Fatale Attraction: 10 Wicked Women from the Golden Age of Film Noir

This year marks the 75^th anniversary of director Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy, a bust on its original release in 1950, now recognized as a singular and seminal crime film that influenced the French New Wave and the young New Hollywood upstart directors. (François Truffaut reportedly screened it for the Bonnie and Clyde screenwriters prior to production.)

Gun Crazy features, to quote Eddie Muller, host of TCM’s Noir Alley, “the tiniest but most ferocious femme fatale in film noir,” Peggy Cummins as carnival sharpshooter Annie Laurie Star. It’s love at first shot when gun-obsessed Bart (John Dall) meets Annie. They go together, Bart says, like guns and ammunition. No sooner do they marry then she leans on him to go after the kind of big money you don’t make at a $40 a week job. Several stick-ups (and an escalating body count) later, they are a couple on the run. As in any marriage, there are disagreements. Bart doesn’t want to see a stickup man looking back at him in the mirror, but Annie’s not having it. She tells him, “I told you I was no good.”

Trailer for Gun Crazy (Uploaded to YouTube by Almira MD)

Film noir’s landscape is littered with poor saps manipulated by the wicked women they crave. Here are nine other iconic femmes fatales from film noir’s Golden Age. They all have one thing in common: When they’re good, they’re very good, but when they’re bad, they’re terrific.

Phyllis Dietrichson, Double Indemnity

Trailer for Double Indemnity (Uploaded to YouTube by Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers)

When did you realize you loved your partner? For Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson, it’s when she realizes she can’t fire a second shot into Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), the insurance salesman she manipulated into killing her husband. “I never loved you, Walter,” she confesses. “Not you, or anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart. I used you, just as you said. That’s all you ever meant to me — until a minute ago. I didn’t think anything like that could ever happen to me.”

Kathie Moffat, Out of the Past

Trailer for Out of the Past (Uploaded to YouTube by Film Trailer Channel)

“I never told you I was anything, but what I am. You just wanted to imagine I was.” So Kathy Moffat (Jane Greer) tells Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum). It’s a rare moment of honesty from the woman who shot amoral gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), left him for dead, absconded with his $40,000, and seduced Jeff, the man Whit sent to bring her back. After all the betrayals and double crosses are done, she takes femme fatale up to 11: “You’re no good and neither am I,” she coolly tells him. “That’s why we deserve each other.”

Betty, Pickup

Trailer for Pickup (Uploaded to YouTube by Roger Stoltz)

“What are you trying to do, ruin your life? She’s not worth it.” No truer words were ever spoken in film noir, but you gotta hand it to the brazen Betty (Beverly Michaels), who, behind in her rent and facing eviction, parlays a free hamburger deluxe meal into a marriage proposal from lonely immigrant widower “Hunky” Horak (Hugo Haas, who also directed). One look at the remote railway station where he lives and works and she’s soon conspiring with Horak’s young coworker (Allan Nixon) to bump him off. The most memorable femme fatales are sophisticated urban types. Not our Betty; only she could pull off a climactic kiss off by sticking out her tongue like an elementary school mean girl.

Bridget O’Shaugnessy, The Maltese Falcon

Trailer for The Maltese Falcon (Uploaded to YouTube by Warner Bros. Entertainment)

“You’re good, you’re very good,” Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade tells Mary Astor’s Bridget O’Shaughnessy, the client who embroils him in a search for the elusive statuette of a black bird. He’s being facetious, of course. But though she’s not straight with him for a minute, he falls under her spell. Too bad she has to take the fall for killing his partner. (Viewers of Monsieur Spade, with Clive Owens as a retired Spade living in France, may have caught the exquisite in-joke when asked about Bridget’s current whereabouts: “She’s antiquing.”)

Diane Tremayne, Angel Face

Trailer for Angel Face (Uploaded to YouTube by Screenbound Pictures)

“How stupid do you think I am?” Robert Mitchum’s Frank Jessup, the Tremayne family chauffeur asks.  Well, stupid enough to abandon his loving girlfriend to get involved with beautiful heiress Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons), who is driven by considerable daddy issues and hatred for her stepmother.

Jane Palmer, Too Late for Tears

Trailer for Too Late for Tears (Uploaded to YouTube by Nostalgia Noir Theater)

Jane Palmer (Lizabeth Scott) is an unhappy housewife. So when a bag containing $60,000 is tossed into their car while she and her husband drive back from a party, she wants to keep it. Her husband wants to give it to the police. And when the man for whom the money was intended turns up on her doorstep, it’s too late for her husband.

Vera, Detour

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On the most ill-fated cross-country trek ever, Al Roberts (Tom Neal) makes a series of incredibly bone-headed decisions, not the least of which is giving a lift to hitchhiker Vera (Ann Savage), who “looked just like she’d been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world” and is, in film noir tradition, the very last person he should ever have met. Suffice to say, his goose is cooked.

Helen Grayle, Murder, My Sweet

Trailer for Murder, My Sweet (Uploaded to YouTube by Warner Bros. Rewind)

“This will be the first time I ever killed anyone I knew so little and liked so much.” Claire Trevor’s Helen Grayle is “evil, all evil” as a woman trying to hide her past (no spoilers here) in this seminal film noir (released the same year as Double Indemnity) based on Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled Philip Marlowe mystery Farewell, My Lovely.

Kitty March, Scarlet Street

Trailer for Scarlet Street (Uploaded to YouTube by Screenbound Pictures)

“Oh, you idiot, how can a man be so dumb?” Femme fatales have that effect on men, like Edward G. Robinson’s mild-mannered middle-aged cashier Christopher Cross, who finds himself in thrall to the scheming Kitty March (Joan Bennett), who, even though she gets her just deserts, haunts him to madness from the grave. Again, femme fatales have that effect on men.