Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies

Mainon

Chapter One Pre-Code Femmes Fatales in the Early American Cinema: From Liberation to Repression

Publicity pose personally approved by mogul William Fox as he plays on Westerners’ fear of and fascination with orientalism (see Edward Said’s book Orientalism).

THE EARLY DAYS OF THE CINEMA, the days before 1934, when the Motion Picture Production Code Office decided to enforce the puritanical rules it had been developing for almost a decade, were among the most fertile for the femme fatale. Her image was formed in these decades, and her influence established.

Theda Bara—

The First Movie Femme Fatale

Theda Bara (born Theodosia Goodman) epitomizes the exoticism inextricably linked to the image of the femme fatale. Her dark Sephardic appearance radiated the same combination of menace and allure which characterized the femmes fatales of history and fin-de-siècle French literature. In addition, the publicity agents at Fox, drawing on their own knowledge of French decadent literature, created a tantalizing biography for their first real star. According to the studio, Theda Bara (an anagram of the words Arab death) was the daughter of a French artist and an Egyptian concubine. She was born in the Sahara Desert and possessed supernatural powers. They posed her in scanty costumes, often next to or on top of the bones of her latest victim. They even coined the term vamp to describe her (drawn from the famous Rudyard Kipling poem The Vampire), a moniker that would become part of the language within a decade. Although she did not possess any supernatural powers, her ability to lure men into cooperating with their own course of destruction was equally lethal.

Theda incarnates another historical femme fatale: Madame Du Barry, mistress and advisor to Louis XV, from Madame Du Barry.

A typical example of the freedom allowed the cinema in the pre-Code era: La Bara seduces the viewer as Cleopatra.

Theda Bara was one of the first film actresses to take on the roles of such formidable literary and historical femmes fatales as Carmen, Camille, Salome, Madame Du Barry, and Cleopatra; sadly, though, copies of those films are believed to have been lost. We do, however, still have her debut film as a star, A Fool There Was (1915), which she described in her own words (using a false, thick foreign accent in keeping with her studio-created persona) to aspiring journalist Louella Parsons as a charnel house of men’s dead hopes and withered ambitions. . . . This vampire of mine possesses only one good or decent quality—her courage.

Theda Bara as The Vampire in A Fool There Was.

The film begins with a title card featuring a quote from the Kipling poem mentioned earlier: We called her the woman, who did not care. But the fool he called her, his lady fair. All of the title cards in the beginning of the film present it as a lesson in morality, with characters such as The Husband, The Wife, The Little Girl, et cetera. Cast as simply The Vampire, with her raven hair, pale skin, and darkly painted eyes, Bara is a picture of ruthlessness, first seen plucking a rose from a vase, strongly inhaling its scent and then mercilessly ripping the head of it completely off. She crushes and grinds the bud between her finger with a look of pure sadistic pleasure. Each of her lover-victims in the film will soon suffer a similar fate of symbolic castration and emasculation. Every scene underlines her status as the ultimate femme fatale, inspiring such terms as vampire, hellcat, and devil.

Fox spent lavishly on its epic Cleopatra. Like most of Bara’s early films, it was a financial success, making Bara one of the first superstars of Hollywood.

A smitten Julius Caesar (Fritz Leiber) quaking in his Roman boots before the voluptuous queen of Egypt, from Cleopatra.

Even though A Fool There Was is a traditional narrative film, it was a favorite among the surrealists of the first half of the twentieth century. The reason is fairly obvious. The film itself epitomizes the surrealist concept of mad love. As explained by filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Mad love isolates the lovers, makes them ignore normal social obligation, ruptures ordinary family ties, and ultimately brings them to destruction. As the femme fatale insinuated her way into the iconography of the cinema, she would become a fervent advocate of mad love. Early in the film we see two of The Vampire’s victims: one has become a tramp, haunting the docks and warning others about her; the other is a desperate alcoholic who, rather than shooting The Vampire as he planned, collapses when she looks into his eyes and proclaims the now infamous line: Kiss me, my fool. Instead, he shoots himself.

Theda as the Biblical Salome manipulates her lust-besotted uncle King Herod (G. Raymond Nye) in Salome, an early entry into Hollywood’s exploitation of Bible stories as a cover for tales of debauchery and femme fatale power.

The decadent extravagance of Bara’s costume as Cleopatra reflects the decadence of artists like Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley.

Although wealthy and married diplomat John Schuyler (Edward José) is aware of her reputation (he is on board the liner when The Vampire’s latest lover shoots himself), he falls under her spell almost immediately—picking up a flower she has deliberately dropped and thereby gaining a glimpse of her delectable foot and ankle. After a rapid fade, he is lying at her feet in a Mediterranean setting as she reclines catlike on a couch. He receives a letter from his desperate wife and child, which The Vampire reads and then callously destroys as she caresses her newest love slave.

Schuyler sacrifices everything for this his mad love. He takes The Vampire to parties where he is humiliated by the rejection of his social peers. He ignores the advice of his closest friends to leave her. He loses his position as a diplomat. Even the appeal of his young daughter cannot shame him as he falls to his knees and kisses the dress of his mistress in front of his child. The fool was stripped of his foolish hide (Kipling’s poem once again).

Schuyler’s final destruction comes in the form he most desires, at the hands of this exotic femme fatale. Jealousy torments him as The Vampire cuckolds him with other men. But it only takes a touch from her to send him back into submission. As drink and poverty begin to take their toll, Schuyler ages exponentially until he is a shell of the man he once was. In the final sequence, we see him lying once again at The Vampire’s feet as she spreads the petals of a flower over him, as if he were already a rotting corpse.

Louise Glaum

—The Domesticated Vamp

Theda Bara’s only real competitor for the title of premiere vamp is almost entirely forgotten today. Louise Glaum, like her sister femme fatale Bara, is shrouded in mystery. Her real name and even her date of death are listed differently in various sources (as examples, see Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database—although the Wikipedia entry seems more credible). Again, like Bara the mystery is deepened by the fact that so few of her films are available.

Glaum was movie pioneer Thomas H. Ince’s answer to Theda Bara. He cast her in dozens of films from 1914 until 1921, often playing a vamp. He hung names on her like Spider Woman and Tiger Woman to enhance her exotic allure. In The Three Musketeers (1916), she played Alexander Dumas’s seductive villain Milady; and in W.S. Hart’s gritty if sentimental western Hell’s Hinges (1916), she was the saloon girl (read: prostitute) who seduced the pure minister and precipitated the holocaust at the end of the movie.

But the film which garnered the most recognition for Glaum, undoubtedly because of its controversial title, was Sex (1920). Produced by Ince through a subsidiary company headed by J. Parker Read, Jr. (both were later sued by Glaum for withholding monies owed), the film typified a style of filmmaking Hollywood directors and writers like Cecil B. DeMille were refining—that of a salacious story wrapped safely (if thinly) in a Judeo-Christian wrapper.

Directed by Fred Niblo, who would helm several notable femme fatale films of the 1920s—including Blood and Sand with Nita Naldi and The Temptress with Greta Garbo—and written by C. Gardner Sullivan, the scenarist behind Glaum’s earlier femme fatale hit Hell’s Hinges, the film presents a vamp on the verge of domestication. We first glimpse chorus girl Adrienne Renault (Glaum) descending from the rafters of the theater in a revealing spiderweb dress as she lies on a gossamer web. Calling to her male victim, a dancer dressed in an equally exotic costume, he tries to resist but cannot. In the audience, among the drooling businessmen, is Philip Overman (William Conklin), Adrienne’s very rich and very married patron.

Louise Glaum exhibits a naturalism in her vamp performances that is absent from Theda Bara’s more extravagant portrayals, from Sex.

Cover for the DVD release of Sex, starring Theda Bara’s competitor for the title of first film femme fatale, Louise Glaum.

Backstage, Adrienne delivers a sermon on her philosophy of love and life to Peggy/Daisy (Viola Barry), a corn-fed innocent stumbling her way through the decadent life of the chorus girl. She takes her under her wing and saves her from drunken lotharios by infusing her with a sense of her own worth. She in fact mentors her: teaching her to look for stability and wealth, to develop a style and a diva-like attitude. Little does she know that her mentee will ultimately be her undoing and precipitate the central irony of the movie.

The dramatic centerpiece of the movie is the discovery by Overman’s wife (Myrtle Stedmen) of her husband’s love nest. She visits Adrienne, contentedly lounging about in lingerie in her luxurious apartment, with the intention of retrieving her husband. Adrienne, of course, holds her ground, telling the wife that she has lost her man and now she possesses him. While they are arguing, the husband enters with flowers for his mistress. Humiliated, Mrs. Overman leaves both the apartment and her husband.

But Adrienne, unlike most of Bara’s femmes fatales, has a yearning for domesticity. In this, the writers add a very human layer to the character. Seeing that Overman will never marry her, she marries rich playboy Dave Wallace (played by actor/director Irving Cummings), hoping to change his ways. She is unable to and soon he takes up with Adrienne’s former protégé, Daisy.

Toward the end of the film, the filmmakers construct a powerful scene that mirrors the earlier humiliation of Mrs. Overman. Wallace has rented Adrienne’s old apartment for his new mistress Daisy. Adrienne, dressed in a conservative black outfit resembling the clothes Mrs. Overman wore when visiting her, confronts Daisy. Dressed in lingerie like Adrienne had worn in the earlier scene, she throws Adrienne’s philosophy back in her face (reprised in a flashback to the backstage scene).

Fulfilling the role of the femme fatale, Adrienne of course does not take this humiliation quite as passively as Mrs. Overman did. She grabs a letter opener and threatens Daisy but loses her nerve. When Wallace enters the apartment to greet his mistress, the irony is complete. Adrienne disappears from the scene, appropriately sailing away on a Blue Star liner in a blue-tinted night, alone and forlorn. Unlike Bara at the end of A Fool There Was, who was victorious over her foolish lover, the vamp here has received her comeuppance. The Christian Victorian values of early-twentieth-century America are safe, at least for the moment.

Alla Nazimova

—The Art Nouveau Vamp

Russian theatrical star Alla Nazimova was among the first actresses who benefited from Hollywood’s interest in importing its femmes fatales rather than home-growing them as they had done with Bara and Glaum. To Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, Europe represented the decadent Old World, filled with debauchery and corruption. One can see this reflected clearly in the novels of American writers like Henry James. It was, in addition, the birthplace of the femme fatale in literature. So why not take advantage of this perceived ethos, as well as Europe’s own highly developed and artistic worlds of cinema and theater?

In 1915 producer Lewis J. Selznick enticed Nazimova from the stage, where she had been incarnating strong modern women in the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov. In Hollywood Nazimova continued her portrayal of complex women in movies like Revelation (1918) and The Brat (1919). By 1919, she was making more money per film than America’s curly-haired sweetheart, Mary Pickford.

Always seeking to expand her creative control, Nazimova began to participate in the writing and production of her films. In 1921, with assistance of noted writer June Mathis (the mentor of the film’s male star: Rudolph Valentino) and art director Natacha Rambova, Nazimova produced her own stylized version of the Alexander Dumas (fils) world-renowned tale of femme fatale Marguerite/Camille and her regeneration through the power of love: Camille.

The first meeting between the future lovers of the film—Armand (Valentino) and the courtesan Marguerite (Nazimova)—is at the opera, where she is surrounded by fawning men, including the wealthy Count de Varville (Arthur Hoyt), with whom she plays as she does other wealthy benefactors. Armand falls immediately under her spell, but when he tries to approach her, she ridicules him: A law student? He’d do better to study love. As she sweeps down the staircase, Armand’s eyes fill with tears, signifying his sensitivity.

The art nouveau designs for Camille clearly on display in this scene with Camille and her retinue of hangers-on.

They meet again at a party in her art nouveau house. During a fit of coughing (which introduces the audience to her illness: tuberculosis), he falls on his knees before her, passionately declaring his devotion in no uncertain terms: I wish I were a servant ... a dog ... that I might take care of you.

The lovers do eventually escape the pressures of their respective lives and establish a love nest in the idyllic country. But even there they are pursued by the tentacles of society: debt, disapproving associates, and finally the imposing father of Armand. Only this paternalistic figure can change Marguerite’s mind and persuade her to release her lover from her loving leash so that Armand and his family will not be destroyed socially and financially. Marguerite leaves the country and returns to her old life and the Count de Varville.

The famous death scene from the play, performed by many prestigious actresses onstage throughout the decades, is somewhat novel in this version. Marguerite is surrounded by creditors who like vultures are examining her possessions, including her deathbed. The only possession they leave untouched is the book Armand gave her, Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost. As the film flashes back to happier days under the trees with Armand, Marguerite expires, alone.

This shot reeks of sentimentality and romanticism—the femme fatale Camille’s undoing.

Nazimova projects the erotic appeal of Wilde’s bad girl Salome, even though the actress’s age undercuts the character’s teenage allure, from Salome.

Designer Natacha Rambova was always daring in her costuming and art direction, from Camille.

Nazimova’s cinematic Waterloo was her 1923 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s decadent play Salome. Based on the Biblical story of the teenage vixen, her seduction of her uncle Herod, and her obsession with the beautiful but pure John the Baptist, Wilde’s play had been met only with derision and legal action during its early performances. Nazimova adapted the play with Natacha Rambova (who also designed the costumes and sets), remaining faithful to the decadent spirit of the piece. The designs were largely inspired by art nouveau illustrator Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for the publication of the play and were dazzling, but possibly too bizarre for American audiences.

In addition, Nazimova was moving into middle age and probably not the best choice for the role of the petulant and lustful teenager Salome. The film was a financial and critical failure. This fact, combined with the changing tastes of modern Jazz Age audiences, gently pushed Nazimova into retirement from the screen. She continued, however, to express her creativity and business sense in turning her meticulously designed villa on Sunset Boulevard—The Garden of Allah—into a decadent hotel/nightclub that became the scene of many notorious Hollywood parties and the watering hole for the glitterati of the town. Ironically, she made a comeback of sorts in 1941 in another classic femme fatale film, Blood and Sand, but this time as an aging señora—not the fiery Doña Sol (that role was reserved for the femme fatale of a new generation: Rita Hayworth).

Pola Negri

—The Comic Vamp

Pola Negri is unique among early vamps in that many of her roles in Germany and later in the United States, where she immigrated with her with mentor and director Ernst Lubitsch, are primarily comic. Even her more serious femme fatale roles like Bella Donna in 1923 always have a touch of humor to them, or what critic Molly Haskell in her book From Reverence to Rape called, large measures of irony and understanding . . . .

Negri, like many early stars of the cinema, grew up in grinding poverty, in her case on the streets of Warsaw. Her break came when she moved to Berlin and began to collaborate with Lubitsch at Germany’s premiere studio: UFA. While there she came to the attention of Hollywood chiefly through two films: Carmen, a.k.a. Gypsy Blood (U.S. title), in 1918; and Madame Du Barry, a.k.a. Passion (U.S. title), in 1919.

Carmen, one of the most adapted femme fatale stories, gives Negri a role into which she can project her natural exuberance and sense of humor as well as her darker need to control men sexually. Lubitsch, the director, followed the outline of Prosper Merimee’s story while lifting a few scenes from Bizet’s world-famous opera. The direction seems none too inspired, unlike Lubitsch’s other works, but that matters little as it is Negri’s enthusiastic performance which sells the film. The viewer can see immediately why men so desperately want to worship this fiery cigarette girl. Two scenes in particular illustrate how captivating Negri’s performance is.

Pola Negri could project that sultry look needed for a full-blooded vamp.

Pola Negri could also be more playful.

The first scene occurs when Carmen comes up with a plan to divert the upright Don José (Harry Liedtke), who is guarding the gate and thereby allow her gang of thieves to pass with their stolen goods. Carmen approaches Don José while he is minding the gate. She lures him away from his post. Within a few minutes, he is on his knees worshipping her. Even though he is aware that the smugglers are slipping through the gate, he cannot stop. His heart sinks in despair and he says, Lower and lower! I am no longer a soldier to be trusted! Carmen then says to him, Grieve not—tomorrow will bring sweet reward! She then makes love to him violently.

The second scene is when Carmen decides to help Don José escape from prison, where he is being held for aiding her. She brings a loaf of bread with a file inside and tells the jailer innocently that it is for José, her cousin. The jailer is reluctant to pass on the food, fearing a trick. So Carmen begins teasing and mocking him by sticking out her tongue and shaking her head. She then converts her little-girl tactics into more womanly ones. She jumps onto his lap, caresses his face, and kisses him on the lips. This does the trick, and the bread is immediately delivered.

Lubitsch’s epic Madame Du Barry combines historical sweep with intimate passion in a commercial product that confirmed Lubitsch’s international reputation as a first-rung director, as well as assuring Negri’s status as an international star. Based loosely on the life of the milliner who became the powerful mistress of Louis XV, Negri again brings her vivacity to the part. She plays with the men in her life like a cat with mice. In the first scenes she has an older admirer carry her belongings to the abode where she is to meet her young, virile lover Armand (Harry Liedtke again). While flirting with Don Diego (Magnus Stifter) at the opera, she accepts the advances of the roué Count Du Barry (Eduard von Winterstein). When her young lover Armand arrives, this inevitably leads to a duel in which Armand runs Diego through with a sword. Du Barry tries to save her lover but is lured away by the wealth Du Barry offers her. As Negri plays her, she is an ambitious young girl who cannot resist the smell of money and the allure of controlling powerful men.

Her control over Du Barry soon fades, however, as he begins to use her for his own ambitions, sending her off to the court to present petitions for money he believes the king owes him. Du Barry uses her wiles for her own purposes and eventually Louis (Emil Jannings) becomes enamored with her. Soon he is kissing her feet as she languishes in her canopied bed, and later manicuring her nails as she petulantly upbraids him for leaving her side to meet with his ministers.

Intent on showing a softer, romantic side to Du Barry, Lubitsch and Negri give the lady a soft spot: her love for Armand. She saves him from execution and then has him promoted to an officer in the king’s guards. Although she desperately desires him as a sexual partner, he refuses, angry that his sweet milliner has become the notorious sybarite known to the rebellious masses as Madame Du Barry. Armand does eventually reveal his love as he tries to save her from the guillotine, dying in the process.

One particular scene has a curious prophetic quality in the film, as art seems to foreshadow life. After the death Louis XV from smallpox, Du Barry, now in the hands of her enemies, sees the coffin of Louis being carried out. She runs to it and falls to her knees, crying hysterically. Negri repeated this scene in real life seven years later at the funeral of her purported lover Rudolph Valentino. Many considered this over-the-top demonstration of her grief to be a publicity stunt; and it was one of the many factors that brought