Home › Best femme fatale noir films.
The femme fatale is the defining figure of film noir — the woman who destroys men, who uses desire as a weapon, who is simultaneously victim and predator within a system that offers women almost no legitimate power. The best noir femme fatales are not villains in any simple sense: they are women doing what they can with what they have, in a world that has given them very little.
Jane Greer as Kathie Moffat is one of the great femme fatales in cinema history. She is introduced swimming in a beam of sunlight in a Mexican cafe, and from that moment Robert Mitchum's Jeff Bailey is doomed. He knows she is going to destroy him. He goes through with it anyway. The film understands that the fatale is not the cause of the tragedy — the tragedy was always going to happen.
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Joan Bennett as Kitty March is not a particularly intelligent schemer — she and Dan Duryea's Johnny Prince are opportunists who stumble into a situation and make the worst possible choices. What makes the film so disturbing is the way it implicates Edward G. Robinson's Christopher Cross in his own destruction: he wants to believe in Kitty so badly that he helps them deceive him.
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Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson is the template for every femme fatale that followed. She gets Fred MacMurray's Walter Neff to kill her husband and then she kills him. Wilder makes her simultaneously terrifying and, at the very end, almost pitiable — there is a moment of genuine feeling in the final scene that complicates everything that has come before it.
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Gene Tierney as Laura is a femme fatale in an unusual sense — she is absent for the first half of the film, existing only as an absence and a portrait and a set of memories constructed by men who loved her. Preminger made a film about the way men project onto women, and what happens when the projection has to confront the actual person.
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Rita Hayworth as Elsa Bannister. Welles had her dye her famous auburn hair blonde and cut it short — a deliberate destruction of her public image. She is one of the most ambiguous femme fatales in the canon: manipulative, certainly, but also trapped, also a victim of the men around her.
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Gloria Grahame as Laurel Gray occupies an unusual position: she is not a femme fatale in the traditional sense, but she is the woman whose doubt about Dixon Steele's innocence destroys their relationship. Nicholas Ray made a film where the destruction comes not from scheming but from reasonable, justified fear.
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Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947), Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944), and Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1945) are the three most celebrated femme fatales in classic noir.
A femme fatale is a woman whose sexuality and cunning lead male protagonists to their doom. The term is French for 'deadly woman.' In film noir, femme fatales often use male desire against men who underestimate them.