Happy Anniversary, Janis Carter!
Glenn Ford was always a good fit for the role of a seemingly normal guy with rage boiling inside. There’s something just a little off about him, a grumpy discontent that belies that decent, working man’s face. Janis Carter only had a short career in films before she retired to become a socialite in the mid-fifties, but during her brief time in the city of sin she etched out a notable place among the bad girls. While some femme fatales are misunderstood, even sympathetic, Carter excelled at playing women who seem twisted, maybe even perverted.
Late in
Framed, she commits a brutal murder, but watch her as she’s disposing of the body and you’ll notice there’s a little smile that creeps onto her face, a rush at being this bad. It can’t help but remind you of her brilliant turn as the deranged femme in
Night Editor. Paula is a little more sane than that character—which isn’t difficult since that character was totally nuts—but she’s still a nasty piece of business. Carter can put this kind of unbalanced wacko across because she has charm to burn. She isn’t just good looking; she has a charisma that pulls you in—usually at your own peril.
Source: thenighteditor.blogspot.com
Flawlessly coiffed, impeccably dressed, she floats onto the screen in the dim half-light of a smoky nightclub or a foggy back alley. As she moves across the frame, we catch a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror or a shop window. She is, of course, the femme fatale—a recurring fixture of 1940s film noir and its offshoots. As poised as she is pitiless, as charming as she is calculating, the femme fatale expertly balances her image and her true intentions to manipulate a tangle of hapless husbands, lovers, and admirers. Dizzyingly, dazzlingly dangerous, she’s the picture of traditional feminine elegance—but she did real violence, both symbolic and literal, to the institution of marriage.
"My husband keeps me on a leash so tight I can’t breathe," Phyllis Dietrichson, the iconic femme fatale in Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic
Double Indemnity, famously complained-a familiar schema, and it recurs in dozens of noirs from the period: in the 1946
The Postman Always Rings Twice, the 1947
The Paradine Case, the 1948
The Lady from Shanghai, and the 1949
Too Late for Tears. The punishment that Phyllis Dietrichson meted out to her husband in
Double Indemnity in 1944 was harsh, but there was some sense in which it fit his crime. He was controlling, stifling, all-too-present—so Phyllis got rid of him. But what Nick wants from Amy—and what modern sexism wants from women—is altogether different.
Seventy years after the release of
Double Indemnity, David Fincher’s new thriller,
Gone Girl, presents itself as one of these. The film is an adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name, and its protagonist, Amy Dunne, is a new kind of femme fatale, a reaction to a new kind of patriarchy. Where sexism once manifested itself straightforwardly, it has since evolved into a subtler affair. Modern patriarchy is evasive, shifty, slimily manipulative, and it requires a different sort of resistance. An homage to its dark roots,
Gone Girl is cynical and atmospheric, a jumble of infidelities, conflicting narratives, and abrupt police interrogations.
The most powerful scene in
Gone Girl takes place when Amy recounts the tale of Nick’s betrayal to a fellow guest at the rural motel where she’s been playing fugitive. She recalls how he performed the same touching gesture with his student that he once performed with her, gently wiping snow off the girl’s lips before he kissed her. The poignancy of Amy’s confession cuts through all her coldness, all her calculations, highlighting the tender, emotional core of the whole convoluted drama: on the one hand, Nick’s self-serving apathy; on the other, Amy’s warped, ineffectual caring.
Amy, neo-femme-fatale that she is, holds Nick accountable. And, in the grand tradition of noir retribution, Nick’s punishment is perversely suited to his crimes. He wants to evade responsibility, to wash his hands of the mess he’s made of his marriage—so Amy ensures that the damned spot won’t come out. Rather than murdering him, she forces him to stick around and own up to his misdeeds—on television, in front of a national audience. “He needed to learn…. Grown-ups pay. Grown-ups suffer consequences,” she says, coolly. Phyllis Dietrich killed her husband and implicated herself. Amy Dunne “kills herself”—and implicates her husband. And, in so doing, she turns the Cool Girl trope on its sorry head. “I’m not a quitter,” she tells Nick at the end of the movie. “I’ve killed for you. Who else can say that? You think you would be happy with a nice Midwestern girl? …I’m it, baby.”
Source: www.newrepublic.com
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