Danger! --- Femmes Fatale

Send us Fan MailLast season we walked through an admittedly unscientific list of the greatest character actors in recent memory --- all men and mostly known for roles as so-called bad men. But we made the promise to rebalance the favor in this season --- so here it is --- an honor roll that by definition only women fill; the femmes fatale. The direct translation is the fatal women, but above all, a female character played in predominately film noir. Part of the atmosphere, darkness, nihilism, and hopelessness of that genre is amplified by the woman who lead the protagonist (you really can’t call them heroes, the scenario being so nihilistic) by the nose, often unwittingly, into the situations that lead to their downfall. Using their beauty, their cunning, their duplicity to maneuver the gee we’re following into doing their bidding --- knocking off a bank to live large for a time, knocking off a husband who’s grown tiresome. And leaving the protagonist to face the music or holding the bag as she slips away. Thus, the understood translation of the femme fatale as a deadly or lethal woman. She crops up in most noirs, not with a voiceover as the protagonist is sometimes granted, but a part of all those noir flashbacks in which the gee traces what went wrong, and just as likely to be seen in a dark room with the shades casting shadows like prison bars across her lovely face --- portents of the future. She has a magnetic presence and deadly agency --- she walks out of the sunlight into a dark bar, or appears at a party on someone else’s arm, or walks down the stairs flashing a honey of an anklet. She hooks the gee with a glance, a look, or by sidling up to him to entice him to buy her a drink. It starts innocently, but then it goes wrong, so very wrong. Inevitably, her feelings for the guy are false, or dropped like a handkerchief, to allow her to drift again, with the money, with her freedom, off to entice and hypnotize another protagonist. As we had seven character actors last season, we have a Magnificent Seven of femmes fatale from the classic era of noir to savor, compare, and contrast. And we’ll delve into some of the sweep of their cinematic craft outside of the noir genre --- no one trick pony these ladies…Website and blog: www.thosewonderfulpeople.comBluesky: @wonderfulpeople.bsky.social