Maria (Ava Gardner), the new international star at the premiere of her most recent movie, from The Barefoot Contessa.
Prizefighter Ole (Burt Lancaster) falls heavily for the sultry Kitty (Ava Gardner) when he first sees her at a party, from The Killers.
When Kitty deserts their love nest in Atlantic City after the heist, payroll money in hand, Ole breaks up the furniture in the room and tries to throw himself out the window. He is stopped by an Irish Catholic chambermaid’s warning about eternal damnation. Instead, Ole buries himself alive in a small town and awaits his fate patiently. Even though he did not physically end his life in that hotel room, he has ended it emotionally—for it is only a matter of time until the partners he double-crossed find him and finish the job.
As we will discuss in more detail in the next chapter, the repression and enforced conformity of the 1950s led to the virtual disappearance of the femme fatale in American movies, with few exceptions. Sensing either consciously or unconsciously this shift, Gardner continued to paint her portraits of strong, sexually liberated vamps in Europe. In 1951 writer/director Albert Lewin brought to the screen in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman the legend of the mythical wanderer, most famously dramatized by Richard Wagner in his opera of the same name. While the original legend focused on the dilemma of the cursed mariner who must wander the seas until he finds a woman willing to die for him and thereby grant him release, Lewin decided to rewrite the story for Gardner and so shifted the focus to the woman of the story.
Kelly (Ava Gardner) is stranded in the wilds of Africa in Mogambo, a tame remake of Red Dust.
Once named by publicity agents as “the world’s most beautiful animal,” Ava Gardner.
On the set of the Dutchman’s schooner, Ava Gardner is attended to after her naked swim, from Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.
Pandora (Ava Gardner)—her name, of course, invokes the original troublesome woman of Greek myth—is darkly beautiful nightclub singer worshipped by all the men around her. As the narrator, archaeologist Professor Fielding (Harold Warrender), puts it, “I was as much her slave as any of them [the men in her life].” However, Pandora can only play with these men. She is restless, overflowing with “fury and destruction.” She asks one of her suitors, the auto racer Stephen (Nigel Patrick), to push his prized car over a cliff into the sea in order to prove his love. He does exactly that while she watches, obviously sexually excited by this act. After the explosion of the car, she lies on the rocks in almost post-coital bliss. As a reward to him, she agrees to marry the racer on the “third day of the ninth month,” although the viewer is never convinced she is serious about this.
The heat between both actors (Gardner and Lancaster) in The Killers was palpable on screen and off.
Another suitor, Reggie, commits suicide in front of her as she sings a song that speaks of her longing to find “true love.” Her only reaction is to leave the club and walk out alone onto the beach in “morbid solitude.” The jealous bullfighter Montalvo, an ex-lover, dedicates his bulls to her and even tries to kill the eventual object of her desire: Hendrik the Dutchman (James Mason).
As soon as Hendrik’s crewless schooner drops anchor in the harbor of Esperanza, Pandora feels drawn to the boat and the mysterious man aboard. One night she swims out naked to find him painting a portrait of her as the mythical Pandora, “the secret goddess that all men’s hearts desire,” even though he has never met her before. The almost preternaturally calm and melancholy Hendrik immediately senses the fury and destruction within Pandora, and tells her so. Her response is to deface the portrait.
But as time passes, she becomes more and more obsessed with him, partly because he is so distant and removed from her, a real challenge. In the final scene, after learning who he really is and the legend attached to him, she swims out naked to his ghost ship in order to sacrifice herself for his redemption. As time stops for them, symbolized by the grains of sand freezing in the hourglass, they kiss. Suddenly a storm appears and it sinks the ghostly schooner.
In 1953, MGM remade its pre-Code hit Red Dust as Mogambo. Gardner played the role of the femme fatale Vantine (here named Kelly) to Clark Gable’s reprise of his role as the rough-and-tumble protagonist. Shot mostly on location in Africa, the film is a pale shadow of its original, another victim of 1950s repression and puritanism.
As mentioned earlier, director/writer Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954) is based loosely on Gardner’s own experiences with large dollops of fiction thrown in for melodramatic taste. Gardner plays a “woman of the dirt” who prefers to be barefoot. In fact, the first glimpse we have of the dancer Maria Vargas is of her bare feet behind a curtain in her dressing room where she is hiding from director/writer Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart) with her newest lover.
Sent by industrialist/movie producer Kirk Edwards (based on Howard Hughes, with whom Gardner had an affair) to fetch Maria and bring her to Hollywood, Dawes strikes up a friendship with the willful Maria and becomes her director of choice. Maria makes three films with him and they are all hits. Maria then becomes an international star. However, her frustration and restlessness does not disappear. Even though she is pursued by wealthy and powerful men, including Edwards, she prefers the company of “peasants,” men she keeps in her guest house to the rear of her Hollywood mansion.
After another attempt by Edwards to control her, Maria leaves Hollywood and accepts the offer of playboy Alberto Bravano (Marius Goring) to sail with him on his yacht. For his trouble, he receives a black eye and a decrease of his fortune and she still refuses his sexual advances. In order to gall him further, she appears on the deck of the ship and disrobes to reveal her sinuous body to his leering friends. Bravano puts up with the humiliation in order to have this glorious woman on his arm—but he reaches critical mass in a casino. He berates her, calling her an “animal.” Before he can continue, however, Count Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi) slaps him in the face and, like a prince in shining armor, sweeps Maria out of the casino (the film references the Cinderella tale several times).
Maria falls in love with this emotionally troubled prince but learns on her wedding night that he is impotent (a theme that will strangely reappear in her next notable femme fatale film The Sun Also Rises). Maria stays with him because she loves him but cannot contain her sexuality and so indulges in her taste for the “dirt” with peasants and workingmen. When she becomes pregnant by one of them, the Count cannot abide the insult and so shoots her. The film ends at her funeral, as it began, with a tracking shot in the rain to the statue the Count had commissioned of his love. In marble Maria is immortalized like a Greek icon—barefoot, of course.
Pandora (Ava Gardner), even though a female Lothario, cannot resist the mysterious Dutchman (James Mason), from Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.
In 1957, Darryl Zanuck offered Gardner the role of Lady Brett Ashley in his adaptation of a novel by her neighbor in Spain: Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises was fraught with difficulties and critically panned, but Gardner’s performance stands out as an authentic recreation of Hemingway’s femme fatale. Again in love with a man suffering from impotence—Jake Barnes (Tyrone Power)—the condition underscores the sexual frustration of the character, much as it had done in The Barefoot Contessa. Brett finds release in the arms of numerous men, individuals Jake tells her are “wounded.” Ineluctably drawn to each other, even though their situation seems impossible, Jake stands by and even assists at times in Brett’s conquests, or at least cleans up after her—all the while drinking himself into oblivion, something most of the other characters in this rendering of the “lost” post-World War I generation also do.
Brett always returns to Jake when her affairs go sour and finds solace in his patience, even though she is tinged with bitterness. In the final scene, after she has sent the young bullfighter Romero (Robert Evans) back to his profession, she asks Jake to take her away. In the car, she tells him that he has always been the only man she has ever loved. As they embrace, she say
s sadly, “There must be an answer for us somewhere.” And the film ends on this ambiguity.
Bette Davis
—A-List Actress as Femme Fatale
Bette Davis is undoubtedly the most honored actor who has played femmes fatales consistently during her career. Her first notable portrayal of that archetype was in the 1934 adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. As Mildred, the slatternly waitress who becomes the crippled protagonist’s —Philip (Leslie Howard)—object of desire, Davis brings a working-class vulgarity to the part, exchanging her upper-class New England accent for a Cockney dialect. She maintains her hold on Philip by playing a game of humiliation that the masochistic Philip seems to crave: dating other men while she is with him, cruelly rebuking him for his lack of sexual aggression, and taking his money while treating him like a “john.” Every time she returns to him, he takes her back, even when she has contracted syphilis.
The sexually frustrated Rosa (Bette Davis) anxiously awaits her lover in Beyond the Forest.
The symbol of suffocation and repression in Rosa’s (Bette Davis) small town—the mill in the background from Beyond the Forest.
Bordertown (1935) allowed Davis to show her histrionic side, which was in evidence off and on in her better movies. As the wife of obese casino owner Charlie Roark (Eugene Pallette), Marie (Davis) cannot hide her attraction for the educated lawyer-turned-bouncer Johnny (Paul Muni). In order to marry Johnny she murders her husband, making it look like a suicide. When Johnny finds out the truth, he rejects Marie. In revenge, Marie implicates Johnny in the murder. However, during the trial, under examination, she has a nervous breakdown and confesses the truth.
Dangerous (1935) earned Davis her first Oscar and increased her reputation and earning power at Warner Bros., the studio which kept her tightly bound by contracts and which she continually fought. Dangerous was the ideal vehicle for Davis. It allowed her to indulge her more theatrical side (she worked in the theater before coming to Hollywood) in drawing this portrait of has-been Broadway star Joyce Heath, a woman who—we learn early in the film—has left both men and shows crippled in her wake. As an actress, she had achieved success playing femme fatale characters like Camille and Sappho; and then, through her reckless behavior, had become persona non grata in the theater world. One night a young architect, Don Bellows (Franchot Tone)—who had changed his career based on seeing a performance by Heath—spots Joyce drunk in a seedy restaurant and abandons both his friend and his fiancée to attempt to redeem this youthful idol.
Bellows pursues his desire to reform and marry the dangerous Joyce (Bette Davis), from Dangerous.
Actress Joyce Heath (Bette Davis) gives admirer Don Bellows (Franchot Tone) an opportunity for a roll in the hay, from Dangerous.
After Heath collapses in the restaurant, Bellows takes her to his home in the country where he and his housekeeper care for her. In return, Heath is ungrateful, insulting him and his housekeeper repeatedly. Still Bellows refuses to send her away even though his housekeeper (Alison Skipworth) warns him that this is a “dangerous” woman. Bellows responds, “You’ve been reading bad translations of French novels,” a reference to the decadent French literary movement which valorized the deadly female.
When Heath begins to recover in this idyllic setting, she decides to incite her host with provocative situations. She lies seductively in the hay. She performs for him a romantic scene that she improvises on the spot while pretending to read a play. And she uses her trademark “Bette Davis” eyes and biting witticisms (including references to dangerous Greek mythological figures like wood nymphs and Dionysian maenads who drive themselves insane with ecstasy and then leap from cliffs—foreshadowing the car crash at the climax of the movie) to ensnare the already awestruck Bellows. Gradually, however, Heath finds herself attached to this determined lover, who even invests his own money in a play for Heath to star in. Warning him that she is not dependable and cannot be restricted, Bellows still pursues her.
Julie (Bette Davis) manipulates the code-bound Southern gentleman Buck (George Brent) in Jezebel.
Moose (Minor Watson) discovers the adulterous lovers (David Brian and Bette Davis) not quite in flagrante delicto, from Beyond the Forest.
The climax of the movie comes when Bellows asks Heath to marry him. In a panic Heath visits her present husband (John Eldredge), whom she has left destitute but still deeply obsessed with her, and demands a divorce. He refuses. So she takes him on a car ride and threatens to run the car into a tree if he does not consent. He tells her he would rather die than give her up. And so she delivers on her promise.
The resolution of the film involves Heath’s redemption. In keeping with the ethics of Hollywood, this “bad girl” must either die or reform. And reform she does. She returns Bellows to his good-girl fiancée (Hollywood’s obsession with Christian dualism always demands, as we have seen repeatedly, the femme fatale be balanced by a long-suffering, virginal good girl). Heath, in another act of expiation, buys flowers for her husband who waits patiently, wrapped in bandages, for his beloved to come back. In a typical example of masochism in the face of femmes fatales, the husband cannot but smile beatifically as his wife enters the hospital, flowers in hand.
Jezebel (1938) was Warner Bros. studio’s answer to MGM’s Gone with the Wind. Set in New Orleans in the antebellum South, the film tracks the journey of the tempestuous belle Julie (Davis) from spoiled Southern beauty to self-sacrificing nurse, repeating the trajectory of actress Joyce Heath in Dangerous (the repetition paid off with Davis winning her second Oscar).
Julie is engaged to mild-mannered banker Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda). Her tantrums and demands on him have resulted in several breaks in their engagement before the story begins. When Dillard refuses to leave his meeting to help Julie pick out clothes, she storms into the bank, disrupting the meeting. When he still refuses to join her, she is insulted. In order to get back at him and regain her position of dominance in the relationship (she talks about her attempts to “train” him in another scene), she appeals to his sense of manhood (which is precarious at best) so that he will accompany her to a ball to which she will wear a daring red dress. The ball is a disaster as Julie is shunned by everyone except her erstwhile suitor Buck (George Brent).
The regal Regina (Bette Davis), from The Little Foxes.
After the ball, Dillard breaks off the engagement once again. Julie’s response is to slap him across the face. Dillard leaves New Orleans for the North and returns with a “Yankee wife.” The outraged and jealous Julie goes on a campaign of insinuation and sarcasm in an attempt to turn her friends and relatives against Dillard and his new wife. Her plan succeeds too well and Buck challenges Dillard’s brother to a duel, where Buck is killed.
Julie is now ostracized by her own friends and relatives. When news comes to Julie’s plantation that the plague is spreading through New Orleans and that the ailing Dillard has been slated for transportation to a quarantined island, Julie appeals to Dillard’s distressed wife to let her accompany Dillard to the island and there nurse him back to health for her. As the cannons roar and the drums beat, marking the passage of the carts taking the dead and dying, Julie holds her ex-lover in her arms. A serene look upon her face, she is victorious at last.
The Little Foxes (1941) reunited the director of Jezebel, William Wyler, and Davis in this adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s award-winning play. Davis plays Regina, the grasping de facto head of the Giddens clan, a Southern family intent on accumulating even more wealth. Davis plays the part like a fox waiting to pounce on any victim who comes across her path, even her ailing husband Horace (Herbert Marshall).
Davis’s portrayal of Rosa Moline in King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest remains remarkable to this day for its intensity and violence. Rosa Moline is a woman trapped. She lives in a small provincial mill town where women are relegated to lives of producing many children and caring for their working-class husbands. But, as the women of the town say, when she sashays through the town in her
ever-present high heels and threadbare dress, Rosa was always different.
Rosa seethes with aggravation and anger. She can hardly sit still—pacing around the room, wandering about the town, railing out at the factory that emits smoke and fire in the background throughout the scenes set in the town. Her frustration is almost palpable as she strikes out at her patient but unambitious husband, Dr. Moline (Joseph Cotten), or watches the trains coming in and out from Chicago, her dream city. She fears that she will die in this town—and tells the audience that as the smoke and fire belches out of the factory behind her.
Rosa’s frustration expresses itself sexually as well when she begins an affair with the wealthy Neil Latimer (David Brian), waiting for him impatiently by the fireplace as the sound of his personal plane flies over his cabin. She immediately seduces him with a passionate embrace after he enters the door to see her feet in her trademark heels swinging provocatively on the floor.
Julie’s true love—Dillard (Henry Fonda), who can no longer abide her domineering ways, from Jezebel.
However, when she manages to squeeze enough money out of her husband to visit Chicago, her planned romantic encounter with Latimer turns sour. He has found a younger woman; and so the angry and suddenly middle-aged Rosa returns to her hometown in defeat.
Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies Page 9