Women in Film Noir
The original film noir cycle appeared at a time when gender roles in American society were in great flux, partly because of the role played by women in entering the workplace to substitute for men who were away at war and partly because of the sweeping changes in American society as a whole. And, while Second Wave feminism is generally seen as beginning with the women’s movement of the 1960s, it is also clear that the beginnings of this movement were already taking shape in the 1950s. It is not surprising that the changing roles of women in American society in the 1940s and 1950s were reflected in American culture in a number of ways. It is also not surprising that film noir, one of the edgiest forms of American cultural production in the 1940s and 1950s, would also be one of the places in which the changing roles available to women would be reflected most clearly. In this case, the figure of the femme fatale—a strong, capable woman who is typically more than an intellectual match for the men she encounters—was clearly a step forward in the portrayal of the agency of women in American film, even if the typically amoral (or even downright evil) nature of the femme fatale made this advance a problematic one[1].
Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson, in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) set a high standard for women in film noir, remaining to this day perhaps the best-known example of the film noir femme fatale. Later films, such as Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950)—with Peggy Cummins as Annie Laurie Starr and Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950)—with Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond—would help the femme fatale character to evolve in some very interesting directions. All three of those films will be discussed in detail in this course.
Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945) features another of the most important representations of women in film noir. Here, the title character (probably the most important female noir protagonist) is played by screen legend Joan Crawford, who won an Oscar for the role. Mildred is the faithful and hardworking wife of an unsuccessful husband, Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett). She has devoted her entire adult life to this marriage; when it breaks down, she resolves to make it on her own and to give her daughters the things they need, beginning by finding a job as a waitress. Eventually, though, Mildred parlays this first job into a career as a successful restauranteur, along the way marrying the (now poor) scion of an old, wealthy family, Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). When flirtations flare between Monte and Mildred’s spoiled daughter Veda (Ann Blythe), a sort of young femme fatale in training, Veda and her mother become estranged. Ultimately, the whole story turns to tragedy.
Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel (1945) features Dana Andrews as Eric Stanton, an on-the-make drifter who gets stranded in the sleepy California town of Walton, lacking the $2.25 bus fare that would take him on to San Francisco, his intended destination. In Walton he goes into Pop’s Diner, where he encounters the eponymous aging proprietor (played by Percy Kilbride), who wiles away his days sick with love for his young employee, Stella (Linda Darnell). The dazzling Stella, in fact, seems to be a romantic target of many of the town’s men, but she is no naïf waiting for love. In fact, the cynical, tough-talking Stella (the femme fataleof the piece) doesn’t appear to believe in love at all. She just wants someone to marry her and provide her with a home so that she can stop working in the diner and have her own life. Stanton, who purports to be a formerly successful New York PR man, immediately falls for Stella and begins to employ all of his skills in an attempt to win her over. Recognizing what she wants, he manages to get her to agree to marry him on the condition that he come up with the money to buy a house and get a start in their new life together.
Given that Stanton can’t actually even afford bus fare, this promise predictably leads to tragedy—in some very noir ways. The single-minded Stella and the fallen Stanton are classic noir characters, just as the Walton-San Francisco nexus provides some classic noir settings, while the mixture of romance, cynicism, corruption, and violence provides some classic noir thematics. It is also typical of film noir that the conniving Stanton and the gold-digging Stella are both rather sympathetic figures whose cynicism is appropriate to the world in which they live. Stella, in fact, is the real center of this film, and her depiction as a strong woman who knows what she wants and pursues it doggedly and honestly, refusing to be distracted by the longings of any of her lovesick suitors, is indicative of the kinds of female characters often found in film noir. That her dreams are so modest and pedestrian only makes her predicament more poignant, serving as a reminder of the limited opportunities open to women in the America of the 1940s.
Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946) is a true classic of film noir. It is also the film that made Rita Hayworth, who plays the title character, the top-sex-symbol in Hollywood in the late 1940s. Gilda herself is one of the most famous of all femmes fatales, and she is very complex character, as much victim as villain. In a sense, Gilda is almost pure sex object—except that she is not only in on her objectification, but largely in control of it. In many ways, she exemplifies woman as object; in many others, she exemplifies Judith Butler’s notion of the performance of gender. She just happens to choose, for her own purposes, to perform a role of woman-as-conventional-sex-object. She’s strong, she’s wily, she’s fierce, she’s pitiless, treating men as objects as well and using them at least as much as they use her. In fact, if the film has a flaw, it’s that male lead Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) seems completely out of his league with Gilda, partly because the serviceable but unimposing Ford is so overshadowed by Hayworth. Yet Gilda is also vulnerable and sweet at her core, acting more out of her own hurt and loss than any genuine malice. In short, she’s a collection of feminine stereotypes, but a very interesting and complex collection whose own contradictions point out the contradictions in those stereotypes themselves. Perhaps the most memorable moment in this film is Hayworth’s ultra-sexy performance of “Put the Blame on Mame,” with its central suggestion that all of the world’s disasters are ultimately caused by conniving women. Just a little interpretive twist, though, and it’s a critique of the way men have so often tried to blame things on women unfairly.
1946 also saw the release of another woman-centered noir featuring one of Hollywood’s most glamorous leading ladies. However, Hedy Lamarr, the star of The Strange Woman, was continually pushed to the margins of Hollywood, partly due to never overcoming the stigma of having appeared in the “shocking” European film Ecstasy (1933) as a teenager and partly due to never fully overcoming her Austrian accent. But Lamarr was resourceful and brilliant, as well as beautiful (one of her ideas provided a key technological basis for the later development of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies), so she decided to form her own production company, which would make films in which she could star without dealing with the usual Hollywood nonsense. That effort was not notably successful, but The Strange Woman is actually a gem, no doubt partly due to the fact that Lamarr nabbed fellow Austrian ex-pat Edgar Ulmer (who had himself long been exiled to the margins of the film industry) to direct. The result is a noir film set in a New England town, mostly in the 1830s, though the town has much of the texture of the Wild West about it. That setting alone makes the film an unusual noir film, but noir it is, with Lamarr’s Jenny Hager serving as a particularly interesting femme fatale, partly because she is also the protagonist and not simply a dangerous woman who brings down the protagonist. She’s also a complex figure: absolutely ruthless in her willingness to exploit men to help her get beyond her difficult beginnings in life, Hager can also be generous and kind, while her backstory at least provides an explanation from her ruthlessness. The film has a bit of a hokey ending, but up until then it’s a solid noir, despite the historical setting. And Lamarr is mesmerizing on screen, as usual.
Completing the trio of femme fatale noirs from 1946, Lana Turner is also mesmerizing in Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on James M. Cain’s 1934 novel. The second half of this film gets a bit bogged down in legalistic maneuvers and excessive plot twists, but the first half is classic noir, dominated by Turner as the sultry Cora Smith, a classic example of the femme fatale who is driven by an American ideology that has taught her she can’t possibly be happy unless she’s rich. She’s also a classic example of the femme fatale as siren: a poor girl who has never had anything going for her but her looks, she uses those looks to good effect to reel in drifter Frank Chambers (John Garfield), who just happens by the roadside diner and gas station that Cora runs with her aging husband Nick (Cecil Kellaway). Cora then induces Frank to help her kill Nick, unleashing a series of unintended consequences that ultimately dooms them all.
Just as Cora is a complex character who is both victim and villain, the crime-doesn’t-pay message of this film is more complex than it first appears. For one thing, the legal system itself is represented as corrupt and heartless. Frank’s impending execution for a crime he didn’t commit after he earlier escaped execution for one he did is thus not a simple case of poetic justice: it also suggests that, in modern America, it is simply impossible for individuals to beat the system—especially unconnected working-class individuals like Frank and Cora.
Jean Negulesco’s Road House (1948) is another woman-centric film that revolves around singer Lily Stevens (Ida Lupino), who is brought in from Chicago by roadhouse owner Jefty Robbins (Richard Widmark) to entertain the patrons at his establishment, located somewhere near the Canadian border. It turns out, however, that Robbins has a habit of recruiting female singers as sexual targets, but Stevens turns out to a match for him. Not only does she repel his advances, but she begins a relationship with the roadhouse’s manager, Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde). The smarmy Robbins concocts a plot to frame Morgan and have him sent to prison, so that he can have Stevens for himself. Stevens, though, is still a match for him and ends up shooting him down in self-defense, while evidence surfaces that will clear Morgan. Road House is an interesting drama with some very effective rapid-fire noir dialogue, though Lupino’s musical performances as Stevens are a highlight of the film, as is the depiction of Stevens as a strong, independent female who can very much take care of herself. Widmark, meanwhile, delivers another strong performance as a psychopathic character with a mad giggle, repeating (in a slightly toned-down form) the persona he had created a year earlier in Kiss of Death.
In Byron Haskin’s Too Late for Tears (1949), Lizabeth Scott—who often plays the (relatively) good girl in noir films—gets to be the villain, even though she is at least partly the victim of circumstances. When a satchel containing $60,000 literally falls into the laps of Scott’s Jane Palmer and husband Alan (Arthur Kennedy), he wants to turn it into the cops, but she wants to keep it to make their lives financially easier. After all, she still bitterly remembers her own difficult childhood. As she herself puts it: “It wasn’t because we were poor, not hungry poor at least. I suppose it was worse, far worse. We were white collar poor, middle-class poor. The people who can’t quite keep up with the Joneses and die a little every day because they can’t.” The money, as it turns out, was meant as a blackmail payment to the smarmy Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea), who inevitably shows up to retrieve the money. Jane (apparently accidentally) shoots and kills Alan, then she intentionally poisons Fuller to get him off her back. She tries to kill Alan’s sister Kathy (Christine Miller) as well, so by this time it is no real surprise when we learn that she apparently killed her first husband as well. She escapes to Mexico with the loot and then accidentally falls to her death as the Mexican police, tipped off by the brother of her first husband (played by Don DeFore), close in. A bit sloppy around the edges, this film still effectively presents Jane as a surprisingly deadly villain—but also as a victim of the American middle-class drive for upward mobility.
The File on Thelma Jordon (1950), directed by Robert Siodmak, is a classic case of a film noir built around a femme fatale character, in this case the character of the title, played by Barbara Stanwyck, one of the greatest enactors of the femme fatale role. The plot is simple: Jordon conspires with her shady boyfriend Tony Laredo (Richard Rober) to murder her Aunt Vera (Gertrude W. Hoffmann) and inherit a fortune for the two of them. What’s worse, in order to assure herself of getting away with the murder, she connives to begin an affair with Assistant DA Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey), precisely so that she can count on Marshall to sabotage the prosecution should she go to trial. Marshall is a classic film noir character: he is not evil, just restless and bored with his marriage, which makes him easy pickings for Jordon, who has all the wiles of the typical femme fatale, if not all the ruthlessness. The plan thus works like a charm—except that Jordon has a change of heart in the end. She shocks Marshall by confessing the entire plot, then leaving him behind as she goes away with Laredo to enjoy the fruits of their deceit. Then, suddenly overcome by guilt, she intentionally causes their car to crash. Laredo is killed, and she is mortally injured. Before she dies, though, Jordon confesses to all her crimes, though she does not finger her accomplice (Marshall), saying she will not identify him because she loves him. Nevertheless, Marshall is left a broken man as the film ends, his life shattered and his career ruined.
In Roy Rowland’s Witness to Murder (1954), the protagonist spots a murder being committed in another apartment across the way, but then has trouble convincing the police that the murder even occurred. The film is thus strikingly similar to Hitchcock’s much admired Rear Window, which was released later in the same year. However, Witness to Murder features a female protagonist, played by noir goddess Stanwyck, introducing some additional gender-related themes. For example, though the police detective investigating the case is a bit sweet on Stnwyck’s character, it is clear that he initially dismisses her account of the crime because of her gender. The film also includes another common noir theme in that the killer (played with delightful menace by George Sanders) is a former Nazi. But what really makes this one a great noir film is the outstanding cinematography of John Alton, which is so effective that many true fans of noir might find that Witness to Murder is actually better than Rear Window, though the latter obviously has a loftier reputation in film history.
Women in Neo-Noir Film
Given that neo-noir film arose at about the same time as the women’s movement of the 1960s, it should come as no surprise that women were often been represented in interesting new ways in neo-noir films. Thus, roles other than that of the femme fatale became more available to women in neo-noir film, even though the figure of the femme fatale remains absolutely crucial to the genre[2]. A landmark film such Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), which will be discussed in detail in this course, mimics Double Indemnity in many ways—so many that it is clearly not a revisionary noir. But the mismatch between its femme fatale (Kathleen Turner’s Matty Walker) and its lost-man point-of-view character (William Hurt’s Ned Racine) is far greater than that between Phyllis Dietrichson and Walter Neff—partly because Ned is more hapless than Walter and partly because Matty is even more ruthless and nefarious than Phyllis. Similarly, the femme fatale of John Dahl’s The Last Seduction (1994)—Linda Fiorentino’s Bridget Gregory—is always several steps ahead of the male characters she encounters. Both Matty and Bridget go well beyond the original femmes fatales in the way they so explicitly use sex as a tool of manipulation, then actually triumph and are not punished for their nefarious ways. Neither, however, really seems to go beyond the original noir films in ways that would make us understand those films differently.
Body Heat and The Last Seduction participated in a wave of “erotic thrillers” that was one of the key elements of the representation of women in neo-noir film. These two films were part of a wave of neo-noir “erotic thrillers” that also included such films as Body Double (1984), Fatal Attraction (1987), The Hot Spot (1990), Shattered (1991), A Kiss Before Dying (1991), Unlawful Entry (1992), Malice (1993), Indecent Proposal (1993), Sliver (1993), and Disclosure (1994). In general, though, the revision of noir conventions in these erotic thrillers is fairly weak, consisting mostly of things the original noir films might have done if not for the limitations dictated by the Production Code.
Meanwhile, neo-noir films featuring women have continued to appear in the twenty-first century. Brian DePalma’s Femme Fatale (2002) is overtly linked to the original noir cycle, both in its title and in the fact that the majority of its action turns out to be an extended dream sequence that is partly inspired by a viewing of Double Indemnity on the part of its title character (played by Rebecca Romijn). However, most of the film doesn’t really look or feel all that much like film noir, and the film certainly doesn’t engage Double Indemnity or other original noir films in any kind of critical dialogue. Meanwhile, while Romijn’s character is both seductive and formidable (and an international jewel thief), she really does little to revise our understanding of the original femme fatale characters. Thus, while it is true that the film’s use of Double Indemnity is so gimmicky as to weaken any nostalgia effect, this film is clearly better regarded as neo-noir, rather than revisionary noir.
Deon Taylor’s Fatale (2020) also calls attention to its central femme fatale character (and almost gives away its central plot twist) via its title. That character herself breaks some decidedly new ground relative to the femme fatale characters in the original noir cycle. As played by Oscar-winning actress Hilary Swank, Val Quinlan is not only a femme fatale but also a police detective, which would never happen in the original noir films. The film’s male lead, played by Michael Ealy, is Derrick Tyler, a successful sports agent whose seemingly wonderful life is disrupted by marital troubles that lead him to even worse troubles when he takes a business trip to Vegas, then hooks up with Quinlan, having no idea that she is a police detective or that she is from Los Angeles, where he lives. After Tyler returns to L.A., Quinlan is assigned to investigate a break-in at his home, which sets in motion a series of twists and turns that are made significantly more serious by the fact that Quinlan is not a woman to be trifled with and cast aside, having more than a little bit of Alex Forrest in her character. She is also a strong character who is perfectly capable of carrying out her own plots, rather than simply to lure a man into doing it for her (though she does that, too). This film also goes beyond anything in the original noir cycle in that Tyler is black, while Quinlan is white, but race is essentially treated as a non-issue in this film (which in itself might be seen as a step forward). All in all, though, this film’s updates to noir motifs do relatively little to revise our understanding of the original noir cycle.
Women in Revisionary Noir Film
The roles played by women in revisionary noir film have extended well beyond what is seen in neo-noir film, though many of these films have simply involved a greater frankness in the exploration of certain sexual themes. For example, it seems appropriate to consider at least one film from the erotic thriller cycle of the 1980s and 1990s—Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992)—to be a revisionary noir film largely for this reason, largely for its explicit treatment of sexuality, including lesbian sexuality. At the same time, its central female character, Catherine Tramell is extremely intelligent and well educated, giving her tools for the manipulation of men that go well beyond her considerable physical charms. This film also introduces a sort of metafictional wrinkle by having femme fatale Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) be a novelist who uses her noirish encounters as fodder for her fiction. Finally, some of the narrative twists in Basic Instinct revise the narrative conventions of film noir in unusually strong ways[3].
A number of recent noir films qualify as revisionary because their treatment of specific social issues is so significantly updated beyond what is found in the original noir cycle that they ask us to rethink the treatment of those same issues in the original noir films. Basic Instinct, for example, is joined by films such as Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003), David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014), Steve McQueen’s Widows (2018), and Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (2020) in presenting women characters as smart, independent, and capable, with considerable agency (though that agency is often—but not always—put to ill use). To this list one might add Ridley Scott’s stylish The Counselor (2013), which adds to the legacy of noir films involving Mexico or the U.S.-Mexican border[4] but is probably most interesting for its particularly sexy, effecicient, and ruthless femme fatale (played by Cameron Diaz), who emerges triumphant from a web of schemes that leaves most of the characters played by the film’s high-profile cast addition dead by spectacular means.
Finally, one might also note films such as Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer (2018), which features Nicole Kidman as a Los Angeles police detective, and John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal (2022), which features Aubrey Plaza in the title role as a young woman struggling so mightily to pay off her student loans that she is driven into crime, where she ultimately achieves a lucrative career. In a sense, the women characters in these revisionary noir films do very much what the women in the original noir films attempted to do, but they go so far beyond those original films that they highlight the severely limited way the original noir films were able to portray women. It is not entirely clear whether this sort of revision makes the original noir films seem more daring or less daring in their portrayal of women characters, but it is fairly clear that these newer films can at least open up a debate on such questions. Meanwhile, it is not insignificant that many of these revisionary noir films were directed by women[5], a phenomenon that promises to expand in the future[6]. Gone Girl will be discussed in detail in this course.
Works Cited
Covey, William. “Girl Power: Female-Centered Neo-Noir.” Film Noir Reader 2. Edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, Limelight Editions, 2004.pp. 311–28.
Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. Women in Film Noir. New Edition, BFI Publishing, 1998.
Silver, Alain and James Ursini. Film Noir Fatal Women. Silman-James, 2022.
Notes
[1] The figure of the femme fatale has been widely featured in critical commentary on film noir. See, for example, the book-length study by Silver and Ursini—who choose to move from the conventional French-originated term “femme fatale” to a straight English translation as “fatal woman” (Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Fatal Women). For broader coverage of women in film noir, see the collection edited by E. Ann Kaplan.
[2] See Covey for a survey of women-centered neo-noir films, focusing primarily on films featuring characters other than the femme fatale (on the basis of the fact that the femme fatale character had not changed all that much since the original noir films).
[3] Another film by Verhoeven, 1995’s Showgirls, could also be considered a revisionary noir, if only because of the extent to which it features sexually provocative nudity, something that made it the first NC-17 film to be widely distributed in mainstream theaters. Originally rejected by critics as a sort of soft-core pornography, the critical standing of this film has risen substantially in recent years. Any revisions to our understanding of the original noir films due to this film would probably be rather minor, though its representation of women goes beyond mere nudity. For example, its protagonist, showgirl Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley), proves quite formidable in seeking violent revenge against a man who brutally rapes one of her friends.
[4] Other films in this category include Out of the Past (1947), Border Incident (1949), Where Danger Lives (1950), and Touch of Evil (1958). It should also be added that Mexican film has a rich noir tradition of its own.
[5] In addition, both Gone Girl and Widows were written or co-written by Gillian Flynn, a key novelist in the phenomenon known as “chick noir”—noir novels written by women and centering on women characters.
[6] The original noir films, of course, were almost exclusively directed by men, with the lone exception being Ida Lupino, who not only acted in several important noir films but also directed several films during the original noir period. One of these, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), is a noir classic. Women directors were only slightly more prominent in neo-noir, helming such relatively obscure films as Mary Lambert’s Siesta (1987) and Katt Shea Rubin’s Stripped to Kill (1987), and Karen Arthur’s Lady Beware (1987). The most important woman director of neo-noir was Kathryn Bigelow, who directed a series of films with prominent noir elements early in her career, though none are classic examples of neo-noir. These films include The Loveless (1981), Near Dark (1987), Blue Steel (1990), Point Break (1991), and Strange Days (1995).