Classic French Noir: Gender and the Cinema of Fatal Desire

In the preceding two chapters, we have seen how good-bad girl fatalitaires display degrees of unruliness in their choice of mates. Similarly, Susan Hayward has suggested that the single defining trait of the fatale, apart from her seductiveness, may well be her uncontrollability.¹ Hayward has notably pointed out that in Judeo-Christian cultures, the femme’s origins can be traced back, through numerous cultural manifestations to Jezebel, Salomé, Delilah, Eve and finally to Lilith, the original unruly female:

Some say that God created man and woman in His own image on the Sixth Day, giving them charge over the world but that Eve did not yet exist … God then formed Lilith, the first woman, just as He had formed Adam, except that He used filth and sediment instead of pure dust … Adam and Lilith never found peace together; for when he wished to lie with her, she took offence at the recumbent posture he demanded. ‘Why must I lie beneath you?’ she asked. ‘I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal.’ Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him.²

In this version of the myth, the sexually rebellious Lilith subsequently had many demon partners and bore multitudes of demon offspring that were killed by God. Earlier Greek tradition also has its Lilith in the form of Pandora, the first woman, sent to earth by the Gods as a poisoned gift to punish mortals for Prometheus’ theft of fire, and whose unruly curiosity unleashes a torrent of evils upon mankind. It is no coincidence that Pandora, whose name signifies ‘possessing all gifts’, has both brains and beauty, clearly considered an uncontrollable and lethal combination.³

In evolutionary terms, this primeval feminine unruliness, clearly a metaphor for a wild and unfixable female sexuality, would correspond to the period preceding the development of monogamous pair-bonds and male parental investment (1.5–4 million years ago), during which early human females as well as dominant males would have had multiple partners.

On a physiological level (both male and) female promiscuity (and the absence of pair-bonds/durable monogamous relationships) is the sociosexual arrangement observed in chimpanzees and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), our closest relatives. Moreover, certain key features of male anatomy and physiology suggest that a degree of female promiscuity is a long-standing feature of our species: namely the moderately large size of testes in human males (compared, for example, to the relatively tiny testes of gorillas, who monopolise harems of faithful females) and the presence of killer and blocker sperm, both of which indicate corresponding levels of sperm competition, a physiological response to females having multiple sexual partners.

The persistence of female sexual ‘unruliness’ under patriarchy can notably be inferred from the trans-historical and cross-cultural prevalence of oppressive mate guarding practices (from restrictive dress codes to sequestration, physical and genital mutilation) and intense, potentially violent male sexual jealousy.

Male fear of female sexual unruliness also underpins the convenient patriarchal myth of innate female chastity versus ‘normal’ male promiscuity.⁴ As does the fatale herself. Her unruliness also explains how she has so frequently been read as embodying male fears of uncontrollable female sexuality.⁵ From an evolutionary perspective, such male sexual jealousy and mate-guarding tactics stems from the evolution of pair-bonds, male parental investment and consequent fears over paternity certainty. Human males always run the risk that their sexual, emotional and economic investment in a female partner and her children will be repaid by betrayal – cuckoldry – resulting in a serious waste of resources and genetic opportunity through the unwitting investment in another man’s offspring, or even in genetic suicide if the man bears no offspring of his own. Paternity uncertainty is theorised to be the ultimate, evolutionary cause of male sexual jealousy and, as such, need not be consciously registered. Put differently, intense sexual jealousy in men has its evolutionary roots in the fact that men can never be entirely sure that their children are their own, while female duplicity (real or suspected, emotional or explicitly sexual) is the proximal or immediate, consciously registered cause. In noir, as a distillation of the dangers of the male-female dynamic, a major source of narrative tension arises from the male protagonist’s uncertainty surrounding the fatale’s honesty, more specifically, her emotional and/or sexual loyalties, as we have seen. According to patriarchal ideology, the surface beauty of the female form should be an honest mirror that reflects both the woman’s moral purity and her man’s status. The femme has the potential to negate both, since she may be a devil in disguise whose voracious treachery will undermine the male’s economic and reproductive interests and status, in other words, his virility, the very core of his identity.

This is what is at the heart of the ‘endemic epistemological uncertainty’⁶ theorised as being simultaneously embodied in the femme and fundamental to the ethos of noir. This is the fundamental and somewhat obvious underlying motive for the visual investigation that has been the subject of so much critical discussion.⁷ However this chapter will also demonstrate the specificity of French figures: the classic femme fatale function can be distributed over several characters or inhabit the most apparently innocent or un-alluring form, thus escaping investigation.

Nonetheless, as bad-girl antagonist, French fatale can be a monstrous figure. Not simply unruly, she may callously exploit the love and trust of her victims, occasionally even plotting his – or her – murder. Her construction thus inevitably raises key questions around the misogyny of French noir and the extent to which it can be seen as promoting conservative or even reactionary ideologies concerning the place of women in what was still a deeply patriarchal society.

‘Lots of money and a little love’ (Dora/Simone Signoret, in Manèges [The Cheat] (Allégret, 1950))

High-risk competition by men for high mate-value (young, beautiful) women is amplified in patriarchal societies where the latter are typically the married property of older, socially dominant (wealthy) males. In French noir, when women are in this position and cannot obtain both love and money from the same male source, they resort to ruthless strategies of deceit and murder. Guilty in the eyes of the law, they may nonetheless be coded by the film’s internal ethics as ‘innocent’ or even heroic in their pursuit of true love, as we have seen. On the other hand, in some of the most popular and/or critically acclaimed French noirs, the fatale and her lover are portrayed as monstrous in their ruthless exploitation of the desire, love and trust of their victims, generally an older husband or male suitor. Here, the femme’s monstrous criminality stems from the same, fundamentally feminine predicament: how to obtain both romantic fulfilment and economic resources, i.e. the eternal dilemma of juggling love and money. But even at her most demonic, the most striking feature of the bad-girl French fatale as irredeemable garce is that her romantic attachment links her to the adulterous or otherwise unruly fatalitaires of our previous chapters. Although French fatale may be ambitious and unscrupulous, whether she is out to pin a murder on an innocent victim (Panique [Panic] (Duvivier 1947)); ruin an older, unattractive husband (Manèges, Allégret, 1950); extract resources from a devoted suitor (Le Bon Dieu sans confession, Decoin 1953); or murder her lover’s innocent, trusting wife (Les Diaboliques, Clouzot, 1955), what most often sets her apart from the American spider woman is her overriding attachment to a male character (albeit in the above films an evil or contemptible antagonist).

Although this figure may certainly be read as misogynous – Manèges and Panique are frequently cited as prime examples of postwar French cinema’s overriding misogyny – it is noteworthy that her main objective is not emotional and economic independence (as with so many American fatales) but emotional and sexual attachment to an ill-chosen male love object. Here the lover may be an unscrupulous gigolo (Panique;⁸ Manèges), an equally unscrupulous married lover (Les Diaboliques), or even a narcissistic penniless husband (Le Bon Dieu sans confession).

In Clouzot’s hugely successful murder mystery, aptly titled Les Diaboliques, abused wife (Vera Clouzot) and mistress (Simone Signoret) join forces to murder the sadistic husband (Paul Meurisse), drugging him before drowning him in the bathtub and transferring his corpse to the swimming pool of the second-rate private school owned and run by the married couple. But the corpse disappears: supernatural intervention or foul play? A retired police inspector (Charles Vanel) starts snooping and the deeply religious wife, who suffers from a bad heart, is sick with fear and guilt. The film’s shocking twist (no doubt a major factor in the film’s popular success) occurs in the final scenes, in which the drowned husband’s corpse miraculously resuscitates, predictably causing the frail wife to drop dead of a heart attack.

As the mistress appears and the two lovers embrace, relishing the thought of a life of ease living off the wife’s wealth (it was she who owned the school), we realise the horrific extent of their treachery. In fact the evil couple are immediately thwarted by the timely arrival of the inspector; nonetheless their impending punishment cannot dispel the prevailing sense of malaise.⁹ My point is that, however monstrous Signoret’s fatale, there is no indication she will now ditch her lover and go it alone, as happens in the most memorable American noirs. In fact, Clouzot’s mise en scène emphasises the intensity of this ‘diabolical’ couple’s mutual passion (Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Les Diaboliques.

In Claude Auntant-Lara’s Le Bon Dieu sans confession, leading female star Danielle Darrieux and Ivan Desny play an impoverished upper-class couple, Janine and Maurice Fréjoul, both of whom thought they were marrying into money. His profligate lack of business acumen eats up the last remains of Janine’s family fortune and they face imminent economic and social ruin but she loves him still. Her saviour will be the self-made businessman, François Dupont (Henri Vuibert, who won the prize for best actor at Venice for the role). When he falls hopelessly in love with her, she accepts his financial bailouts but cunningly manages not to sleep with him in return – feigning to share his old-school moral scruples against breaking up his marriage and family, promising she will wait until he is a free man to consummate their union, so as not to sully their love. The unfulfilled promise of sex can be an even more powerful weapon than its granting. Thus Janine keeps the faithful Dupont dangling like a puppet on a sexual string for over a decade, never actually becoming his mistress although unable to convince her jealous, narcissistic husband that she is simply using Dupont to save their marriage.¹⁰ The film employs a polyphonic flashback structure similar to that of Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941): opening on Dupont’s funeral procession, the narration consists in a series of subjective flashbacks initiated by his oldest friends, family and business associate, who celebrate his life and heap scorn on the falsely angelic Janine, so innocent looking, ‘butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth’.¹¹ Films de France reviewer James Travers praises Darrieux’s performance, describing her Janine as ‘an ambiguous character whose ‘nobler qualities (unceasing devotion to an unworthy husband) are undermined by the despicable manner in which she milks her willing sugar daddy’.¹²

Darrieux’s desperate, ruthless attempts to keep her good-looking, good-for-nothing husband (which finally result in Dupont’s fatal heart attack) align her with Viviane Romance’s Alice in Panique, who seduces an eccentric Jewish outsider (Hire) in order to frame him for a murder committed by her gigolo boyfriend (Paul Bernard). But whereas Alice’s responsibility is counterbalanced by the cowardly viciousness of the crowd of honest citizens who demand Hire’s blood, precipitating his death, Janine is singly responsible for Dupont’s demise. And whereas Alice is manipulated by her evil gigolo (for whom she has done prison time), Janine acts on her own initiative. Her greater agency, afforded by her social status, is signified by her favourite pastime of horseriding. Indeed, it is the tragic forced sale of her beloved mare that decides her to put her seduction plan into action. In Manèges, Dora’s achievement of upward social mobility and power is also signified via horseriding.

It is hardly a coincidence that all four films reference the Occupation. In Manèges, Signoret’s scheming garce callously eyes up the handsome stranger who will become her lover, while her spouse (Bernard Blier), an ex POW, tearfully recounts his wartime sufferings and best friend’s tragic death. In both Panique and Clouzot’s Diaboliques, snooping neighbours evoke the wartime national sport of denunciation previously allegorised in Le corbeau. Moreover, even more than it highlights the treachery of the fatale, Duvivier’s Panique points the finger at French mob mentality and anti-Semitism, which resulted in Vichy’s collaborationist aiding and abetting of Nazi deportations and genocide.¹³ Anti-war director Autant-Lara’s Confession takes a far more original – and more problematic – angle. The negative construction of Janine’s husband, Maurice, as a self-righteous, narcissistic parasite and coward, despite having been imprisoned in a German stalag, is contrasted with the honourable François Dupont (whose name suggests his everyman status), who made his fortune in the Black Market and was briefly and wrongfully imprisoned for collaboration at the Liberation. The film thus not only undermines the Resistance myth but, also, its rehabilitation of French everyman as an honest Occupation profiteer indirectly endorses the neo-Vichyite right’s attempted revival of Pétainism that followed the Liberation purges.¹⁴

Noir is about false appearances, about the difficulty of distinguishing good and evil. As the embodiment of this central problematic, the femme is the prime object of investigation as alluring surface. Indeed, most commentators see such investigation as central to the figure’s construction. But a number of French fatales crucially escape this investigation, using drab, prim, non-sexualised appearance as camouflage, to mask their evil intentions. Diaboliques, which relies on both the victim and the spectator failing to locate the fatale until the film’s final shocking ‘reveal’, is the epitome of a non-investigative ‘queering’ of the fatale figure, as Susan Hayward has argued.¹⁵ I would add that Nicole’s apparently asexualised appearance, her sensible clothing and singular lack of glamour, is part and parcel of her masquerade as abused mistress and loyal friend. The success of her deceitfulness (key to Clouzot’s shock plot twist) depends precisely on the lack of the sexualised costuming and visual investigation (insistent close-framing) central to the construction of the femme in so many iconic American noirs, in which the male victim fears or senses her duplicity from the start.

Even more than Signoret’s Nicole, the most duplicitous and the most ruthless French fatale of the post-war period is ‘camouflaged’ by a singular lack of glamour, and a high degree of sartorial restraint.

Gabin plays André Chatelin, celebrated restaurant owner and chef in the central Parisian market district of Les Halles. One morning, a young girl arrives seeking his aid. Catherine (Danièle Delorme), only daughter of his estranged wife Gabrielle, whom André left more than 20 years before, has just lost her mother and is alone in the world. André takes Catherine in, gives her a job in his restaurant and seeks to pair her with his adopted son, Gérard, a hard-working young medical student (Gérard Blain). However, when Catherine indicates her romantic preference is for André, he overcomes his scruples over their age difference and marries her. But the angel-faced ingénue turns out to be the proverbial devil in disguise. She begins by destroying the friendship between the two men, taking Gérard as a lover and claiming her husband’s brutality in the usual prelude to inciting him to murder. But unlike the guilty fall-guy anti-heroes of American noir, he remains a (comparatively) loyal surrogate son to Gabin’s duped husband and refuses to execute the femme’s murderous plan, whereupon she calmly murders him instead. Both men will be avenged in the film’s closing scene, by the murdered lover’s faithful wolfhound, who devours the femme as a disgusted Gabin looks on.

Of particularly interest here is the film’s visual construction of its murderous jeune fille fatale. As part of her lost-girl ingénue disguise, Delorme’s costuming is excessively modest, consisting of a shapeless coat, scarf and beret over plain skirts and loose-fitting sweaters or white blouses always buttoned to the neck. Unusually wide unobtrusive framing in the first 30 minutes (placing Catherine in the background as she insinuates herself into Chatelin’s life) reflects both Chatelin’s failure to detect her deception and his disavowal of his quasi-incestuous desire. We see no close-ups, no visual investigation until the culmination of Catherine’s seduction plan, which again involves feigned innocence: she arrives in a drunken state, enticing Chatelin to undress her and put her to bed as he would a child, whereupon she initiates the sexual contact he has been longing for.

The question of the femme’s duplicity, as well as her purported narcissism, is also typically signified in both French and American noir by the use of mirrors, the quintessential visual reference being the climatic hall of mirrors scene in The Lady from Shanghai (Welles, 1948). Truth and knowledge are concealed and replaced by the enigma of the femme as multiplication of appearances, a multitude of faces, each one of them apparently false, each progressively shattered. In contrast, Assassins places Catherine in only two mirror shots and these reveal more a desire to check the solidity of her façade than the narcissistic preening attributed to the fatale. The film thus confirms French fatale’s frequent lack of the glamour that defines her American sister, as we have seen in comparing Garnett’s Postman and Chenal’s Tournant. Indeed, French fatale’s relative visual drabness (even more so than Nicole’s ‘queer’ femme in Diaboliques) is informed by the postwar dark social realism of much French noir. Known as le réalisme noir, its insistence on sordid realities can be linked, once again, to the legacy of the Occupation, which highlighted the banality of evil and the on-going economic hardships of postwar France.

In the previous two chapters we have investigated the sensual fatalitaire as loyal mistress, wrongly accused of duplicity. Assassins reveals the opposite dynamic: as deceptively treacherous surface, this femme’s sexual coyness is the ultimate masquerade.¹⁶ The film’s disappointing box office (1,538,259; 52nd/81 French releases), despite the presence of Gabin, who had regained top star status in 1954, suggests that audiences preferred the good-bad fatalitaire to the heartless garce.¹⁷ The casting of Delorme, who had made a name for herself since 1949 in period dramas, playing positive ingénues as plucky modern girls or victims of patriarchal injustice,¹⁸ is also instructive. Her quintessential ‘girl next door’ played chillingly against type in Assassins may well explain the film’s relative lack of commercial success.

Finally, Assassins shares with Manèges a clear suggestion of intergenerational female evil, since both films feature bad girls with bad mothers. Too old to ensnare eligible men themselves, scheming mères maquerelles or ‘pimping mothers’ seek economic security and social mobility via the only means open to them: marrying off their daughter to a financially secure male whom they can jointly bleed of his wealth. Assassins, in which Catherine’s mother is a visibly degenerate ex-prostitute and pitiful drug addict, doubles poverty and mental illness with social exclusion. In both films, well-trained daughters use sexual unruliness and deceptiveness as a tool to escape their mothers’ mediocre (Manèges) or destitute (Assassins) situation (Figure 7.2).

Figure 7.2 Voici le temps des Assassins.

Like the spider-woman fatale central to American noir, Danièle Delorme’s Catherine takes the unruly sexual strategy to the limit, seeking to ditch both husband and lover and keep all the resources for herself, in a triple refusal of monogamy, maternity and emotional attachment in any form. Beyond her troubled childhood, it is this emotional poverty rather than simply her desire for a measure of financial independence that condemns her as monstrous and justifies (positions the spectator to accept) her narrative punishment. It has been argued that classic American noir insidiously conflates the two, equating the fatale’s desire for material independence with emotional coldness in order to cajole women back into the kitchen and re-establish patriarchal order. Such a reading is persuasive but also counterbalanced by the presence of fatale-like characters, in whom professional assertiveness and financial independence are combined not with ruthless, duplicitous egotism but warmth, sincerity (Helen in The Lost Weekend (Wilder, 1941); Laura; Vienna in Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954)) and/or maternal devotion (Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945)).

In classic French cinema, the combination of female socio-economic power (wealth and status) and beauty is almost always negatively coded, revealing of French society’s more traditional attitudes and greater reluctance to accept the idea controversially put forward by de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe (1949) that women might follow traditionally masculine career paths. Women can be primary school teachers but not university professors; secretaries but not bankers or company directors; prostitutes and nightclub singers but not gang bosses.¹⁹ Despite the fact that more married women are working, total numbers of French women in the workplace (1945–60) drop. The commercial failure of Grémillon’s L’amour d’une femme (1954), whose young woman doctor is abandoned by her fiancé when she refuses to give up her career for marriage and motherhood suggests that France as a nation was not ready to take an honest look at the possibility of women in professional careers.²⁰

It is no surprise that Portrait d’un Assassin, one of French postwar cinema’s few evocations of the fatale as ruthless, glamorous vamp, presents her as a highly ambitious, wealthy career woman: the very beautiful, very rich, very influential, international circus impresario, Christina (Maria Montez), who manages male daredevil acts. Her clients are also her lovers and she ‘feeds’ off their lethal exploits, making a living from their daily brush with death, sexually using, discarding and replacing them once maimed or dead. The film’s title, Portrait of a Murderer, refers to her last lover, who will end up killing her twice. Circus entertainer ‘Fabius the Great’ (Pierre Brasseur) is tired of his faithful wife and stage partner Martha (Arletty) and terrified of his job, consisting in a nightly motorcycle stunt riding a vertical wall of death, considered so risky the couple can no longer afford the insurance premiums. His professional identity is so inextricably linked to his marriage that he decides the only way out is to murder his wife: ‘I could hardly strangle my motorbike’, he weakly confesses. But he shoots the wrong woman, wounding our fatale. She has no trouble luring Fabius away from the faithful Martha and pushes him to attempt an automobile stunt even more dangerous than that which has just killed her latest lover.

Critically acclaimed on its release, awarded the Grand prix du film d’Art français in 1949, now recognised as a classic by AFCAE, the film plays with poetic realist tropes: rain-washed city streets, popular vs bourgeois spectacle, self-reflexive links between life and/as art. If not a masterpiece, the film is noteworthy for its rare portrait of a visually and narratively dominant sexual predator fatale but also for Arletty’s moving portrayal as the hero’s courageous loyal partner. The film notably reprises aspects of her wisecracking worldly woman roles in Le jour se lève and Hôtel du nord while inversing that of Les Enfants du Paradis. From ultimate object of desire in Carné and Prévert’s Occupation masterpiece, in which her legendary Garance is the ‘awesome embodiment of female mystery’,²¹ adored object of multiple male gazes (including that of Pierre Brasseur’s Fréderick Lemaître), she has become a childless cipher of lethal domesticity. For the loyal amoureuse, age and gender are a double tragedy. Combined with low social status and economic hardship, her situation gives rise to the popular musical tradition of the chanson réaliste (dating back to the late nineteenth century, associated with 1930s poetic realist cinema and epitomised by Edith Piaf), in which the chanteuse ‘typically chronicles the plight of a woman facing heartbreak and poverty’.²² The film poignantly evokes this tradition, as an abandoned Arletty, dressing for her last fatal performance, listens to a chanson réaliste about the hopelessness of love. Combining eros with masochistic agape, her character could easily be the subject of a chanson réaliste, with her last words as its refrain: ‘If I could die the same night as him, I’d be happy. That’s how silly I am.’

But let us return to the fatale. Voracious sexual predator feeding off the lethal spectacle of masculinity, Christina is a cipher for the danger of insatiable female desire. She is the real assassin. The male body is desirable to her uniquely because of its capacity to confront danger and death. Once she has possessed a lover, she callously moves on to the next. As insatiable spider woman, Christina combines feminine allure with masculine power and a typically masculine-coded combination of love styles. Her erotic and emotional investments are manically focused on a single love object who she uses and then discards with Casanova-like rapidity. Thus the dialogues ask: ‘Is she a man or woman?’ Impossible to categorise, Christina’s ‘preying’ mantis fatale represents the fear that if women are in a position of (masculine-coded) power, they will employ extreme masculine-coded sexual strategies: eros, ludus and mania.

The scene that most clearly makes this point is introduced ominously by three knocks: the French theatrical signal for a play to begin. Cut to an engraved sign: ‘A ceux qui sont morts pour que le spectacle vive’ [‘To those who died so the show could go on’]. Track down to Christina, hammering nails into the portrait of her latest victim/hero/lover/trophy. Enter Christina’s embittered but loyal ex-lover Eric (von Stroheim in a role reminiscent of his Max in Sunset Boulevard), an ex-trapeze artist, crippled trying to save his friend and partner, who had replaced him as Christina’s lover after only four nights. Still consumed by manic love-hate for her, Eric bemoans Christina’s objectification of ‘lovers pinned like butterflies’, warning the spectator against the fatale’s emasculating power. But of course, it is a lesson the hero will learn too late.

Moreover, the scene sets up an obvious parallel with that most lethal of male spectacles: war. Christina’s ‘monument’ clearly echoes the line on every town and village cenotaph in France: ‘À ceux qui sont morts pour la patrie’ [‘To those who died for the nation’]. The male’s status as object of desire arises out of his capacity for selfless, courageous action, as epitomised by the war hero. The film thus misogynistically implies that it is sexually voracious women who are responsible for sending soldiers to their deaths.

The inevitable punishment of the fatale (Fabius turns the tables, shooting her dead before performing his death-defying stunt) is counterbalanced by the posthumous rehabilitation of the faithful wife. Fabius learns too late that ‘his’ Martha has been killed trying to fill her husband’s shoes. In the previous scene we see her, wearing his trousers and boots, attempting his motorcycle act, despite the fact that ‘she didn’t even know how to ride a push-bike.’ Her lack of professional competency makes her gesture all the more tragically admirable. Not only her physical courage and thwarted agency, but also her continued selfless love (eros and agape) for the man who tried to kill her before dumping her for a younger, more luxurious model, make her the real hero of the film – for this spectator at least. Arletty’s comeback role after Liberation purges (she was 51 when the film was made), her poignant portrayal steals the show from the glamorous Montez, 14 years her junior. Would it have been possible to imagine a scenario in which Arletty’s character has been (secretly perhaps) learning to ride the motorbike and so is able to successfully replace her man?²³ Perhaps while he would die attempting the lethal double somersault? Not in France, at least not in 1949. After executing Christina as justice for her dead lovers and for Martha, Fabius miraculously pulls off the double somersault then calls the police.

The only other postwar French noir to feature a visually and narratively dominant vamp as spider-woman fatale is Denys de la Patellière’s Retour de Manivelle (1957). Adapted from Hadley Chase’s There’s Always a Price Tag (1956), the story is yet another variation on the Postman plot but it is unclear whether the fatale is motivated by sexual voraciousness or frigidity. The French screen version stars Michèle Morgan, quintessential lost girl of poetic realist classics and top French female star throughout the 1950s,²⁴ as the ruthlessly cold-hearted wife of a failed financier (Peter Van Eyk). She seduces an impecunious young drifter (Daniel Gélin) into helping her get her hands on her husband’s insurance money; not however by murdering him, but by making her husband’s suicide look like a murder.

The most chillingly Machiavellian part of the femme’s plan is to hire a pretty young maid (Michèle Mercier²⁵), whom she immediately instructs the lovesick Robert (Gélin) to seduce. This second affair will provide them with an alibi and throw the police off the scent when they inevitably suspect the murderous-wife-and-her-lover scenario. Engaged to a soldier who never returned from the war, Mercier plays the classic ingénue, falls for Gélin, completing the noir love triangle: the ingénue loves the hero who loves the femme who, unusually in French noir, loves no one.

Commercially in the top third of French films in France,²⁶ no doubt thanks to Morgan’s presence, Manivelle was dismissed by the Cahiers critics (for whom popular director de la Patellière and script writer Michel Audiard were emblematic of a stale, derivative ‘tradition de qualité’) as ‘a reasonably solid French jalopy of a film, certainly not a Cadillac’.²⁷ Interestingly, the film was better received in the USA, with New York Times reviewer A.H. Weiler comparing it favourably to Clouzot’s Diaboliques, praising ‘taut portrayals that do justice to a script that is adult and sparse’. Weiler notes the Pandora-like arsenal of Morgan’s fatale: ‘An agile mind in an equally agile body (it is strongly implied) are this designing dame’s efficient tools, so we can’t blame our lovesick swain for listening to his heart instead of his brain.’²⁸

Gauging, winning and keeping the heart of the fatale … a risky business. All of which begs the question of why the noir hero falls for her in the first place, particularly when the narrative often provides him with a choice. Why is it that he wavers between, and almost invariably prefers, the sexy, mysterious, uncontrollable, potentially treacherous fatale over the homely promise of maternal security and sexual fidelity offered by the good woman, faithful wife (Portrait) or adoring ingénue (Manivelle)? The proximal narrative cause is obvious: the noir hero is blinded by desire and/or greed so that he is unable to discern or be deterred by the fatale’s duplicity and/or ruthlessness.²⁹

In terms of ultimate (evolutionary) causes, for males, the stable, long-term pair-bond promised by the good woman may be a mixed blessing if it also entails the foreclosure of future reproductive opportunities. Secondly, the most desirable members of both sexes, those with the highest mate value, represent a costly and potentially dangerous investment, precisely because they are the objects of intense competition. They are the hardest to get and even harder to keep, tending to make the least reliable partners because they are heavily solicited by potential lovers and because, knowing they can attract any number of high quality mates, can easily afford the risk of abandoning an existing relationship. There is therefore an unconscious correlation between desirability and unreliability, for both men and women: danger is sexy. And vice versa. In the case of the fatale, her volatility, dangerous appeal and status as feminine archetype are thus intimately causally connected (I would say the same of the less common figure of the homme fatal, the subject of our ‘investigation’ in Chapter 8).

Moreover, I would argue that the dangerous challenge represented by the femme is ultimately linked to the physical risks males have always had to take, and have therefore evolved to enjoy taking, in order to compete for and monopolise sexual access to the most desirable (young and beautiful) females. On a hormonal level, increased risk-taking behaviours in males, particularly in adolescents, correlates strongly with increased levels of testosterone and has been the subject of extensive research.³⁰ In terms of the evolution of male risk-taking behaviours and their connection to intrasexual competition, I offer two examples. Firstly, studies of hunting practices in hunter-gatherer societies suggest that men hunt primarily for the status and increased mating opportunities successful hunting provides, and not simply to provision their legitimate spouse and offspring with a source of calories and protein.³¹ Secondly, ethnographic studies have found that men who have killed in intertribal raids have greater chances of attracting wives and mistresses.³²

In Retour de Manivelle the key to the femme’s ruthlessness is provided by an iconic element of decor – a life-size moulded bronze torso, which has pride of place in the husband’s drawing room, mythically titled ‘Hélène, 1954’. Not present in the source novel (whose fatale is a more one-dimensional spider woman), though it could certainly be read as a visual translation of Hadley Chase’s titular ‘Price Tag’, the bronze is in evidence in six scenes interspersed throughout the film. Appearing on screen for over four minutes in total (including three six-second full shots), it is an unambiguous iconic signifier of Hélène’s power but also (and more importantly) her simultaneous subjection/objectification. Even before the hero meets her in the flesh, he is smitten by Hélène’s reified form, the quintessence of classical beauty, which her husband has commissioned and paid for; but which he is paradoxically unable to possess. (Her lack of love for him has driven him to drink, financial ruin and suicide.)

De la Patellière places the bust ominously in the background when Hélène instructs Robert to seduce the maid (Figure 7.3). A later scene, opening on a dissolve to a five-second close-up of the bronze, reveals that the police inspector’s investigation has uncovered some unsavoury facts. Hélène once attempted suicide, allegedly due to her perverse husband’s habit of ‘sharing’ his ‘collector’s item’ with wealthy business associates. In scene after scene we are reminded – visually (via the bronze) as well as via dialogues – of her status as pure object of desire and exchange. It is her rebellion against a lifetime of such objectification that has rendered her emotionally (and sexually?) frigid and prompts her ruthless quest for emotional and economic independence: ‘My whole life I’ve been bought and sold like a thing. This money is mine. I’ve earnt it. Paid for it with year after year of disgust.’

Figure 7.3 Retour de Manivelle.

In the dramatic climax, Hélène goads the lovesick Robert into hitting her, by hitting him with the unpalatable truth of their relationship. But instead of knocking her out (part of their plan to mislead the police), he accidentally kills her – and is subsequently caught and accused of double murder. The film thus constructs its monstrous fatale as violent refusal of male objectification. Pure status object (like her bronze bust), paraded before and even exchanged with other men as a reflection of their worth, knowing her power depends entirely on her ability to enslave the desiring male gaze, she uses it while she can, determined to eliminate it altogether.

Manivelle anticipates feminist critiques of the reduction of woman in film to visual surface, erotic spectacle and object of exchange. Feminist theory has privileged conventional Freudian psychoanalytical explanations for the fetishistic reduction of the femme and her investigation, reading her as an iconic signifier of castration anxiety. I offer instead a biocultural explanation, as arising out of the specific dynamics of human sexual selection. As we have seen, the evolution of pair-bonds and male parental investment mean that men often restrict their mating efforts (for varying periods of time) to one woman for whose offspring they provide resources and protection. It has therefore become in their reproductive interest to choose the best available woman in whom to invest, i.e. the most desirable partner in reproductive terms. The means of gauging female reproductive fitness in humans have been primarily (though not solely) visual. Of course, women also appraise men visually. However, in most cultures, since it is heterosexual men who monopolise resources and power, women’s value has been seen almost exclusively in terms of visually coded reproductive fitness and it is the female body that has become the primary site of visual spectacle. Empirical, cross-cultural research confirms the common sense intuition that men place greater emphasis on physical beauty than do women. In terms of the attributes most sought after in a mate, although both men and women value physical (beauty), intellectual (intelligence, humour), moral (kindness) and economic (wealth) qualities; wealth and status are typically rated higher by women while physical beauty is typically rated higher by men.³³ The emphasis on feminine beauty and the construction of woman as visual spectacle can thus be seen to represent part of the evolutionary ‘price-tag’ women have been forced to pay for male parental investment, the establishment of pair-bonds (durable love relationships), protection and provision of material resources. In patriarchal societies, the price tag can become unbearably heavy.

This brings us to examine the precise nature of the spectacle, i.e. the specific attributes of feminine beauty, particularly as they relate to the fatale. Fashion trends and cultural variation notwithstanding, evolutionary theory posits that in humans, as in other animal species, there exist a number of universal features of physical sexual attractiveness, which are essentially markers of reproductive fitness: for women the potential to bear, and for men the potential to father, protect and provide for many fit, healthy offspring. In women, unsurprisingly, these visual markers include: youth (indicating optimum reproductive potential); facial symmetry, clear skin and shiny hair (absence of parasitic infestation) and oestrogen-dependent features: triangular face; firm, full breasts and a low waist-hip ratio (also indicative of the absence of an existing pregnancy). In other words, cross-culturally recognised definitions of feminine beauty equate broadly to visual markers of health and female reproductive fitness.³⁴ The youth and health accentuating make-up – tight-fitting or suggestively flowing costumes that are the sartorial hallmark of the fatale, the sensual lighting and framing of her face and body – are unambiguously designed to accentuate and display these features.

The ability of the fatale to capture the scopophilic gaze of the male protagonist, along with (both male and female) critics and spectators alike, the explanation for her physical allure and source of her power, is ultimately (in evolutionary terms) that her seductive beauty and youth represent the epitome of feminine reproductive fitness. Of course, differentially gendered and sexually orientated spectatorial desire will mean that the scopophilic drive (present in females as well as in males, despite patriarchal restrictions on women’s looking) may derive from one or other of two causes: either the desire to possess or the desire to be the fatale, or in some cases, both. Either way, Freudian explanations for scopophilia as voyeuristic sadism and fetishistic over-investment in the image of the fatale as iconic signifier of Oedipal angst (her tight-fitting, elongated dresses causing her body to resemble the phallus, whose lack can thus be disavowed, allaying unconscious castration anxiety in the male), are as redundant as they are comically improbable.³⁵

We have seen how Morgan’s femme enacts a violent refusal of male objectification. And although Maria Montez’s predatory vamp (Portrait) revels in her own specularity, she too uses it to escape objectification; obtaining, power and status as well as a sexual thrill from controlling the spectacle of lethal masculinity.³⁶ Danièle Delorme’s heartless, murderous fatale (Assassins) can also be read – less convincingly perhaps – as a survival strategy.

In perhaps the most powerful example of the fatale’s rebellion against objectification, Danielle Darrieux plays opposite Jean Gabin, in ex-husband Henri Decoin’s extraordinary La vérité sur Bébé Donge [The Truth about Bébé Donge] (1952). When she falls in love and marries rising industrialist and inveterate womaniser, François Donge, Elizabeth, known to all as ‘Bébé’ (Baby), naively hopes her husband will share her romantic notions of the couple. When she gradually realises she is little more than a social accessory, and that her husband’s affairs have continued unabated since their marriage, she is destroyed. The usual options, pragmatically taking a lover or dutifully finding fulfilment in motherhood, are not open to her. (Having accepted to have a child only as a last ditch effort to save the marriage, maternity clearly does not fulfil her emotional needs and the child never appears on screen.) Instead she takes radical action: one fine day, seemingly out of the blue, she calmly pours arsenic into her husband’s coffee.

The film is told in flashback, ostensibly via Gabin/Donge’s voiceover, as he lies helpless in a private clinic, hovering between life and death, fully aware of his wife’s act. As he relives the relationship, he comes to see it from her point of view. His gradual understanding leads him to take responsibility for the crime (he is adamant she should not be prosecuted) and to make the declaration of love she had been waiting for – and which alone could save him. But it is too late. She declares she no longer loves him, Donge dies and in the final scene, Elizabeth is willingly led away by the law.

Judged by Burch and Sellier as one of the few French noirs to take an overtly feminist stance, the film openly invites its spectator to side with its murderous femme, denouncing the patriarchal sexual economy that in effect ‘kills’ women by relegating them to the status of expendable beautiful objects³⁷ and compliant maternal perpetuators of male genes. Each hospital scene is punctuated by Bébé’s ghostly presence, already dressed in widow’s black, her gaze impenitent and devoid of remorse, shame, anger or pity: a victim of slow emotional starvation, she is already dead (Figure 7.4).

Figure 7.4 La vérité sur Bébé Donge

Bébé’s nickname is a glaring denunciation of the patriarchal infantilisation of women, suggestive of the conservative judgement that her youthful romanticism (her visceral need for an enduring, passionate bond) is a childish self-indulgence: once married, she will grow out of it and into docile maternity. But she does not, whence her family’s shocked incomprehension when confronted with her crime. Donge is a good husband, he works hard, provides materially for her and her child, what more could she want? Her calm response to her mother’s desperate question ‘Why?’ is a chill reminder of the generational emotional subjection of women, even among society’s upper echelons where material needs are amply met: ‘Perhaps so as not to end up like you, Mummy dear.’

In biocultural terms, the film’s central couple represent extreme masculine and feminine love styles. Gabin’s cynical womaniser, whose social status gives him the right and the means to play the field before and after marriage (which, for him, is pure social necessity, not an emotional investment); equates to one half of a typically male strategy, the denial of eros in favour of objectifying ludus, which French upper-middle-class society of the time allows and unofficially encourages. Secondly, he has cleverly chosen a beautiful but chaste, romantically invested virgin, which leaves him free to pursue affairs with (other men’s) more sexually available women. (He displays no jealous mate-guarding because he knows his wife to be incapable of sexual infidelity.) Conversely, Darrieux’s Elizabeth embodies an extreme version of women’s romantic preference for a single long-term mate and demonstrates that such a preference can be ‘lethal’ in the face of men’s greater tendency to seek multiple, short-term partners.

The film’s extraordinary justification of its unruly, murderous fatale is effected through her emotional honesty and courage: the polar opposite of the cowardly, deceiving garce, Bébé’s candour is in total disregard of her own self-interest. She never denies her rebellious action and accepts without protest or self-pity her impending punishment by the law. More importantly, the murder is reconfigured by the film as an act of self-defence, even poetic justice, rendering her more avenging angel than lethal spider woman. No simple crime of passion, she murders because, in refusing her love and denying her subjectivity, her husband has already murdered her spirit. Thus her character is not constructed as evil, contrary to most femmes examined in this chapter.

Male control of female sexuality is facilitated and perpetuated by female passivity and selfless maternal solicitude, which qualities are therefore commonly elevated in patriarchal ideologies to the highest of feminine virtues. We have seen how the fatale’s demonic power, her appeal and simultaneous threat lie in the fact that she cheats the system by using her status as feminine icon to eschew the so-called feminine virtues of compliance and selflessness, daring to combine feminine beauty and intelligence with sexual assertiveness and (so-called) masculine agency. Daring to wield the gaze herself, she is guilty of claiming agency, committing the cardinal sins of active disobedience and selfish desire, wanting and getting things for herself – including the right to be with the lover of her choice.³⁸ In other cases, she rebels against and/or exploits her position as visual object as a means to power. In this sense, the fatale can remind us of the inherent, etymologically inscribed reversibility of subject-object relations in human interaction: the capacity to be an active subject depends on the simultaneous capacity to become an object (of desire), subjected to the desiring gaze of the other. Bourdieu (2001) notes how strategies of masculine domination attempt to circumvent this process and attain pure subjectivity while relegating the woman to the position of pure object. The fatale’s unruly subversion and/or rejection of her objectification make her a key figure for feminism. However rare, demonic French fatale (along with the more common, less ruthless fatalitaire) can be productively read in terms of this dynamic.

The venal ruthlessness, bloodlust and violent criminality of the fatale, as examined in this chapter, stands in stark contrast to social reality and point to her construction as patriarchal myth. Not that women are incapable of homicidal violence.³⁹ But, unlike the fatale’s murderous misdeeds, real-life female criminality is mostly on a small scale, subsistence level consisting of low risk, low gain property crimes. Women most often offend to survive, to feed themselves and their families. Men, on the other hand, most often engage in high-risk criminal behaviour in order to attain status, which elevates their chances in the mating game.⁴⁰ Moreover, although many fatale figures are portrayed as killers, whether out of sexual jealousy, passion or cold ambition, in reality of course it is men who are statistically more likely to rape, seriously wound or murder, particularly in ‘crimes of passion’.⁴¹ In the light of the above, the violence of the fatale would seem to serve a triple purpose. First, as noted, she may be a site of displacement for male violence that may be disavowed and projected onto the body of the bad woman.⁴² Second, she may act as a warning to men around the dangers of adulterous or romantic adventures with seductive young women on the make. Third, the fatale may well provide a salutary outlet for repressed female anger and violence at multiple forms of patriarchal injustice.⁴³ This sentiment is also undoubtedly behind feminist comments that what women retain of the fatale is not her narrative punishment but her magnificent agency and challenge to patriarchal supremacy. In Retour de Manivelle and especially Bébé Donge, the femme as violent avenger is a rare and perhaps unheeded warning to French patriarchal forces that men would continue to objectify, disregard and exploit women at their own peril.