gilda (Rita Hayworth) tempts both husband and lover with bedroom eyes and sexy smirk.

  The femme fatale has many changing forms. She is the Egyptian Sphinx, half-human, half-animal. She is the Bible’s teenage seductress Salome. She is the devious World War I spy Mata Hari. She is the evil Queen in Snow White. She is the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, the Roman empress Messalina, the Byzantine ruler Theodora, the controversial apostle of Jesus—Mary Magdalene, the much-maligned Renaissance princess Lucrezia Borgia, and the misunderstood second wife of English King Henry VIII—Anne Boleyn. All these women and many more have been turned into femmes fatales by male historians, simply for exercising power much like their male contemporaries did. Reaching her peak in decadent fin-de-siècle Europe, it could be argued that this lethal lady found her most copacetic home on the silver screen, particularly in American movies where audiences hungry for glamour lived vicariously through these radiant and dangerous characters, while European filmmakers opted for more nuanced characterizations.

  At the beginning of cinema history, the femme fatale came to life in silent films that took on a new dimension when haunted by Theda Bara’s dark kohl-lined eyes and pale skin. Debaucherous clubs in Berlin became en vogue with Marlene Dietrich. Between the ravages of two world wars rose such sirens as Louise Glaum, Bebe Daniels, Nazimova, Nita Naldi, Clara Bow, Brigitte Helm, Pola Negri, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Anna May Wong, and the quick-witted Mae West. Despite such an auspicious beginning, the femme fatale was silenced in 1950s America by censorship, the anti-Communist blacklist, enforced valorization of the nuclear family, and morale-boosting attempts to replace her with cheesecake-photo actresses and wholesome girls-next-door.

  For a time Latin America and Europe took up the slack with exotic beauties such as Maria Félix, Belinda Lee, Brigitte Bardot, Isabel Sarli, Barbara Steele, Chelo Alonso, and Anita Ekberg. The post-feminist explosion of modern femmes fatales such as Béatrice Dalle, Li Gong, Angelina Jolie, Monica Bellucci, Salma Hayek, Dyanne Thorne, Pam Grier, Tia Carrere, Sybil Danning, Emmanuelle Béart, Ornella Muti, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Traci Lords, Lucy Liu, Asia Argento, and Jodi Lyn O’Keefe proves that the reputation of the femme fatale is still intact, as well as ever-growing.

  While sexually insatiable male characters and “hommes fatales” from Don Juan to James Bond are generally enviable heroes in movies, the sexually insatiable woman is usually cast in a darker manner, as an anti-heroine or villain and frequently making her appearance in horror films as a monster or vampires. There is a tendency to attribute supernatural qualities to these women, as their power has such a mesmerizing, enchanting quality. Femmes fatales are present in countless murder mysteries, and of course a staple of film noir that enhanced the careers of legendary actresses such as Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Gene Tierney, Linda Darnell, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, and Hedy Lamarr.

  A femme fatale is not complete without being surrounded by males who succumb to her whims (or at least spend the movie fighting the temptation to succumb). She tortures them by never giving confirmation of her true love. Seemingly innocent men always walk unwittingly into her “trap.” In the movie Gilda with Rita Hayworth, the hapless character Johnny makes a remark which typifies the idea that men are helpless victims against these females when he says in narration before entering his boss’s home and encountering his devastatingly beautiful past lover Gilda for the first time, “You’d think a bell would have rung or I’d have had some instinct of warning, but I didn’t, I just walked right into it.”

  Just like the story of Adam and Eve and the original sin, the man blames the woman for his own actions time after time, rarely having the ability to recognize that in the end he is the one w
ho brings about his own demise. Our last book, Cinema of Obsession: Erotic Fixation and Love Gone Wrong in the Movies, documented some of the most spectacular and tragic romantic demises ever shown in film. In this book, we take a lingering gaze at some of the incandescent female characters that have ignited these romantic disasters, and some of the erotic secrets and traits that make these lethal women so unforgettable to us.

  —Dominique Mainon

  Chapter One Pre-Code Femmes Fatales in the Early American Cinema: From Liberation to Repression

  Publicity pose personally approved by mogul William Fox as he plays on Westerners’ fear of and fascination with “orientalism” (see Edward Said’s book Orientalism).

  THE EARLY DAYS OF THE CINEMA, the days before 1934, when the Motion Picture Production Code Office decided to enforce the puritanical rules it had been developing for almost a decade, were among the most fertile for the femme fatale. Her image was formed in these decades, and her influence established.

  Theda Bara—

  The First Movie Femme Fatale

  Theda Bara (born Theodosia Goodman) epitomizes the exoticism inextricably linked to the image of the femme fatale. Her dark Sephardic appearance radiated the same combination of menace and allure which characterized the femmes fatales of history and fin-de-siècle French literature. In addition, the publicity agents at Fox, drawing on their own knowledge of French decadent literature, created a tantalizing biography for their first real star. According to the studio, Theda Bara (an anagram of the words “Arab death”) was the daughter of a French artist and an Egyptian concubine. She was born in the Sahara Desert and possessed supernatural powers. They posed her in scanty costumes, often next to or on top of the bones of her latest “victim.” They even coined the term “vamp” to describe her (drawn from the famous Rudyard Kipling poem “The Vampire”), a moniker that would become part of the language within a decade. Although she did not possess any supernatural powers, her ability to lure men into cooperating with their own course of destruction was equally lethal.

  Theda incarnates another historical femme fatale: Madame Du Barry, mistress and advisor to Louis XV, from Madame Du Barry.

  A typical example of the freedom allowed the cinema in the pre-Code era: La Bara seduces the viewer as Cleopatra.

  Theda Bara was one of the first film actresses to take on the roles of such formidable literary and historical femmes fatales as Carmen, Camille, Salome, Madame Du Barry, and Cleopatra; sadly, though, copies of those films are believed to have been lost. We do, however, still have her debut film as a star, A Fool There Was (1915), which she described in her own words (using a false, thick foreign accent in keeping with her studio-created persona) to aspiring journalist Louella Parsons as “a charnel house of men’s dead hopes and withered ambitions. . . . This vampire of mine possesses only one good or decent quality—her courage.”

  Theda Bara as The Vampire in A Fool There Was.

  The film begins with a title card featuring a quote from the Kipling poem mentioned earlier: “We called her the woman, who did not care. But the fool he called her, his lady fair.” All of the title cards in the beginning of the film present it as a lesson in morality, with characters such as “The Husband,” “The Wife,” “The Little Girl,” et cetera. Cast as simply “The Vampire,” with her raven hair, pale skin, and darkly painted eyes, Bara is a picture of ruthlessness, first seen plucking a rose from a vase, strongly inhaling its scent and then mercilessly ripping the head of it completely off. She crushes and grinds the bud between her finger with a look of pure sadistic pleasure. Each of her lover-victims in the film will soon suffer a similar fate of symbolic castration and emasculation. Every scene underlines her status as the ultimate femme fatale, inspiring such terms as “vampire,” “hellcat,” and “devil.”

  Fox spent lavishly on its epic Cleopatra. Like most of Bara’s early films, it was a financial success, making Bara one of the first superstars of Hollywood.

  A smitten Julius Caesar (Fritz Leiber) quaking in his Roman boots before the voluptuous queen of Egypt, from Cleopatra.

  Even though A Fool There Was is a traditional narrative film, it was a favorite among the surrealists of the first half of the twentieth century. The reason is fairly obvious. The film itself epitomizes the surrealist concept of “mad love.” As explained by filmmaker Luis Buñuel, “Mad love isolates the lovers, makes them ignore normal social obligation, ruptures ordinary family ties, and ultimately brings them to destruction.” As the femme fatale insinuated her way into the iconography of the cinema, she would become a fervent advocate of mad love. Early in the film we see two of The Vampire’s victims: one has become a tramp, haunting the docks and warning others about her; the other is a desperate alcoholic who, rather than shooting The Vampire as he planned, collapses when she looks into his eyes and proclaims the now infamous line: “Kiss me, my fool.” Instead, he shoots himself.

  Theda as the Biblical Salome manipulates her lust-besotted uncle King Herod (G. Raymond Nye) in Salome, an early entry into Hollywood’s exploitation of Bible stories as a cover for tales of debauchery and femme fatale power.

  The decadent extravagance of Bara’s costume as Cleopatra reflects the decadence of artists like Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley.

  Although wealthy and married diplomat John Schuyler (Edward José) is aware of her reputation (he is on board the liner when The Vampire’s latest lover shoots himself), he falls under her spell almost immediately—picking up a flower she has deliberately dropped and thereby gaining a glimpse of her delectable foot and ankle. After a rapid fade, he is lying at her feet in a Mediterranean setting as she reclines catlike on a couch. He receives a letter from his desperate wife and child, which The Vampire reads and then callously destroys as she caresses her newest love slave.

  Schuyler sacrifices everything for this his mad love. He takes The Vampire to parties where he is humiliated by the rejection of his social peers. He ignores the advice of his closest friends to leave her. He loses his position as a diplomat. Even the appeal of his young daughter cannot shame him as he falls to his knees and kisses the dress of his mistress in front of his child. “The fool was stripped of his foolish hide” (Kipling’s poem once again).

  Schuyler’s final destruction comes in the form he most desires, at the hands of this exotic femme fatale. Jealousy torments him as The Vampire cuckolds him with other men. But it only takes a touch from her to send him back into submission. As drink and poverty begin to take their toll, Schuyler ages exponentially until he is a shell of the man he once was. In the final sequence, we see him lying once again at The Vampire’s feet as she spreads the petals of a flower over him, as if he were already a rotting corpse.

  Louise Glaum

  —The Domesticated Vamp

  Theda Bara’s only real competitor for the title of premiere vamp is almost entirely forgotten today. Louise Glaum, like her sister femme fatale Bara, is shrouded in mystery. Her real name and even her date of death are listed differently in various sources (as examples, see Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database—although the Wikipedia entry seems more credible). Again, like Bara the mystery is deepened by the fact that so few of her films are available.

  Glaum was movie pioneer Thomas H. Ince’s answer to Theda Bara. He cast her in dozens of films from 1914 until 1921, often playing a vamp. He hung names on her like “Spider Woman” and “Tiger Woman” to enhance her exotic allure. In The Three Musketeers (1916), she played Alexander Dumas’s seductive villain Milady; and in W.S. Hart’s gritty if sentimental western Hell’s Hinges (1916), she was the saloon girl (read: prostitute) who seduced the pure minister and precipitated the holocaust at the end of the movie.

  But the film which garnered the most recognition for Glaum, undoubtedly because of its controversial title, was Sex (1920). Produced by Ince through a subsidiary company headed by J. Parker Read, Jr. (both were later sued by Glaum for withholding monies owed), the film typified a style of filmmaking Hollywood directors and wri
ters like Cecil B. DeMille were refining—that of a salacious story wrapped safely (if thinly) in a Judeo-Christian wrapper.

  Directed by Fred Niblo, who would helm several notable femme fatale films of the 1920s—including Blood and Sand with Nita Naldi and The Temptress with Greta Garbo—and written by C. Gardner Sullivan, the scenarist behind Glaum’s earlier femme fatale hit Hell’s Hinges, the film presents a vamp on the verge of domestication. We first glimpse chorus girl Adrienne Renault (Glaum) descending from the rafters of the theater in a revealing spiderweb dress as she lies on a gossamer web. Calling to her male victim, a dancer dressed in an equally exotic costume, he tries to resist but cannot. In the audience, among the drooling businessmen, is Philip Overman (William Conklin), Adrienne’s very rich and very married patron.

  Louise Glaum exhibits a naturalism in her vamp performances that is absent from Theda Bara’s more extravagant portrayals, from Sex.

  Cover for the DVD release of Sex, starring Theda Bara’s competitor for the title of first film femme fatale, Louise Glaum.