Femmes Fatales from Film Noir
During the 1940s and 1950s Hollywood released a cycle of motion pictures that came to be called film noir. These movies, nearly always filmed in black-and-white and often set at night in large cities, peeked into the dark corners of postwar America. They hinted at deep-seated anxieties and fears, especially related to the possibility of men and women living together happily and harmoniously.
Many film noir pictures featured alluring femmes fatales: beautiful but dangerous women who challenged the prevailing social order. The femme fatale represented the opposite of the nurturing, safely contained wife and mother. Usually unmarried and childless, she posed a threat to both men and other women. In The File on Thelma Jordan (1949), for instance, the title character, played by Barbara Stanwyck, cynically destroys the marriage of a young, weak-willed district attorney. She initiates an illicit affair with him not because of love, or even lust, but as part of a complicated plot to use him in manipulating the criminal justice system. The postwar era’s most prominent female stars—such as Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, and Lana Turner—achieved both popular and critical acclaim playing such roles.
It is of course tempting to view the significance of the many femme fatale characters in postwar film culture as nothing more than negative symbols, part of a cold-war culture that exalted family life and stressed the subordination of women to male heads-of-households. Film noir features, however, developed a loyal audience among women, and some students of Hollywood films have suggested that the femme fatale—seeker of independence and power—might have provided an exaggerated symbol of female filmgoers’ dissatisfaction with tightly contained women’s roles.
