Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies

by Ursini, James

  In 1925, Paramount reunited Valentino and Naldi in a vehicle called Cobra. Naldi plays Elise, who initially seems to be nothing more than a demure society debutante seeking a rich husband. She is initially drawn to the fatally attractive Count Torriani (Valentino), but when she finds out he is not as wealthy as he appeared to be, she goes for his milquetoast business partner: Dorning (Casson Ferguson). After Elise’s dormant sexuality has been awakened (by the ministrations of the considerate but unexciting Dorning, it is implied), she begins to seek out other more stimulating lovers—including, of course, Torriani. Dressed in luxuriant furs and backless dresses, she tempts the weak Torriani. At this point it becomes clear that she is the cobra of the title—exemplified by the art deco sculpture of the snake, which transforms into a seminude Elise with a cape of snakeskin. However, this modern-day incarnation of the cobra, not readily pushed aside, makes her case rather effectively to Torriani; she has made her husband happy. Isn’t it her right to be happy, too? Torriani finally capitulates and agrees to meet her in a hotel. Once there, he finds he cannot go through with this act of betrayal, and runs out. Elise, still in heat, calls up another lover and tells him to come over. In another reaffirmation of Judeo-Christian ethics so common to Hollywood cinema, Elise and her lover cannot escape their due punishment as they are burned by real hellfire, a conflagration that engulfs the hotel in which they are staying.

  Nita Naldi, seen here with Valentino in Blood and Sand, was able to project a very hot and kinky sexuality which made her a favorite vamp in the 1920s.

  Nita as Sally Lung in The Ten Commandments played into Anglo America’s xenophobia, particularly regarding the rising wave of immigration from Asia.

  Bebe Daniels

  —Singing and Dancing Vamp

  Bebe Daniels was a multitalented actress whose penchant for semi-nudity and alluring pouts made her a natural for femme fatale roles. She gained her first real success in Harold Lloyd comedies where she honed the comedic skills that kept her in good stead throughout her career in the movies and on stage. However, it was Cecil B. DeMille, the master of comedies of manners and sex, who developed her image as a vamp. Seeing her dance in a club, he pursued her relentlessly until she agreed to appear in several of his films, most notably The Affairs of Anatol (1921).

  Based on a play by the Viennese decadent writer Arthur Schnitzler (most famous for writing the controversial La ronde), DeMille cast Daniels as Satan Synne, a dominatrix/performer who turns men into objects (figuratively as well as literally, as she stabs a heart-shaped pillow representing one disappointing benefactor and puts her feet on a pillow with the face of another ex-suitor). The protagonist Anatol (Wallace Reid), who has an aggravated messiah complex conveniently restricted to beautiful women, encounters Satan Synne while visiting a Broadway theater. She is lying nude before a backdrop, her white skin luminous. After a bit of light flirtation in which Satan, naked under a fur, tells Anatol that the devil is really a woman, not a weak man, she invites him to her lair: “The Devil’s Cloister.” When he hesitates, she accuses him of being frightened and pricks his male pride.

  The Devil’s Cloister, like the sanctuaries of vamps before, is decorated in high style, this time influenced by art nouveau. Her dresser resembles a spider’s web, her diaphanous gown envelops her like a silk skin, and a growling leopard is leashed to her ebony bed. Early on, Satan, of course, demands her tribute from her newest victim—three thousand dollars. At this point the film changes tone and by the means of a phone call reveals another layer to Satan Synne. She is paying for the medical care of her husband, a “forgotten man” of World War I. The three thousand dollars is for a much-needed operation. This attempt to humanize the vamp is typical of the complexity early DeMille films gave their female characters, largely due to the influence of his collaborator, writer Jeanie Macpherson who helped shape DeMille’s best films of the silent period.

  Sultry poses were Daniel’s specialty.

  “The Devil’s Cloister” where Satan Synne (Bebe Daniels) captures and then objectifies men, here with her newest victim, Anatol (Wallace Reid), from The Affairs of Anatol.

  With the coming of sound, Bebe Daniels, unlike other vamps like Bara and Negri, was able to negotiate her way through the transition, chiefly due to her skills as a singer and dancer. She was a hit in Rio Rita (1929), where she played an irresistible señorita who turned bandits into fools. In Reaching for the Moon (1930), she plays an aviatrix who decides on a lark to seduce an innocent millionaire. In Busby Berkeley’s landmark musical 42nd Street (1933), she plays the diva of the show who seduces her sugar daddy with her long and languorous legs while keeping her true love off balance. In all these films, she displayed not only her considerable physical charms but also her smoky singing voice.

  But the film that over the decades has become most memorable is the first and best adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s noir novel The Maltese Falcon (1931). Her performance as the duplicitous Ruth Wonderly bridges the gap between the pre-Code vamp and her daughter, the noir femme fatale of the 1940s. As Wonderly, Daniels exploits her trademark long legs and girlish pout to befuddle the men of the piece, including the cynical womanizing detective Sam Spade (played by Ricardo Cortez with great humor and insouciance). In order to involve Spade in the search for the invaluable “black bird,” she at first plays the damsel in distress, appealing to his tarnished chivalry as well as his innate greed. In a particularly telling scene, Ruth lounges on the couch in lingerie, playing with Spade’s libido. When he asks for his fee, she pleads poverty and he accepts her excuses. As he leaves, she pulls up her slip to reveal her silk stocking stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.

  Although her Spanish accent was questionable, her hot-tempered persona was genuine. Bebe Daniels as Rio Rita.

  But, again unlike the vamps before her, this “new woman” does not confine herself to sexual wiles in order to gain power in a man’s world. Like the noir femmes fatales of the next decade, she uses whatever means necessary, including violence, to maintain her position. She kills at least one man, Spade’s partner Archer, in cold blood—and may have killed others.

  From the first version of Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon, Ruth Wonderly (Bebe Daniels) is so languorous in lingerie that even the libertine Spade (Ricardo Cortez) is captivated, at least temporarily.

  Clara Bow

  —A Vamp for the Jazz Age

  “The more I see of men, the more I like dogs.”—CLARA Bow

  Clara Bow was the “It” girl of the 1920s, the name given to her by writer Elinor Glyn who picked her for the film adaptation of her hit book in 1927. But Bow had already through her own efforts and personality become the apotheosis of the Jazz Age flapper years before Glyn had placed her seal of approval on her. She combined a naughty girlish quality with an overpowering drive to achieve her goals. She was the child-woman femme fatale of the 1920s, sure of her sexuality and the power it gave her. She was the working-class girl (she herself had grown up a victim of both poverty and abuse) who knew how to exploit the patriarchy in order to carve out her own successful place in society.

  Bow began formulating her screen persona when she joined forces with producer B.P. Schulberg in 1923. Although Schulberg overworked and underpaid Bow (she made over forty films within four years), he gave her the freedom to develop her natural exuberance and playful sexuality, which led to her stardom and Paramount’s decision to buy Schulberg’s company simply to add Bow to their roster of stars.

  Parisian Love in 1925 gives the viewer a glimpse into the earlier Clara Bow. In this film she is the Apache dancer/burglar/prostitute Marie who is pursued by multiple men as in all of her films (reflecting her own personal sexual appetites which often included more than one lover at a time). During a routine episode of breaking-and-entering, her lover Armand (Donald Keith) finds himself the “prisoner” of the owner of the house—Marcel (Lou Tellegen) who has taken a quasi-homoerotic interest in redeeming Armand (who was also a student of his at one point). Marie, who ha
s escaped the police, is outraged at Marcel’s attempt to encroach onto her territory. So she takes a job as a maid in the house to get a better sense of what has happened to her lover.

  When Marie discovers that Armand, who now believes that Marie was shot by the police, is content with his living arrangement she becomes enraged and plots her revenge on her rival Marcel. While Armand is away on a business trip Marcel has set up for him, Marie pretends to be a society girl fresh from the convent and seduces Marcel. On their wedding night, the obviously excited Marcel enters their boudoir to find his demure bride dressed in her silk nightgown but far from compliant. She reveals her plot to him as they consummate the marriage, laughing in his face. But before she can complete her revenge, her criminal partners invade the house, looking for loot, and shoot her by mistake as she throws her body in front of Armand who has just returned from his trip.

  This publicity shot epitomizes the Lolita–femme fatale image Clara Bow created in her career.

  Bow’s first huge hit was in 1926—Mantrap, directed by her newest mentor and lover Victor Fleming (he would direct her again the next year in the provocative Hula). Fleming was devoted to Bow and spoke with adulation of her natural qualities before the camera. In this Bow vehicle, Clara plays a bubbly beautician named Alverna who latches onto a craggy woodsman named Joe (Ernest Torrence) and marries him on a lark. He takes her away to the backwoods of Canada, to a town aptly named Mantrap. Of course, the true “mantrap” of this film is Alverna. Bow is again the uncontrollable child-woman who needs multiple men, lots of liquor, and jazz music to keep her happy. She flirts with dazzled trappers, turns a church party into a Jazz Age “orgy,” and sets her sights on Joe’s closest friend, the city lawyer Prescott (Percy Marmont). She is unabashed in her sexuality as she good-naturedly flirts with both husband and potential lover simultaneously. In one scene she dances and wiggles around the room provocatively while she stuffs chocolates in both men’s mouths and then kisses them individually. She jumps like a child onto her husband’s lap while her newest conquest looks on stunned.

  Bow as Elinor Glyn’s It girl prepares another frontal assault on a judgmental representative of the patriarchy, in this case Waltham (Antonio Moreno), the wealthy storeowner.

  Later during the night, she leaves her husband’s bed and joins Prescott outdoors where she bares a shoulder and asks him whether he is “scared” of her. She snuggles up to him and soon he is hers. They decide to go to the city for a new adventure but Joe follows them. The resolution of the film is typical of the sexual tolerance allowed Bow in her films, possibly because of the innocence at the core of her femme fatale persona. Joe convinces her to return with him and try to be a “good girl.” She agrees, but in the last scene she is again eyeing hot young men and telling her husband as he embraces her, “I’m slipping just a little.”

  In 1927 Paramount cast her in their adaptation of Elinor Glyn’s novel It. As Glyn explains the concept in the film, a woman has “it” when she exhibits a “magnetism” which is irresistible, “unorthodox” in her ways. Glyn’s erotic fiction for women of the period helped set the liberated tone of the Jazz Age as much as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s more critically praised books. Enter Betty Lou Spence (Bow), who when she first sees the handsome storeowner—Waltham, played by Antonio Moreno (Bow was often cast opposite sensitive Latin actors who were matinee idols in the 1920s)—blurts out, “Sweet Santa, give me him.” But a Bow character does not wait around for Santa or even God to answer her prayers. Instead she pursues her goal with a sense of purpose worthy of any true predator.

  By an elaborate game of tease and denial (a technique in many of Bow’s films), Betty Lou dates Waltham’s ne’er-do-well friend Monty (William Austin) and thereby arouses the storeowner’s interest. She goes on a date with Waltham to Coney Island where she falls all over him in a series of rides, obviously stimulating his lust and desire. But when he attempts to kiss her, she denies him that privilege. Although he is smitten with her, he decides to abandon her for the upper-class socialite of the piece (who is described in the titles as just another “boring” blonde) when he discovers, or thinks he does, that she is raising an illegitimate child. Insulted Betty Lou, who is helping her roommate take care of her baby, refuses to give an inch to this puritanical man (“rebellion against a puritanical society embodied by men” is another theme that runs through Bow’s films) and therefore will not explain her situation. Instead she sneaks onto his yacht with Monty and torments him with her vivaciousness and magnetism. He of course caves in totally and agrees to all her demands.

  Clara Bow, adorable in college uniform and sporting her trademark pout, from The Wild Party.

  In Red Hair (1928), Bow again interpreted Glyn in this tale of an ambitious manicurist who lets no man stand in the way of her pursuit of love and money. In 1929 she teamed with female director Dorothy Arzner for one of the best dissections of the Jazz Age on campus: The Wild Party. It was Bow’s first talkie and the film that debunks all the myths that Bow’s voice was the cause of her retirement from films in the early 1930s. Bow plays another liberated femme fatale confronting an attractive uptight older man: Professor Gilmore (Frederic March). Whether crawling into his sleeper bed on a train or throwing her body around and about him, she is determined to break his shell. The film is also notable for its female solidarity, which was also evident in other Bow films like It. The women on this campus may spend a lot of time lounging in lingerie, drinking, and looking for guys in roadhouses—but when one of their own is threatened, they stand together.

  The coeds of the college set their sights on the new teacher (Frederic March), who represents quite a challenge, but not for the confident femme fatale Stella (Bow) in the front row.

  Call Her Savage (1932) is in many ways Bow’s best film; and, unfortunately, it is her second-to-last effort. It is has only recently been rediscovered and restored, and so has not received the attention that many other pre-Code films have. It is among the most daring of that string of liberated films that directly preceded the crackdown by the Production Code Office in 1934. After a brief prologue where Nasa’s (Bow) parentage is established (she is the love child of an Native American and a lonely wife), Bow rides onto the screen in close-up, wielding a whip as she beats her horse into a frenzy. Then after being thrown from it, she uses the weapon to slice up a snake. Not satisfied with the sadomasochistic pleasure these acts obviously give her, she proceeds to pull her laughing “half-breed” lover Moonglow (Gilbert Roland) off his horse and beat him mercilessly as he stands there and accepts his punishment. After a moment of regret in which she throws herself on the ground like a petulant child and pounds her feet, she admits her pleasure in being “mean” as Moonglow looks on with obvious affection. When her overbearing father arrives and asks why she was beating Moonglow, she tells him she was “practicing in case I ever get married.”

  Nasa (Bow) whips her worshipful lover Moonglow (Gilbert Roland)—who is the only one who truly understands and revels in her mercurial nature.

  Nasa spends the rest of the movie with her whip in hand, figuratively that is. She rebels against her father by marrying a decadent playboy—Crosby (Monroe Owsley). Disappointed in his inability to be faithful, she humiliates both Crosby and his mistress (Thelma Todd) on two different occasions. She exacts further revenge by spending his money and flirting with as many men as possible. When Crosby finally contracts a venereal disease and tries to rape her, she beats him to the ground.

  The film is also intent like most of Bow’s vehicles in showing the softer, more innocent side of Bow’s character. She gives birth to a child; and when her father and husband cut her off, she turns to prostitution in New Orleans to support the child. The melodrama of the film is heightened when the child is killed in a tenement fire, and Nasa returns to society life with a vengeance. In a remarkable scene, shot mostly silent, Nasa awakens in her art deco bed, dissolute and disheveled. In a silk negligee she wanders around the room drunkenly, looking for a cigarette and a
match. As she sinks further into despair the camera cuts to close-ups of her face until in a rage she breaks the mirror. She returns home to learn the truth about her birth from her ailing mother. Released, she accepts her heritage and returns to her devoted Moonglow in a scene that reverses whatever negative associations the film had made before between her savageness and her Native American heritage.

  Even though the film has several moralistic titles and speeches about the sins of the father and such, it is clear that those are for the ears of the censors only. From the first minute the audience sees Bow their sympathies are with this wild, rebellious girl. The film itself was a financial and critical success and puts to bed yet another myth about Bow: that her popularity was on the wane. In fact the studio execs at Fox so valued her participation that they paid her $135,000 for her participation in the film, a salary unsurpassed by any star of the period. Bow, however, did retire but left on her own terms. Mental illness haunted Bow the rest of her life, much as it had her mother. She died in 1965 with little fanfare from a movie business which had largely forgotten her.

  Nasa (Bow) awakens to a realization that her party days have to end, from Call Her Savage.

  Brigitte Helm

  —The European Vamp

  Although Europe supplied the archetype of the femme fatale thought the literature and art of men like Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Moreau, Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, Pierre Louys, and Aubrey Beardsley, the cinema itself produced far fewer examples of lethal ladies. European cinema has always had a predilection for more multidimensional characters, and therefore often opted for a more naturalistic approach to characterization and story, while the American cinema excelled in the molding of genres like the Western or the gangster film (along with their attendant archetypes and icons).