The African Queen: Then and Now

The African Queen: Then and Now:

Next Thursday night (September 27) hundreds of Cinemark Theatres in the USA are going to be showing John Huston's classic film, "The African Queen" (1951), on the big screen in a one day only showing starting at 2 and  7pm.
http://www.cinemark.com/cinemark-classic-series
 The film is in the American Film Institute Top  100 list and has recently undergone a major restoration.  The new version was shown last year in several theaters  around Great Britain.
People familiar with older films know this one has  a special appeal.  It was the only on-screen teaming of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn for starters, and much of the film simply an action tour de force by these characters as they try to make down a nasty stretch of jungle river to escape the German colonial army which has invaded British East Africa (the film is set at the beginnings of World War I).

It was shot on location by John Huston and his company in Uganda and the Belgian Congo.  The more difficult sequences involving seedy boat captain Charlie Allnut  (Bogart) and starchy Methodist missionary Rose Sawyer (Hepburn) were photographed at the Isleton Studios outside London.
Jeremy Arnold writes of some of the problems making the film on the Turner Classic Movies website entry of "The African Queen.
Most of the cast and crew of the film came down with dysentery while shooting in central Africa. Bogart managed to serious illness reputedly by consuming copious amounts of alcohol between shooting dates.  Hepburn later wrote a small and engaging book about her experiences on the shoot, the title of which gives you an idea just what she went through. It was released in 1987 and called "The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall, and Huston and almost Lost My Mind."     At one point Huston talked Hepburn into joining him on a pre-production elephant hunt andshe was almost killed along with the director and his guides when they found themselves in the middle of a stampede of wild animals!  She also recounts the heat, humidity, poisonous insects, snakes, crocodiles and scorpions that made the movie quite realistic buy also perilous for those involved.
Thinking about seeing this film again got me to wondering what was the fate of the boat "African Queen" itself.  Turns out if was saved by a couple in Key Largo, Florida and is still seaworthy.   The boat was originally made in England in 1912 and has survived to become a tourist attraction.
"The African  Queen" is one of the great romantic adventure films of all time, and one of my personal favorites.  I'm glad it's getting some special attention this month, and hope film fans who've never seen it or haven't watched it in a while will look it up at a screening at a Cinemark location or rent the DVD.

"My Week With Marilyn" (2011) Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Romance

Those who might be in the mood for an old-fashioned popcorn movie could do a lot worse than to see this one, a behind-the-scenes glimpse of two great talents coming together to make what was supposed to be a light-hearted comedy that had hit written all over it.

Except that it wasn't a hit and shooting the picture was not so light-hearted.

As great as Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe were in their separate careers, they brought little in the way of chemistry to the screen.

Accept that Olivier, the director and star of the 1957 film, "The Prince and the Showgirl", found the often temperamental and always-late Miss Monroe a major pain. Her acting teacher, Paula Strasberg, wife of Lee Strasberg a founder of the "Method" based Actor's Studio in New York City, ran interference between Olivier and his co-star. Her husband at the time, the great playwright Arthur Miller, was caught up in his own problems with her, exacerbated by her finding out she was the main subject of some notes he was making for a play. "She's devouring me," Miller says at one point to Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and soon he flies back to New York City to visit his kids and Sir Larry is left to try and manage her truancy and constant blown lines from the set without any help from home.



One of the best things in the film is watching Branagh (as Olivier) slowly depart from the affable and generous actor-director he purports to be when the project begins and then--a few days into the shooting--realizes that Monroe is both nearly impossible to direct and also quite irreplaceable as far as his producers are concerned. He descends from a patronizing theatrical giant into a small and agitated man mumbling savage lines from his previous screen incarnation as "Richard III".

Adding to his sense of insecurity is that fact that, despite her delaying tactics and neurosis, Monroe's "good days" on the set steal the film away from him. Somehow, in a inexplicable way, she is a natural before the camera, and the damn thing loves her--and that same love eludes him.

The main plot here follows a brief affair Monroe has with an assistant director on the film named Colin Clarke . This throws the whole hierarchy "Larry" and his American producer have carefully set up on its ear. Suddenly a non-entity is the only person on the crew Marilyn will deal with, so make that two indispensable people. Eventually the film gets made. Clarke tries to "save" Marilyn, as all men want to do when this seemingly vulnerable woman lets them into her life, but she things are a lot more complicated than that.


The whole "Olivier/Monroe Flying Circus" movie ends with a rather nice twist and so does the brief and unusual affair between the blond bombshell and young Clarke. The film is based on the latter's 1995 memoir "The Prince, the Showgirl and Me" and all I can say is that if this story is true it's amazing because the whole brief affair plays like a young male's wildest dream. Only the ending has the bite of a real fling.

Michelle Williams as Marilyn is incredible. She might even be better than the original. And that's just her walk!

Anyway, a fun movie for old time film fans, and a break from all the 3-D kid flicks and techno-action films.

The 400 Blows (1959) directed by Francois Truffaut

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

"The 400 Blows" is one of the great films of the French New Wave, a film I wished I had seen as a teenager because it captures so well that period in a boy's life when he is suspended between being effectively still a child and entering adolescence.

It is also a unique story of one youngster who lives a life of desperation, caught up in a small Paris apartment with a hostile mother and an indifferent father, and knocked about in school by teachers who are pompous martinets, quick to humiliate their pupils and slow to inspire.

There is a documentary feel to this film, as if we are prying into the life of the youngster, Antoine Doinel, played by the amazing Jean-Pierre Léaud, not seeing it acted out. When life at home becomes unbearable for him, he runs away to play hooky at the cinemas, or steals about with a friend, getting involved in the petty theft that will send him first to a police jail (in scenes inspired I believe by Alfred Hitchcock's 1957 crime drama "The Wrong Man") and then the reform school--and the final heartbreaking rejection by the mother who never wanted him born in the first place.


What could have been a tragic or melodramatic film is simply a powerful 99 minute personal statement by a director destined for other great films like "Jules and Jim"(1961), "Day for Night"(1973), and another excellent film about the unique (and soon all-too lost) world of childhood, "Small Change" (1976).

It's a matter-of-fact slice of life involving an intelligent and sensitive young boy who reads Balzac novels, smokes cigarettes, has the spunk of three ordinary kids and is equiped with a desire to live and enjoy a bit of freedom before being drafted into the military and/or the banality and conformity of the adult world.



One look at this film (I saw it first at 24 ) and you know without knowing much about writer-director Francois Truffaut that this had to be based on his own life, or someone close to him. The story is extremely intimate and the boy breathes life into a role that seems all too real. Nothing here suggests its drawn from a sociological study or the hyped 1950's "message" movie in the Hollywood tradition of Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) or "The Blackboard Jungle" (1956) and other lesser B-films of that era that lean toward exploiting the youth movement from a safe and decidedly adult perspective.

This is a singular vision of childhood without sentiment or hyper-dramatization. A must-see.

Symphony of Suspense--Alfred Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956)--Albert Hall

Of the two versions of this film Alfred Hitchcock made, I rate the earlier one, a British-made movie from 1934, as the over-all best.

Although the color is stunning in this 1956 remake, and the lead actors very engaging, this version lacks a great villain like Peter Lorre in the cast and , also, the convention of having the lead female character as a singer leads to a rather flat finale, at least for those of us who aren't all that crazy about Doris Day's big hit featured in this film, the saccharine 'Que Sara Sara".
(In the earlier version, the mother of the kidnapped child is a champion rifle marks-person.To give more away would be telling too much, but suffice to say the finale in the earlier film is a real grabber! )


Still, this version with James Stewart and Doris Day has its high points, and this amazing nine-minute sequence has to be one of them.

Using "The Cantata for Clouds", Hitchcock creates an suspenseful sequence without using words--a masterful return to the silent film that the great director began with in the 1920's.

The movie follows a certain Doctor McKenna (Stewart) his wife (Doris Day, playing a former professional singer) and their son Hank as they go on holiday in Morocco. They meet a nice French fellow who turns out to be a secret agent trying to ferret out a murderous international spy ring. When the Frenchman is stabbed in a bizarre in Marrakesh, he whispers the details of an assassination plot to the American doctor. To prevent the couple from revealing what the agent told McKenna, they kidnap his son and tell the couple to not alert the police.

The McKennas remain silent, flying to London to try and ferret out the spy ring on their own. They discover that the murder of an important diplomat is to take place in the Albert Hall during a concert.

Which leads us to this point near the end of the film. Jo McKenna has gone to The Albert Hall. Her husband is close behind her, She knows that there is an assassin there, and she also knows her son is in danger. Stewarts character has already had a narrow escape from the desperate antagonists. It's up to them to catch the killer and hope he'll lead them to their son.

I'll let the film-maker take it from there.

PS--The composer on the podium in this scene is the great Bernard Hermann, who also wrote the original score for this and several other Hitchcock classics like "Vertigo", "Psycho" and "The Birds".

The full nine-minute version of "Cantata for Clouds" was composed by Australian composer Arthur Benjamin for the 1934 film. Hermann declined to write a new score for this scene, feeling that Benjamin's original couldn't be topped.

"The Magnificent Seven" (1960) For Those Times When Five or Six Gunfighters Just Won't Cut It

John Sturges' 1960 Western "The Magnificent Seven" remains one of the most popular westerns ever made --spawning two sequels and a television series.  None of them capture the intensity or dramatic impact of this film. The story is simple--seven disparate gunfighters are all down on their luck.  Into a border town come three Mexican peasants looking for men with experience in gun-fighting  to save their village from being plundered and terrorized by a bandit and his pack of parasites.   One by one the gunfighters agree to ride to the village and  save the destitute farmers.     

The film helped make stars of Steve Mc Queen, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn and contributed to the later international stardom of Charles

 Bronson.  The film score by Elmer Bernstein is a classic as well.  Bernstein studied with the master composer Aaron Copland and he does his old teacher proud here.  

 Both this film and Akira Kurosawa's classic original "Seven Samurai" (1954)   raise the issue of why men will take up a cause that offers such little reward.  In Kurosawa's original the samurais are men facing the collapse  of feudal Japan in the late 16th Century.  Their leader fights because of honor; others fight because the farmers can offer food; some of them fight simply because this is their profession, or out of loyalty to their leader. 

The theme of a lone man coming into a small town on the edge of civilization and taming the bad guys, then riding off into the sunset is a standard Western theme.  It was one that Kurosawa--a fan of the films of Western director John Ford--took the main part of and added the code of the samurai  to create a masterpiece that introduced Torshiro Mifuni to Western audiences.  

(Here's a compilation of the 1960 film put together by Austinmillbarge22 from You Tube.) 

 

The gunmen in the  Sturges' Western are not members of any feudal class, but they are men of a dying breed, facing the fallout from  the taming of the West.  This, to me,  is the end of America's Homeric "Age of Heroes" in popular culture .  This Western was a big-budget , big screen  "last hurrah" before the bad news from the War in Vietnam changed the zeitgeist of the country.    Only John Wayne could make Westerns like this after the 1960's came to maturity--and Wayne's films  became increasingly anachronistic and stilted.  

The American version of this story seems to take place in the railroad-dominated West of the 1890s: those wide-open frontier towns that needed gunmen to keep the peace between the cow punchers and the hot-head gamblers are rapidly being tamed.  

Like the Samurai, their way of life is at an end.  The irony of the American film is that many critics and film-makers today see The Magnificent Seven as the last real American Western before television shows like "Bonanza" and "Rawhide" and their inferior cousins added to the glut of Western shows and  killed popular interest in the genre. Another factor was the rise of the ultra nihilist and violent "Spaghetti Westerns" of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone changed the genre forever. 

When Akira Kurosawa saw the 1960 remake of his masterpiece, he sent a gift to John Sturges in appreciation--a ceremonial Japanese sword.  

Elvis - "Surrender" (1960), a video co-starring a plethora of beautiful women

This is Elvis' version of "Come Back to Sorrento", one of my favorite of his tunes.
Recorded in October of 1960, it made Number One for two weeks in America and four weeks in the UK.

Some of the movies featured in the video give strong evidence to my theory that, to-wit:

(a) Elvis made a lot of movies, only some of them good, and quite a few of them not-so-good.

(b) He got to kiss so many attractive ladies, and get paid for it, that one cannot help but conclude he was one Lucky B*stard!

Here's some you might recognize from the clips.

"Change of a Habit" (1968) --Elvis as a "hip" doctor down in the New York ghettos. Mary Tyler Moore is the nurse with the guitar. This is really not so good, but the idea of black people even BEING in an Elvis movie I think wasa cultural break-through of sorts.


"Wild in the Country" (1961) One of his best films, as a sort-of back country would-be writer/motorcycle enthusiast/sex maniac , involved with Hope Lange, Tuesday Weld and Millie Perkins-I think all at once!

"Jailhouse Rock" (1957) --Another one of those rare good Elvis films. Again he plays a country boy who this time gets on the wrong side of the law.

"And now, the deluge":

Girls, Girls, Girls--1962
"Speedway"--1965
"Live a Little, Love a Little"--1968
"The Trouble with Girls"--1969
"Fun in Acapulco"--1963

The last five movies are pretty much dreck. I know. I watched them as a kid on Saturday afternoon television. Elvis was already "past it" more than a bit, but kids like me watched his movies to get tips on how to woo girls. Frankly, "The King" makes it look a lot easier than it really is for ordinary mortal men.

Perhaps I should have spent less time watching the movies and just taken up the guitar.

Also...
Milton Berle Show ( Elvis singing Hound Dog) 1956 or abouts...

Theme from "A Summer Place" (1959)

Since it's been getting quite hot up here in the Rogue Valley of Oregon, what we in the Northern Hemispheres call "Summer", I've thinking quite a lot about going the 120 miles or so out to the Coast where my wife and I could escape the 100 degree heat for a spell. It's just not possible right now. But, at work recently, this song came on the radio and I've decided this is my official Summer Song. My apologies to Fred and all other Jimmy Buffett fans from "Margaritaville". Here's the Max Steiner composition from the 1959 film that was arranged into a major hit by Percy Faith the following year.

Errol Flynn: The Centenary of Hollywood's "Tasmanian Devil"

David Niven and Errol Flynn were close friends in Hollywood's Golden Era (just before World War II) and shared a home in Beverly Hills as bachelors about town. (Errol was a semi-bachelor, technically, since he was just separated from his first-wife, the long-forgotten Lili Damita.)  Between squiring ladies about town and going on weekend sailing expeditions in the Santa Catalina Channel off Los Angeles-sometimes with a nearly all-female crew--they also did films at Warner Bros  they were teamed up for "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1936) and a remake of the 1930 film, "The Dawn Patrol", filmed eight years later.  

Niven said of his friend, whom he saw sporadically after the Second World War and unto the latter's death in 1959:

"The great thing about Errol was you always knew exactly where you stood with him because he always let you down.  He let himself down, too, from time to time, but that was his prerogative and he thoroughly enjoyed causing turmoil for himself and his friends."

He was born almost exactly a century ago (June 20,1909) in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Recently one of his three children, Rory Flynn, went back to Hobart for a film festival and ball celebrating the island's most famous former resident on the centennial of his birth:

If you're interested, here's more on that recent event from an official website: 

 http://www.inlikeflynn.com/

     

As a youth he became a first-rate amateur boxer, shipping clerk, boat captain, plantation supervisor (on a rubber enterprise in New Guinea), gold prospector, etc.,  and later found his way to England, leaving in his wake a capacity for seducing women and living beyond his means. 

  He went into  acting on the advice of friends.  Plucked from the theatrical provinces to appear in a couple small British films, he was soon flown to Hollywood by a Warners' scout.  A year after his arrival he was a major star, thanks to "Captain Blood" (1935), a costume adventure that cemented his reputation.  He also did a variety of other films--straight dramas, screwball comedies, a lot of Westerns, et al, but it was as Robin Hood and the Elizabethan "sea hawk" John Thorpe that made him one of the biggest stars in the world. 

His desire for younger women brought infamy in two statutory rape trials, one famous one in Hollywood and another in France.  He escaped being found guilty thanks to having good lawyers and the fact that some of the young ladies were more opportunists than innocents. Along the way, he tried marrying and settling down and having children, but that never lasted long.  

   It seems he never quite learned--or could control his desires--for too much.  Too much alcohol.  Too many drugs. (He probably would have smoked crack if somebody had invented it back then--he settled for regular cocaine.)  Too many young ladies, married women, etc ,etc.  In the latter case it certainly is easy to judge him too harshly--how could I know what temptations I could withstand  were I handsome and driven as he was to seek excitement in everyday life?    

The other side of Errol Flynn is also interesting.  He found time to write three books (two novels, and a memoir "My Wicked Wicked Ways", co-written with Earl Conrad) do some oceanography--his father was a professor of marine biology back in Hobart, and appeared at USO shows in Alaska and other remote spots during World War II and the Korean War. 

 Biographers note that Flynn himself was given an Army induction physical in California in 1942 and was declared ineligible to serve due to an enlarged heart, tuberculous and a few other lingering illnesses picked up from  his days in the New Guinea ports and jungles.  He later said not being in the war was his greatest regret.  I rather think it was at least a major regret since he went by his own volition to Spain during the Spanish Civil War as a sort of celebrity journalist and in 1958 he went into the guerrilla hideaway of Fidel Castro for an interview on Cuba. 

The author Charles Higham claimed in a bestselling 1981 book "'The Secret Life of Errol Flynn"  that Flynn had been a Nazi spy.  That he knew a shadowy German doctor named Hermann Erben, was was either a Nazi or a Communist pretending to be a Nazi depending on the source you look up.  Simple guilt by association. (Flynn was investigated by the J Edgar Hoover's  FBI, but so was any other star, especially one who raised a bit of hell in his off-hours.)  

 Higham is the type to always put a scandal in his books to sell more copies.  No one who knew Flynn from those days and were still around to refute the book, including David Niven and the rough-and-tumble actors and stuntmen Flynn hung around with, believed such a curious theory.  

The most important thing about Errol Flynn today is the legacy of great films he played an intergal part in. Besides great supporting casts and outstanding directors and composers, he is the lynchpin of exciting movies like "The Adventures of Robin Hood", "Gentleman Jim", and "The Sea Hawk".  His non adventurous roles, such as that of Lord Soames in "The Forsyth Saga" (1949) and as an older adventure seeker in  "The Sun Also Rises" also proved he had real talent to move an audience without need of gun or fencing foil. His persona is as recognizable of John Wayne's steely American gunfighter or as Clint Eastwood's anti-heroes.  And, for my money,as natural for the roles he played as the both of them.     

Here's Flynn cleaning up an old Spanish bed and breakfast when the service turns sour in "The Adventures of Don Juan" (1949). Note the great film score by Max Steiner.  He and the magnificent Erich Wolfgang Korngold did the scores for all the best Flynn vehicles, as well as a variety of other film work.   

Alfred Hitchcock and "The Man In A Spot"

Sir Alfred Hitchcock made over 50-odd movies, several of which are some of the best cinematic thrillers ever produced, either in the UK or Hollywood.  Of all the different variations on the thrillers genre he succeeded at, one of the most satisfying for me were his films about, as he put in an interview, "The Man in A Spot".  

The basic plot for this story is simple and existed long Hitchcock mastered it: an ordinary but intelligent fellow finds himself in over his head, usually accused of a murder or two he didn't commit, despite the fact that the circumstantial evidence indites him in the eyes of the police.  To save himself, he must not only flee from the police inspectoprs who are dead set to hang him, but also find the real killer(s).  Along the way, he meets a beautiful lady (usually a blond) who is convinced he's the killer.  Through the circumstances of being thrown together--or literally handcuffed together, as in the case of Robert Donat and Madelaine Carroll in "The 39 Steps"--she discovers he's really an innocent man, and takes on the task of helping him stay out of jail and catch the real culprits.

He's a clip from "The 39 Steps" (1935), a film which has been adapted into a recent award-winning  comic play that gained success on the West End and now on Broadway.  Based on a John Buchan novella, this was the 35-year old director's first international success and established him as an "A"-list director.

 In this scene, fugitive Richard Hannay (Donat) plays a nice Canadian ex-pat in London who helps a female stranger out with a chaste place to stay the night after she begs for his help at a local music hall.  The poor chap.  He wakes up the next morning to find his chivalry unrewarded: she's been murdered in his bedroom (through no fault of his own. ) He escapes via a train (The Highland Express) but a squad of policemen  catch up to him on the railway.  

 

 

Twenty-four years later: same situation almost, and another train scene. It's  from "North By Northwest" (1959) .  This time the wanted man is Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant). He manages to have a more successful tete-a-tete with a lady on a train than Hannay.  I love the look on Grant's face in this scene when he realizes Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) is decidedly NOT playing hard to get on the 20th Century Limited. 

Funny, but in all my youthful train trips in and around the States, I don't remember anything close to this type of personal service available on Amtrak.    No brook trout.  No cocktails.  No blonds. *Sigh*

  

    

 

Finally, here's a bit more of the "man on the spot" sub-genre. It's from Hitchcock's 1942 version of this familar plot, a  lesser known film called "Saboteur" with Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane and Norman Lloyd as the guy who framed Cummings character, Barry Kane, for a murder in a defense plant in California. The climax of he film takes place at a studio mock-up of the Statue of Liberty, fulfiling Hitchcock's fondness for   placing scenes at the landmarks of American or British Power and Influence.  There's always something a little sinister about these places after you've seen a film like this.

 

 

Good Jazz Beats All-- Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye in "The Five Pennies"

Ever watch a hum-drum movie one late night on the tube, get ready to go to bed but suddenly comes a scene that just makes you happy? Such is the case for this musical duet by the great Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong and Danny Kaye. I didn't think the movie was that enjoyable--strictly for Danny Kaye fans I guess--but when Louis Armstrong is on screen with the star of the show, it's a real moment in music and movie-making. I taped the movie the next time it came around on cable just to watch this "When the Saints Go Marching In" sequence again.

"The Five Pennies" is just a typical 1950's sentimental biopic The plot is about a real-life 1920's white jazz guy named Red Nichols and the film evokes the music and zeitgeist of America's first Jazz Age about as well as I sing Wagner.
The storyline is similar to a lot of movies made in the wake of the success of "The Glenn Miller Story" (1955) with James Stewart: a successful musician (or actor , or athlete, or yoga instructor, whatever) rises up from obscurity to the spotlight, then has to deal with the loss/disaffection of his faithful wife and cute little kids, his fair-weather friends, the end of his musical career by changing tastes in pop culture, alcoholism, egotism, his bad temper, itchy skin, a German U-Boat attack on his yacht, a persistant case of dandruff caused by black-market diluted shampoo, yada-yada-yada. Well, if you've seen a movie like it, then you get the idea. But here's the best three minutes in the film and, if you like jazz and a little scat singing, you've come to the right place.

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".    

 

 

Picnic (1955)--William Holden and Kim Novak

One of the best romantic scenes in Hollywood history--alas, too subtle in sexuality by today's standards. IYou'll think me a prude, but I'm sorry we don't see something along these lines more often in modern films. There's a lot of story here and very few words.
I remember this was one of my parents' favorite movies and I thought it a crashing bore when I first saw it at age 12. Humphrey Bogart sending Mary Astor off to the gallows for killing his detective partner in "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) was my idea of an good late show love story.

Now I see this and pine a bit for a lost time in cinema when people could read feelings rather than witness people stripping off each others' clothes in every "love scene".