“She was bad. She was dangerous. I wouldn’t trust her any further than I could throw her. But, she was my kind of woman.”
-Rod Riley (Fred Astaire) in the ‘Girl Hunt’ ballet, The Band Wagon
Happy Valentine’s Day! And what better day to celebrate femme fatales, those sinuous, cold-hearted, duplicitous sirens who lead hardboiled detectives and luckless chumps to their doom. There’s usually a dash of romance in film noir, before the bullets start to fly.
The Maltese Falcon (1941) “There’s a girl here to see you… [and] she’s a knockout.” Enter the original woman to die for. Miss Ruth Wonderly (Mary Astor) is anxious to rescue her sister from the clutches of the scoundrel she’s run off with, and she needs private eye Sam Spade’s (Humphrey Bogart) help to do it. Except Miss Wonderly is really Brigid O’Shaughnessy, part of a gang of thieves desperate to lay their hands on a priceless black bird that’s the stuff that dreams are made of. Brigid is beautiful, calculating and frequently breathless to the point of hyperventilation. Spade knows she’s lying the instant she walks into his office, but he takes the case anyway—partly for the money, partly for the pleasure of picking apart her lies and partly because, despite his healthy instinct for self-preservation, Brigid is irresistible.
Double Indemnity (1944) When cocky insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) first meets Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), he sees a sultry housewife clad only in a bath towel and a cheap wig. She sees a means to an end: he’s weak, he’s pliable and he’ll do. Within days, Phyllis has seduced Walter into helping her plan her husband’s murder—a seemingly accidental death that will trigger the ‘double indemnity’ clause in his life insurance policy and ensure she receives double its worth. Phyllis is utterly mercenary, with a patina of falseness she bears with pride, and manipulates Walter, a heel hovering on the edge of respectability, with every asset at her disposal. She doesn’t have to push him off the cliff. For her, he falls willingly.
Laura (1944) In which the detective falls in love with the woman only after she’s dead. Cynical policeman Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) is called in to investigate the murder of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), a glamorous advertising executive. Tagging along is Laura’s mentor, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), an acerbic columnist who admires her less as a woman and more as his creation, a worthy addition to his collection of exquisite objet d’art. As McPherson learns more about her, he becomes obsessed with a woman he has never met and can never have. What really makes Laura so seductive, besides her portrait and Tierney’s bewitching performance, is her theme, a lustrous, haunting melody composed by David Raksin. Director Otto Preminger had settled on using Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady’, but Raksin thought the film needed original music. Alfred Newman, 20th Century Fox’s music director (and a legendary composer in his own right), persuaded Preminger to let Raksin try writing a score. He composed the now classic theme in only a single weekend.
The Big Sleep (1946) Notorious for a plot so impenetrable, even Raymond Chandler (on whose 1939 novel the film is based) couldn’t keep track of who murdered whom. But when a movie stars Bogie and Bacall at their most magnetic, who cares? An ailing millionaire hires private eye Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) to get rid of his daughter Carmen’s gambling debts. Yet Carmen’s older sister Vivian (Lauren Bacall) insists her father really wants Marlowe to find out what happened to his friend Sean Regan, who has mysteriously disappeared. Vivian is cool, elegant and unaccustomed to the insolence that is Marlowe’s stock in trade. Their constant verbal sparring, even over something as innocuous as horses, sizzles. Solving the mystery becomes an afterthought.
Out of the Past (1947) She’s a thief, a murderer and a liar. His response? “Baby, I don’t care.” Private detective Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum) lives a dull life in a small town until his past catches up with him: gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) hired him to find his girlfriend Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), who’d run off with $40,000. Instead, Jeff fell in love with her, only for her to abandon him too. A viper dressed in virginal white, Kathie holds the same fascination for Jeff that a snake does for its prey. He’ll fight for her, kill for her, turn his back on every friend he ever had for her, all with the expectation that she will walk out on him whenever it suits her. Poison never had a prettier face.
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