Hollywood on Women : Femme Fatales

A femme fatale (plural: femmes fatales) is an alluring and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetypal character of literature and art. Her ability to entrance and hypnotize her male victim was in the earliest stories seen as being literally supernatural, hence the most prosaic femme fatale today is still described as having a power akin to an enchantress, vampire, female monster or demon. The ideas involved are closely tied to fears of the female witch  and misogyny. (wikipedia)

Although women had been portrayed in movies for decades as "vamps"--short for vampires, a phrase more common to women than men in the Silent Film Era-- it was during the post World War II era that a block of "film noir" movies came out of Hollywood studios. Such alluring actresses as Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Linda Darnell, Gene Tierney, Gloria Grahame (pictured, left)   and the quintessential femme fatale, Jane Greer in "Out of the Past" (1947) brought to the screen cold-blooded ladies who saw men as their tickets not to marriage and blissful domesticity but as pawns to be used to kill unwanted husbands or anybody else who stood in their way to some kind of "warped"  happiness.

 Commentators have speculated that part of the reason for this trend was the opening up of women into the workforce during war mobilization and the fear among men returning from the war that women would not accept their old roles as domestic helpmates. 

There was probably some truth to that, and these films, while meant to be entertainment, also reinforced the notion that there was something warped about a woman who wanted the same freedom men took for granted.   Or, at the very least, they also offered female viewers a chance to see some "bad girl" escapism.    Of course, the fatal woman is still around in suspense movies today but I doubt she has the impact as a character that she did to audiences back in the 1940's and early 50's.

Here's a little tribute to those films, which speaks for itself.  The first is a few minutes of "Out of the Past" with Ms. Greer as Kathie, a lady so bad she knocked off her gangster boyfriend (Kirk Douglas) and didn't even clean up around the the living room where she plugged him!   The next video is a compilation  of these ladies and their deeds set to the music of The Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale".