Film Title
and Director
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Femme Fatale
|
Film Description
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Example
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The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
d. Lewis Milestone |
Martha Ivers
(Barbara Stanwyck) |
This sordid and noirish melodrama told about three childhood friends who were brought together 18 years later for a climactic denouement regarding a murderous and guilty secret from the past; the film opened in 1928 with young heiress Martha Ivers (Janis Wilson) attempting to run away with her street-smart boyfriend at the time Sam Masterson (Darryl Hickman); when brought home and provoked, she bludgeoned her tyrannically domineering, mean-spirited, wealthy Aunt Iverson (Judith Anderson) to death (on a flight of stairs where she tumbled to her death) during a raging thunderstorm - for killing her cat Bundles with a cane; the murder was witnessed (possibly?) by Sam who fled town and by young Walter O'Neil (Mickey Kuhn), the son of Martha's tutor - who lied about the killing to save Martha; Walter's scheming father Mr. O'Neil (Roman Bohnen) through blackmail framed and condemned an innocent man for the death of the Aunt, in exchange for Martha marrying Walter; the love triangle clashed when they were brought together again almost two decades later; single-minded, predatory, self-interested and determined femme fatale Martha (Barbara Stanwyck) - who had lovelessly married alcoholic district attorney Walter (Kirk Douglas) and now dominated everything in the small steelworks town - was still attracted to her former beau Sam (Van Heflin) when he returned, although she feared his knowledge of the awful crime and would try blackmail; Martha decided, however, to seduce Sam and then have him heartlessly kill her weak-willed husband ("Now, Sam. Do it now. Set me free. Set both of us free...Oh, Sam, it can be so easy"), but Sam refused ("I've never murdered"); she pulled a gun on Sam and claimed she could kill him with a charge of self-defense, but couldn't pull the trigger as he left and told them: "I feel sorry for you, both of you"; the shock double-suicide ending included Martha's death when she pulled the trigger herself as her jealous and drunk husband Walter held a gun to her stomach during a deadly embrace - and then with her draped limply in his arms, shot himself to death |
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Born to Kill (1947)
d. Robert Wise |
Helen Trent
(Claire Trevor) |
Robert Wise's dark, racy (divorce, sex and adultery), amoral and noirish crime melodrama was based on James Gunn's novel Deadlier Than the Male; it opened in Reno with a cold-blooded double-murder of his girlfriend Laury Palmer (Isabel Jewell) and male date (Tony Barrett), committed by jealously enraged, megalomaniacal bad guy Sam Wilde (Lawrence Tierney) - an irresistible male femme fatale with a killer instinct! - a reversal of the typical noir pattern; the wealthy, worldly and beautiful socialite Helen Brent (Claire Trevor), in Reno for a divorce, discovered the bodies on a kitchen floor but didn't report them to police, because she had plans to travel to San Francisco to marry wealthy fiancee Fred Grover (Phillip Terry); when the two fled town separately, they found themselves on the same train and sexually interested in each other - she was drawn to the murderer, as the film's tagline described their relationship: "The coldest killer a woman ever loved"; Sam married her affluent newspaper heiress foster-sister Georgia Staples (Audrey Long), although he maintained an illicit sexual relationship with Helen - his lustful and passionate "soulmate"; both repelled and attracted to Sam, Helen hinted to seedy private detective Matthew Arnett (Walter Slezak) trailing Sam that he was a remorseless murderer, while still offering him $15,000 to supress evidence against Sam; in one repellent scene, Helen and Sam embraced in a kitchen while gleefully reminiscing about the double-murder; by film's end, an enraged Sam fatally shot Helen through a door just before he was killed by police gunfire, with her final thought about how her fiancee Fred hadn't saved her from being irresistibly drawn to Sam: "Fred was right...this time I didn't land on my feet" |
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Dead Reckoning (1947)
d. John Cromwell |
Coral 'Dusty' Chandler
(Lizabeth Scott) |
This overly complex film noir about doomed romance, conspiracy and betrayal was told in flashback by returning WWII military paratrooper veteran Capt. Warren 'Rip' Murdock (Humphrey Bogart); he and his army buddy Sgt. Johnny Drake (William Prince) were to be decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor and Distinguished Service Cross; enroute to Washington to receive their war service honors, Drake told Murdock that he was haunted by a blonde in his past, and was advised: "Johnny, why don’t you get rid of the grief you’ve got for that blonde, whoever she is? Every mile we go, you sweat worse with the same pain. Didn’t I tell you all females are the same with their faces washed?"; Drake disappeared from the train in Philadelphia when photographers and news-reporters appeared; Rip traced Drake to his sultry southern Gulf City hometown where he learned that Drake had recently been killed in a fiery car accident; digging through Drake's past, he learned that he had been accused of murder a few years before the end of the war when involved in a love-triangle, and fled to join the Army with a fake name (his real name was Johnny Preston); in a memorable entrance scene, Rip found Drake's blonde ex-lover Mrs. Coral 'Dusty' Chandler (Lizabeth Scott) - a cabaret lounge singer ("Cinderella with a husky voice") at the Sanctuary Club owned by gangster Martinelli (Morris Carnovsky); the camera panned up as she prepared to smoke a cigarette - and Rip held out a match to the alluring femme fatale; in voice-over, Rip reflected: "I hated every part of her. I couldn't figure her out yet. I wanted to see her the way Johnny had. I wanted to hear that song of hers with Johnny's ears. Maybe she was alright. And maybe Christmas comes in July, but I didn't believe it"; a letter written by Johnny before he died was thought to hold clues to the case; Rip also found himself falling in love with the alluring but treacherous and duplicitous Coral ("I didn’t like the feeling I had about her - the way I wanted to put my hand on her arm, the way I kept smelling that jasmine in her hair, the way I kept hearing that song she’d sung. Yeah, I was walking into something, all right"), who was revealed to be the widow of the wealthy, elderly victim named Stuart Chandler that Drake had killed; eventually, Coral claimed that she had committed the murder in self-defense, and was thereafter blackmailed by Martinelli after she gave him the murder weapon; contrary to her story, Martinelli claimed that he and Coral were married and that he killed Chandler and then framed and killed Johnny so that Coral would inherit her rich husband's wealth; in the film's ending, Coral killed Martinelli, thinking it was Rip - and as Rip drove her to the police station to turn her in, he told her: "You're going to fry, Dusty...when a guy's pal is killed, he ought to do something about it" - as he was driving, she held a gun on him and fired as he accelerated to 80 mph - leading to a loss of control and a car crash, with her subsequent death from injuries |
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Lady in the Lake (1947)
d. Robert Montgomery |
Adrienne Fromsett
(Audrey Totter) |
Set in 1940s Hollywood, private detective Phillip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery in his directorial debut film, using an experimental and revolutionary subjective camera technique) was to solve the case of a missing wife, promiscuous Chrystal (Ellay Mort), married to millionaire pulp-crime magazine publisher Derace Kingsby (Leon Ames) at the behest of his tough-girl, manipulative, witchy and kittenish editor-assistant and career woman Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter), the film's femme fatale; supposedly, the wife had run off to Mexico two months earlier with muscle-bound gigolo boyfriend Chris Lavery (Dick Simmons) - who turned up dead, and the case became even more complicated when another woman's body was found drowned in Little Fawn Lake near Kingsby's summer retreat cabin; the corpse belonged to Muriel Chess, the wife of Kingsby's caretaker, whose real name was Mildred Haveland (Jayne Meadows); gold-digging, self-interested Adrienne, who suspected that the caretaker's wife was murdered by Kingsby's wife, wanted Marlowe to investigate and either find "murderess" Chrystal dead or alive - so that she could be prosecuted for murder, and so that Kingsby could begin divorce proceedings against her so that she could marry her boss; the plot became even more complex when Kingsby fired Adrienne for her scheming ways, and announced that he had no plans for divorce; ultimately, in a long concluding dialogue with Marlowe (with the camera entirely on her), Adrienne abandoned her ways to show her affection for the private detective on Christmas Eve: ("We'd be fine together. In everything, we'd be fine together only you just...you don't think I'm honest. I want you to know that I am...I want to take care of you. Maybe it isn't glamorous, I don't know, but I want to be your girl. That's what I want for Christmas. Don't laugh at me...It's just like you said that day. We're both alike. In everything we're alike. We'll be fine together. We will, won't we? This is what the world is really like, isn't it?") |
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in the following list are the films 
