Not Your Grandmother's Femme Fatale...

Please note that this week's film has been rated  18  in the UK.

Remember Too Late for Tears?

Lizabeth Scott's Jane Palmer is often regarded as the femme fatale to end all femmes fatale, in part because she proves herself to be so completely amoral. Outwardly, she is a typical post-war housewife with a devoted (if slightly bland) husband... but then someone drops a bag of blackmail cash into the wrong car, and sweet, demure Mrs. Palmer reveals herself to be capable of extremes that would give Joan Bennett and Barbara Stanwyck pause.

Her film ends (a trail of corpses in her wake) with her almost, almost getting away with it.

Too Late for Tears was released in 1949, and Scott's character was the perfect expression of the femme fatale for a society in transition. All those "WACs" and "Rosies the Riveter" of the war era were starting to discover that the bright future for strong independent women that had looked so promising in the 1940s was suddenly looking much more domestic now that the war was over. 

Women who had stepped into the workforce while the men were off saving the world were being swept (often forcefully) into a world where they were either sexual objects (the Centrefolds, Playboy bunnies and Miss Americas) or they were "accessories" to their men: the dutiful wives, devoted mothers, faithful companions. 

Jane Palmer, a married woman who refuses to let anyone come between her and that big bag of cash she finds, is a violation of every template for the "good girl" of the time. She is plainly evil in the eyes of American morality. (She also kills a bunch of people, so there is that.)

But nothing ever stands still.

Time passed. The Boomers grew up and started to challenge the system. Betty Friedan noticed how many housewives were pathologically miserable, and published The Feminine Mystique. Women burned their bras, ran for office, became Supreme Court judges.

The "Women's Lib" movement of the 1970s produced the ultra-Conservative "family-values" backlash of the 80s (only now with added sexual "liberation"!). 

The new and improved "perfect woman" of the post feminist era was not only a dutiful wife/mother and bedrock of the family unit, she was also, somehow, a successful career woman and an enthusiastic sex partner. 

Film critic Molly Haskell wrote extensively about the impossibility of "existing while female" through this generation, and discussed Hollywood's attempts to portray those challenges in mainstream cinema.

We finally did get a couple of mainstream feminist films. One, about the three-ring circus, familiar to working women, of trying to hold down a job, raise a kid and run a household all at the same time, and who got the role? Dustin Hoffman, in Kramer versus Kramer. And the other, the story of a woman "of a certain age" and homeliness struggling to make her way, and fight off harassment, in a man's world. And what was it? Tootsie, with (yet again) Dustin Hoffman as the actor who has his consciousness raised and his sexual complacency punctured, in the course of his travails as a very plain woman.

And where was the femme fatale of this era?

The classic femme fatale of the 1940s had been a strong, confident woman who learned how to turn the "male gaze" back on itself. Barbara Stanwyck, Ava Gardner, Joan Bennett, Claire Trevor; these were no passive objects of desire: they were complete individuals who knew exactly how to get what they wanted. They took charge of their narrative and refused to be subservient to any other character.

Cinema of the late 1980s, by contrast, gave us the Psycho Bitch.

The sexually un-tethered final decades of the 20th Century produced a string of unhinged cinematic harridans who often started out as sexy, desirable and available, but then invariably revealed themselves to be homicidal lunatics as the story developed.

Glenn Close had a casual fling with Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction, then stalked him, terrorised him and boiled his bunny (not a metaphor) when he tried to break off their affair. Sharon Stone may or may not have been a psychotic ice-pick killer when she famously opened her legs (again, not a metaphor!) to Michael Douglas(!) in Basic Instinct, and Demi Moore had a steamy (and consensual) office affair with (guess who?) Michael Douglas, only to accuse him of rape the next morning and derail his legitimate, successful, testosterone-based career in Disclosure.

If there's a lesson here, it's that Michael Douglas should never, ever have sex with anyone in a movie.

Michael... just say "no".

If there is a measurable difference between the femmes fatale of the "noir" era and the psycho-bitches of the "erotic thriller" era, it's that femmes fatale are generally in control. Everything they do is deliberate and calculated, and they use their power over men to devastating effect.

The psycho-bitches are, well, psycho... and yes, they are born out of a tremendous amount of chauvinism.

That's what makes our next film so interesting.

The Last Seduction was released in 1994, during the peak of the "erotic thriller" era (psycho-bitch country, basically). It was not a high-profile film at the time, and in fact was originally released straight to cable television (HBO).

It tells the story of Bridget Gregory, a cold, calculating and completely in-control woman who impulsively steals $700,000 of drug money from her husband after he hits her during an argument.

Channelling Lizabeth Scott from forty-five years earlier, Bridget proceeds to make sure that no one, no one gets between her and that money.

The network executives who green-lit The Last Seduction probably thought they were getting one more low-budget erotic thriller of the Basic Instinct/Fatal Attraction mould. 

But The Last Seduction is different. For a start, Bridget is not psychopathic, she's sociopathic, and the distinction is very important: there isn't a single moment in the entire film when she isn't in complete control. She also understands how others perceive the reality around them, and she is able to use that to control the image of herself that she projects.

Like so many femmes fatale before her, she turns the "male gaze" back on itself.

The Last Seduction is also a rare example of a film that succeeded completely on its own merits. Released to cable television with minimum fanfare, it was impressive enough to generate sufficient respect (and reputation) to get itself noticed by a wider audience. It was eventually given a proper theatrical release, and there was serious discussion of an Oscar nomination for Linda Fiorentino... but sadly the Academy rules disqualified what was officially classified as a "TV movie".

TV movie or no, The Last Seduction stands today as a full-fledged modern noir, and Bridget is just about the clearest portrait of a true femme fatale since Lizabeth Scott got her hands on that big bag of cash.

We will screen The Last Seduction at 7.30 on Thursday, the 10th of July at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

Again, please note that The Last Seduction has been classified  18  in the UK, and that classification is completely appropriate.