Fatality and Identification in Noir Films

An icy blonde whose trademark hairstyle - a cascade of golden tresses that obscured one heavy-lidded eye - remained among the enduring images of Hollywood glamour, Veronica Lake was for a time, one of the most popular and sought-after actresses in motion pictures. She starred in a handful of features that, though the years, earned legendary status, including the film noirs, "This Gun for Hire" (1942) and "The Blue Dahlia" (1946), as well as the smart comedies, "Sullivan's Travels" (1941) and "I Married a Witch" (1942). She also motivated a generation of women to imitate her cool sexuality and chic style, at the same time, causing an equal number of men - particularly fighting WWII G.I.s - to fall for her. Unfortunately, her success was short-lived, her star fizzling under the weight of personal tragedies, gossip and mental illness. Despite her fall from grace, Lake stood the test of time as a Tinseltown icon, inspiring tribute in songs, literature, and movies - most notably Kim Basinger's Academy Award-winning turn in "L.A. Confidential" (1997), as a prostitute whose glacial beauty is modeled after Lake. Source: www.tcm.com

The famed "fascination and destnictiveness" of the femme fatale is, however, always enigmatic, and the power she wields is typically far in excess of her material presence.' One way of understanding this paradox is to say that the femme fatale functions neither literally nor allegorically but synecdochically within noir cinema, as a screen: as both herself and the bearer of a projected image. Now we can begin to recognize how noir negotiates between two versions of fascination: as the inherent property of a certain object, eliciting the gaze, or as relational and fantasmatic, projected by certain subjects. [...] renaming her the femme fascinant, the essence of film fascination, in noir both woman and film are invested with the power of fascination by the homme fasciné. For there is almost always one-and only one-for whom fascination with the femme as image proves fatal.

The scenario of Lang's The Woman in the Window is especially clear in this respect. Three friends-a district attorney, an old doctor, and a professor of psychology-all fantasize about the painting of their "dream girl," but only the expert on Freud falls for his fantasy. The synecdochic function of the femlne fatale is clear: she embodies one type of cinematic experience, a certain relation to the image, an exception to the rule.

In line with Mary Ann Doane's reading of the femme fatale as a doubly traumatizing "figure of fascination," in that she articulates not only a threat to male subjectivity but to a system of signification based on faith in the image: certain noir narratives became cinematically self-reflexive and made visible a moral or political preoccupation with film's power of fascination, in relation to the demands of negotiating fascination historically in the sphere of desire and death.

In the case of Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945), the invocation of Hollywood cinema's complicity is emphasized by the voice-over's open challenge to the audience's capacity for belief ("You're going to tell me you don't believe me!") and its desire to forget ("Did you ever want to cut away a piece of your memory and blot it out? You can't, you know!"). Variations on the theme connect such different films as The Spiral Staircase (Siodmak, 1946), a Gothic tale of trauma that begins with an extraordinary scene juxtaposing audience fascination and a brutal murder; Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947), often paired with The Killers for the lethal return of the past and the fascinating allure of its femme fatale, and Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947), in which the sight of acute male lack coincides with a radical restriction in camera point of view.

Swede relates to Kitty as spectator to image: he only has eyes for her, so that the room becomes a kind of cinema for Swede. It is as if he had kept his date but passed through the screen to encounter his fantasmatic image of a woman, animated like Alice's painting in the window in Lang's movie or, even more precisely (given the resemblance of their dark cross-strap dresses), like the uncanny portrait in Otto Preminger's Laura (1944). The body of the homme fasciné ends "near tore in half," proof that contact with the image is lethal.

We might conclude that what noir criticism has failed to reckon with is noir cinema's own engagement with fascination. How the movies themselves understand fascination historically has remained obscure, while fascination in noir has much to do with the obscurity and obscuring, the loss of history itself. Logically enough, our "objective" critical distance is also already inscribed reflexively within certain noir films, but with a twist that is crucial to their affective appeal: when the dispassionate analytical eye triumphs over a gaze distorted by desire, it feels like a defeat, suggesting that what must be recovered is in fact precisely the naive affinity, the apparently uncritical and unhistorical "identificatory" note, suggested by Michael Walker's "unsolved mystery": what at first appears as a simple internal contradiction between fact and fantasy, typically embodied by the central character(s) in the split between knowledge and belief, breaks down; and as it does so, it opens up what Tom Conley calls the "median area, between spectators' fantasies and the facts of the film." -"Film Noir Fascination: Outside History" by Oliver Harris (Cinema Journal, Vol. 43, No. 1., Fall 2003)

James Naremore uses the example of "Double Indemnity" to illustrate what he terms "performance within performance" whereby the film character is also performing a role in the diegesis. Fred MacMurray plays the role of Walter Neff who falls for the wife of a potential client; playing innocent to his superior Walter Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). For Richard De Cordova, this masking of "dissimulation" is a common model in film noir. Sylvia Harvey (Woman's Place: The Absent Family in Film Noir) argues than a canonical noir text as "Double Indemnity" stages the woman as a sign of desire for insurance salesman Walter Neff, an emblematic alienated male in an economy driven by corporations rather than individuals. -"A Companion to Film Noir" (2013) by Andrew Spicer & Helen Hanson

"Pushover" (1954) directed by Richard Quine (Full Movie)

Pushover (1954) directed by Richard Quine, starring Fred MacMurray, Kim Novak and Dorothy Malone

Never a scenery-chewer, MacMurray quietly shines in his role - giving a restrained and authentic performance. Addled with bills and complexes, his weary flatfoot aches to break free - and with Leona's insistence that .."Money isn't dirty, just people..", mulls it over, goes against his better judgment, and concludes that the iron's just hot enough. Complementing MacMurray in her debut lead role, Novak delivers the goods - equal parts beauty and raw talent. Sort of a 'fatale-in-training', her Leona is less guilty of treachery than of youthful inexperience - in her scheme to 'rob Peter to pay Paul'. Showing a real knack for noir, Quine (who's only other genre credit is the passable 'Drive a Crooked Road') keeps his compositions tight, confining - and his streets rain-slicked. His flat 50's cinematography is perfect for showcasing the story's late-night dives, back alleys, and shadow-laced apartments. Source: www.noiroftheweek.com

Happy Anniversary, James M. Cain!

Edward G. Robinson and Fred MacMurray in "Double Indemnity" (1944) directed by Billy Wilder, based on the novel "Double Indemnity" (1943) by James M. Cain

MacMurray's performance and chemistry with Barbara Stanwyck would be incendiary. Cast against type it would be amongst the defining performances of a career that seventeen years later would find him playing Professor Ned Brainerd in Disney's The Absent-Minded Professor. MacMurray would later describe Double Indemnity as "the best picture I ever made."

The chemistry between MacMurray and Stanwyck drives the narrative of Double Indemnity. Even as the Hay's Production Code forbade the depiction of explicit sex, as the couple discuss the various mundanities of insurance cover the conversation becomes the unlikely kindling of a convincing Amour Fou. As Dietrichson says, "There's a speed limit in this state Mister, and I think you just broke it." Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

She closed her eyes, and after a while she began to cry. I put my arm around her and patted her. It seemed funny, after what we had been talking about, that I was treating her like some child that had lost a penny. "Please, Walter, don't let me do this. We can't. It's simply—insane."
"Yes, it's insane."
"We're going to do it. I can feel it."
"I too."
"I haven't any reason. He treats me as well as a man can treat a woman. I don't love him, but he's never done anything to me."
"But you're going to do it."
"Yes, God help me, I'm going to do it."
She stopped crying, and lay in my arms for a while without saying anything. Then she began to talk almost in a whisper.
"He's not happy. He'll be better off—dead."
"Yeah?"
"That's not true, is it?"
"Not from where he sits, I don't think."
"I know it's not true. I tell myself it's not true. But there's something in me, I don't know what. Maybe I'm crazy. But there's something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I'm so beautiful, then. And sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy, by taking them out where I am, into the night, away from all trouble, all unhappiness...Walter, this is the awful part. I know this is terrible. I tell myself it's terrible. But to me, it doesn't seem terrible. It seems as though I'm doing something—that's really best for him, if he only knew it. Do you understand me, 'Walter?"
"No."
"Nobody could."
"But we're going to do it."
"Yes, we're going to do it."
"Straight down the line."
"Straight down the line."

-Get this, Phyllis. There's three essential elements to a successful murder." That word was out before I knew it. I looked at her quick. I thought she'd wince under it. She didn't. She leaned forward. The firelight was reflected in her eyes like she was some kind of leopard. "Go on. I'm listening." "The first is, help. One person can't get away with it, that is unless they're going to admit it and plead the unwritten law or something. It takes more than one. The second is, the time, the place, the way, all known in advance—to us, but not to him. The third is, audacity. That's the one that all amateur murderers forget. They know the first two, sometimes. But that third, only a professional knows. There comes a time in any murder when the only thing that can see you through is audacity, and I can't tell you why. You know the perfect murder? You think it's this swimming pool job, and you're going to do it so slick nobody would ever guess it. They'd guess it in two seconds, flat. In three seconds, flat, they'd prove it, and in four seconds, flat, you'd confess it. No, that's not it. The perfect murder is the gangster that goes on the spot. You know what they do? First they get a finger on him. They get that girl that he lives with. Along about six o'clock they get a phone call from her. She goes out to a drugstore to buy some lipstick, and she calls. They're going to see a picture tonight, he and she, and it's at such and such a theatre. They'll get there around nine o'clock. All right, there's the first two elements. They got help, and they fixed the time and the place in advance. All right, now watch the third. They go there in a car. They park across the street. They keep the motor running. They put a sentry out. He loafs up an alley, and pretty soon he drops a handkerchief and picks it up. That means he's coming. They get out of the car. They drift up to the theatre. They close in on him. And right there, in the glare of the lights, with a couple hundred people looking on, they let him have it. He hasn't got a chance. Twenty bullets hit him, from four or five automatics. He falls, they scram for the car, they drive off—and then you try to convict them. You just try to convict them. They've got their alibis ready in advance, all airtight, they were only seen for a second, by people who were so scared they didn't know what they were looking at—and there isn't a chance to convict them. The police know who they are, of course. They round them up, give them the water cure—and then they're habeas corpused into court and turned loose. Those guys don't get convicted. They get put on the spot by other gangsters. Oh yeah, they know their stuff, all right. And if we want to get away with it, we've got to do it the way they do it, and not the way some punk up near San Francisco does it, that's had two trials already, and still he's not free." -"Double Indemnity" (1943) by James M. Cain

Gay Marriage is Legalized in California

Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger as Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar in "Brokeback Mountain" (2005) directed by Ang Lee

US Didn't Become Pro-Gay Overnight: The movie Brokeback Mountain looks like a big, bold, manly Western movie. But instead of the usual "boy meets girl" romance, this film's about "cowboy meets cowboy." "It is very, very propagandistic because the entire purpose of the movie is to make homosexuality seem like something good and appealing, and to make people who are opposed to homosexuality bigots and homophobes," said David Kupelian. There have been homosexual movies for years, but they are usually marketed to gay and art-house audiences. That was not the case with "Brokeback." Source: www.cbn.com

As crowds celebrate from the Castro to the Village, the implications of the Supreme Court's DOMA and Prop 8 decisions are still reverberating around the country. But as same sex couples start to register at Crate & Barrel, shouldn't they wonder: Of all the institutions to be committed to, is marriage really the sanest choice?

Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity" (1944) directed by Billy Wilder

If Hollywood is any guide, it probably isn't. From Double Indemnity and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf to War of the Roses and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the silver screen is littered with bitter, vitriolic marriages scarred by regret, revenge and recrimination. Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Same-Sex Marriage Law Could Mean Wedding Bells for Straight Hollywood Couples In 2006, longtime partners Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie made clear that they would not tie the knot until all couples could, with the actor telling Esquire that "Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able." And while Pitt did put a ring on it in 2012, the duo has yet to make it down the aisle." Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Ava Gardner's memoirs recount her three loves

Three Men and a Goddess: Once Hollywood’s most irresistible woman—wed to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra—by 1988 Ava Gardner was nearly broke, ravaged by illness, and intent on selling her memoirs. But the man she chose as her ghostwriter, Peter Evans, had his own problems, not least a legal war with Sinatra.

“I think the most vulgar thing about Hollywood is the way it believes its own gossip,” Ava told me that day. “I know a lot of men fantasize about me; that’s how Hollywood gossip becomes Hollywood history.”

“Is that why you want to write a book?,” I asked warily. “You want to put the record straight?”

“I’m broke, honey. I either write the book or sell the jewels.” I was surprised at the frankness with which she admitted it. “And I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels,” she added.

The stroke she’d had a year and a half earlier had partially paralyzed her left side and frozen half her face in a rictus of sadness. It would have been a hard blow to bear for any woman, but for an actress who had once been hailed as “the world’s most beautiful animal,” it was a tragedy.

Ava Gardner & Mickey Rooney: Married 10 January 1942 - Divorced 21 May 1943

“Going to the fights every Friday night in L.A., that was an education. We’d go along with George Raft and Betty Grable. Mickey always insisted on sitting ringside. Those little bantamweights were the worst—they’d nearly kill each other to entertain us. That fact bothered me more than any of the rest of it—the things people would do to please you if you were famous enough, and there was nobody more famous than George Raft, Betty G., and Mickey in those days. You have to remember Mickey was bigger than Gable in those days. At least, his pictures took more money than Gable’s, although they each earned the same five grand a week when $5,000 was real money.

“I remember asking him one evening, shortly after we were married, what he thought of me that first time we met. We had a kind of truth game we used to play in bed. We’d spend a lot of time in the sack in the early days, a lot of time: talking, laughing, making love. I must have seemed so fucking awkward, so fucking gauche. Anyway, I asked him what went through his mind when he saw me on the set that day.

“He said, ‘O.K., when they said you were a new contract player, I figured you were a new piece of pussy for one of the executives. The prettiest ones were usually spoken for before they even stepped off the train. I didn’t give a damn. I wanted to fuck you the moment I saw you.’

“I still didn’t know that he was the biggest wolf on the lot. He was catnip to the ladies. He knew it, too. The little sod was not above admiring himself in the mirror. All five foot two of him! He probably banged most of the starlets who appeared in his Andy Hardy films—Lana Turner among them. She called him Andy Hard-on. Can we say that—Andy Hard-on?” “I don’t see why not,” I said. “It’s a funny line.” “No wonder, when I think of that marriage now, I think of nightclubs: the Palladium, Ciro’s, the Cocoanut Grove, where we danced to Tommy Dorsey’s band. Guys didn’t trouble me much—most of them knew I was Mickey’s wife—but that’s where I learned to drink, I mean to drink seriously. All the clubs were hot on under-age drinking, but Mick would slip me dry martinis in coffee cups. Sipping a dry martini out of a coffee cup seemed as glamorous as hell to me.”

Ava Gardner & Artie Shaw: Married 17 October 1945 - Divorced 25 October 1946

"[Artie Shaw] He’d just come out of the navy when he met Lana. He was deaf in his left ear from when he was bombed at Guadalcanal. Lana was 18. The classic MGM starlet. Artie had an I.Q. of—I don’t know what it was. It was right up there. The intellect isn’t connected to the pelvis, he told me once when I asked what had attracted him to her. [Gardner’s chronology is wrong. Shaw married Turner in February 1940, when she was 19. They divorced seven months later, and he enlisted in the navy in 1942.]

“Mickey reckoned he made her pregnant when she was 17. He probably did, although Lana always denied it. She had to, of course. She was in an Andy Hardy film with him. He said she had great knockers. First Mick, then Artie … she beat me to both of them. And to Frank, too. Even so, I liked her. We became good friends.”

“Artie was difficult, he was complex, but I was stuck on him,” she continued. “To tell the truth, I was always a little afraid of him. Not physically. Not the way I was scared of G.C.S. [George C. Scott, with whom she had an affair while they were making The Bible: In the Beginning]. When G.C.S. was loaded, he was terrifying—he’d beat the shit out of me and have no idea the next morning what he’d done.

“Artie was another kind of bully. I was afraid of his mind. He was a dominating son of a bitch. He used to put me down so much I lost complete confidence in myself. When I went into analysis—that was something else he made me do—I insisted on taking an I.Q. test, because I was at the point where I thought there was something seriously wrong with my mind. Well, it turned out very well indeed. I didn’t have an enormous I.Q., but I did have rather a high one. “I don’t think in my heart I genuinely wanted a baby at all. I just thought, I’m going back to school, I’m getting an education, I’m being the good wife—to make it perfect I’ll have a child. Maybe I was playing a part, who the hell knows?”

Ava Gardner & Frank Sinatra: Married 7 November 1951 - Divorced 5 July 1957

“I fell for the oldest con in the world. Frank said it didn’t matter a damn if I’d slept with Mario or not, it was in the past. He just wanted me to be honest with him. He said if I told him the truth, it would all be forgotten. So I told him the truth, and, of course, it was never forgotten. He brought it up every goddamn argument we had. He never forgave me.” “But he still married you,” I said.

“November 7, 1951. A day that will live in infamy. Only days after his divorce from Nancy became final. It was too soon, but that was Frank all over,” she said. “Plenty of people told me I was mad to marry him. Lana Turner had had an affair with him after she divorced Artie. ‘I’ve been there, honey,’ she told me. ‘Don’t do it!’

“The trouble was Frank and I were too much alike. Bappie said I was Frank in drag. There was a lot of truth in that. He was the only husband I had that Bappie didn’t approve of straight off the bat. I’m not saying she disliked him. On the contrary, she thought he was great—but not for me. I should have listened to her.” “Why didn’t you?,” I said. “He was good in the feathers. You don’t pay much attention to what other people tell you when a guy’s good in the feathers,” she said.

Frank knew I was dating Luis Miguel Dominguín. Luis Miguel was the most famous bullfighter in the world. Bogie [Humphrey Bogart] was furious that I was giving Frank a hard time. He loved Frank like a brother. They started the Rat Pack together. ‘I don’t know why you want to two-time Frank with a goddamn fruit,’ he’d needle me. Stuff like that. Luis Miguel was one of the bravest men I knew. He was definitely no fruit, I can tell you that.” “Frank and I had been married barely a couple of years. The marriage was obviously unraveling even then. I’m just surprised it lasted as long as it did. It was a bad time for Frank. Poor darling, he was so insecure. He was broke. He didn’t have a job. He was hanging on to his place in Palm Springs by the skin of his teeth. It was the last real asset he had. If he’d lost that, it would have been the end of the line for him. He had made a lot of enemies in his good years, before the bobby-soxers found somebody new to throw their panties at. Nobody wanted to be around him. There were no hangers-on. He didn’t amuse them anymore. He couldn’t lift a check. There was nobody but me. He had burned most of his bridges with the press. There was a catalogue of disasters: His voice had gone. MGM had let him go. His agent had let him go. So had CBS. On top of all that, the poor bastard suffered a hemorrhage of his vocal cords and couldn’t talk, let alone sing, for about six weeks. That’s when I saw through those people. I saw through Hollywood. Naïve little country girl that I was, I saw through all the phoniness, all the crap.” Source: www.vanityfair.com

Ava Gardner in "The Killers" (1946) directed by Robert Siodmak

The film’s strengths are its cinematography by Elwood Bredell, which is wonderfully stark, as well as Ava Gardner’s sexy performance as Kitty Collins, the woman the Swede falls for and who eventually leads him to his downfall. Her allure and sultriness make for a one of a kind femme fatale, and it is easy to see how she can manipulate the Swede or anyone else she wants. It is a shame she does not have a bigger role in the film. Source: sbccfilmreviews.org

Ava Gardner and Fred MacMurray in "Singapore" (1947) directed by John Brahm


Ava Gardner was loaned to Universal by MGM in late February 1947 for "Singapore", which reminisced of Casablanca's story. Fred MacMurray, whom French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville had called "the inventor of underplaying", got along well with Ava who thought he was great.

Fred MacMurray & June Haver video

Fred MacMurray & June Haver video. Soundtrack: "Paradise" and "It's All Yours" by Artie Shaw & Helen Forrest, "My Ideal" by Glenn Miller Orchestra, and "I'm gonna love you too" by Buddy Holly

Prisoners - Official Trailer #2: Jake Gyllenhaal & Hugh Jackman

Award-winning filmmaker Denis Villeneuve (Incendies) directs a deep ensemble cast in Prisoners, about two families whose lives are upturned when their young daughters go missing together.

Hugh Jackman, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, and Viola Davis play the distraught parents, with Jake Gyllenhaal as a cop trying to pick up the missing girls’ trail. Paul Dano and Melissa Leo also star in the drama written by Aaron Guzikowski. Source: www.deadline.cm

Happy Anniversary, Billy Wilder! (Thoughts on Double Indemnity)

Fred MacMurray & Barbara Stanwyck on the set of "Double Indemnity" (1944) directed by Billy Wilder


A clip from "Double Indemnity" (1944) directed by Billy Wilder, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson.

In the classic noir plot, the hero quite coincidentally meets the alluring femme fatale—in Double Indemnity he happens to pass by her villa and enters to ask her husband to renew a car insurance policy. Yet their meeting follows the fateful logic of a love at first sight. As Mladen Dolar notes, what seemingly happened unintentionally and by pure chance is belatedly recognized as the realization of an innermost wish: 'the pure chance was actually no chance at all: the intrusion of the unforeseen turned into necessity.'

From the moment the hero catches sight of the femme fatale, both find themselves caught in a sequence of events which can go only one way. Both are tragically framed within a narrative of fate and can only come to accept the law of causation.

As Joan Copjec argues, in order to indemnify himself against the dangers of sexuality, the noir hero treats her as his double, to which he surrenders the fatal enjoyment he cannot himself sustain. On the other hand, the femme fatale is more than simply a symptom of the hero’s erotic ambivalence. She sustains his selfdelusion, but also gives voice to a feminine desire that may include him in order to attain its aim, but also exceeds his fantasy realm. In her insistence that “it’s straight down the line for both” of them, she can be understood as moving towards an ethical act meant to radically undercut the blindness of self-preservation her lover seeks to entertain at all costs.

Owing to this function of duplicity within noir narratives, Slavoj Zizek suggests that the femme fatale functions as a symptom of the noir hero’s fatal enjoyment in such a way that, by destroying her—Walter Neff will shoot Phyllis Dietrichson in the heart—he hopes to purify himself of the desire she inspired and the guilt this entailed. In so doing, however, the noir hero not only does not recognize her as separate from him (thus denying her humanity), but also remains blind to the encrypted message about the fragility of his existence that she embodies for him.

Double Indemnity has come to figure as the prototype of film noir, not least of all because it performs the rhetorical duplicity connected to the femme fatale, staging Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) both as the symptom of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and as a female subject who will not give way and thus exceeds his narrative of the fatal consequences of their mutual transgression.

We only hear the confession he makes to his superior Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) after having shot his partner in crime; a self-justifying narrative, establishing the tragic code of failure. It begins with the statement, “I killed Dietrichson. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pity isn’t it,” and continues as a voice-over throughout the film. Yet, at key moments in the fatal sequence resulting in the production of two corpses, Wilder also offers close-ups of Phyllis’s face, visually articulating a different perspective than that of her noir lover.

“No, I never loved you nor anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart. I used you just as you said, until a minute ago, when I couldn’t fire that second shot. I never thought that could happen to me.” One could read this as a gesture of abdication, because at this moment she actually stops her seductive game to see both her lover and herself. She acknowledges him by directly acknowledging how she had used him, and, in so doing, she asks for him to attend to her. By killing her rather than putting himself in her presence, he hopes to repress both his own desire for destruction as well as his complicity with her. That she, in turn, willingly accepts the death he is giving her not only renders visible the incompatibility of their two fantasy scenarios. It also allows us to decide whether we will privilege Walter Neff’s misogynist description of the femme fatale in his voice-over narrative, or recognize her as a separate human being, exceeding his appropriation of her and, in so doing, exhibiting an agency of her own.

According to Janey Place, film noir should be read as a “male fantasy” and the femme fatale, as the mythic “dark lady, the spider woman, the evil seductress who tempts man and brings about his destruction” and who has been haunting our image repertoire since Eve and Pandora. So that, even though she is punished in the end, her transgressions against masculine authority —killing her husband, cheating the insurance company, bringing about the demise of her disloyal lover— is what tarries in our memory. As Sylvia Harvey notes, “Despite the ritual punishment of acts of transgression, the vitality with which these acts are endowed produces an excess of meaning which cannot finally be contained. Narrative resolutions cannot recuperate their subversive significance.” Within feminist film criticism, the femme fatale has thus emerged as a fundamentally unstable figure.

Not only will she not allow herself to be dominated by the men who fall for her charms, but also the meaning she assumes in any given text refuses to be fixed. In the same manner that she will not assume an unequivocal place in the fantasy life of the noir hero, no single interpretation can be imposed on the disturbance posed by her resilient feminine power. -"Femme Fatale — Negotiations of Tragic Desire" (2004) by Elisabeth Bronfen

"Repeat Performance" (full movie): a cross between noir genre & Twilight Zone

Repeat Performance (1947) directed by Alfred L. Werker, starring Louis Hayward, Joan Leslie, Virginia Field, Richard Basehart, Tom Comway, etc.

Film noir and The Twilight Zone have more in common than you'd probably think. B-movie actors from the 40s peppered the casts of Twilight Zone episodes almost 20 years later. Dutch angles magnify tension; and other impressive black and white photography (at least before the Twilight Zone started to shoot on video late in the series) on the CBS show could easily be mistaken for a classic noir. Watch the credits at the end of a TZ and you'll see many names sometimes associated with film noir: Harry J. Wild, Joseph LaShelle, John Brahm, Richard Florey to name a few. Of course the fantasy/sci-fi element of the Twilight Zone are usually not found in noirs. The exceptions being Val Lewton's RKO horror films and the New Years Eve thriller, Repeat Performance.

Repeat Performance was released in 1947 by Eagle-Lion films who at the time were trying to establish themselves as a major force in Hollywood. They put out some “nervous As” – not cheap enough to be Bs but not expensive enough to be As. Repeat Performance fits that description.

Just before midnight on New Year's Eve, 1946, Broadway actress Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) shoots her husband Barney (Hayward) and then rushes to see her friend, odd-ball poet William Williams. After a distressed Sheila confesses her deed to William (Basehart), he suggests they talk to Sheila's producer John Friday (Tom Conway). As Sheila and William are walking up to John's apartment, Sheila wishes that she could relive the past year, insisting that if she had it to do over, she would not make the same mistakes twice. Upon reaching John's door, Sheila notices that William has disappeared and then gradually realizes that something is wrong.

The film is based on a book by William O'Farrell. O'Farrell doesn't seem to have many other books after this, his first. Published in 1942, the book is something. Over at the Mystery File, Dan Stumpf writes, “O’Farrell can write. He can put across a bitchy theatrical milieu and a seedy flophouse with equal aplomb, evoke a desperate chase and a disparate seduction with commensurate suspense, and weave a tale of murder and melodrama (verging on Soap Opera at times, but teetering skillfully on the edge) with prose that keeps the pages turning very nicely.”

There are many changes from the book (which is wonderfully bleak) and the movie. Barney is the actor that goes back in time, not Sheila. Barney begins the novel as a flop-house drunk after shooting his lover Paula when she tried to dump him. When on the run from cops, Barney and William get shot at by the cops leading to the magical happenings. The scene is so cinematic I'm a bit surprised they didn't find a way to shoe-horn it into the film. And although it is soapy, O'Farrell's novel concludes more satisfactory than most thrillers. A good read if you can find it.

O'Farrell's book was his only one to gain any attention. His movie and TV credits are slim too – he did write an episode of Alfred Hithcock Presents. Repeat Performance was remade into a 1980s TV movie (with Joan Leslie in a small part).

The cast of the '47 film includes Louis Hayward. Hayward's career wasn't what it was just a few years before, but he did make some interesting choices. He was best friends with Edgar G. Ulmer and appeared in Ulmer's Citizen-Kane-of-B-noir drama Ruthless in 1948. 1950 he starred in one of Fritz Lang's last US productions House By the River. Ladies in Retirement, And Then There Were None and Strange Woman all were released around the same time as Repeat Performance.

Tom Conway is a favorite. In addition to Cat People and the 7th Victim he was The Falcon in that long running mystery series (replacing brother George Sanders who got bored with the part. Similarly, Sanders replaced Hayward as The Saint in the movie series that The Falcon was most likely based on.)

Joan Leslie - so good in High Sierra - is very inspired as the conflicted Sheila and as strong as her Repeat Performance co-stars. Not an easy task when you consider how outrageous the story gets.

Finally, Richard Basehart captures the book's William part without being obvious about it. I know most remember Basehart from TV's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and the voice of the 1984 Olympics but his contributions to film noir is impressive. The next year Basehart would star in the unforgettable He Walked by Night. His other noir credits include the period film Reign of Terror, Tension, Outside the Wall, Fourteen Hours, The House on Telegraph Hill, and the Brit noir The Good Die Young. Source: www.noiroftheweek.com