I am holding in my hands the first edition of Karen Burroughs Hannsberry's Femme Noir: Bad Girls of Film (1998), which I obtained through my local library system at no additional cost to myself. In the first two pages of the introduction, Hannsberry writes:
Aside from visual characteristics, these films contain both heroes and villains who are cynical and disillusioned, inextricably bound to the past and ambivalent about the future.
In addition, most films noirs offer portraits of complex female characters who, to some degree, are fundamental to the development of the plot. Some exist as champions for the male protagonist, as in Phantom Lady (Universal, 1944), where the relentless determination of Ella Raines' Carol lifts the protagonist from his state of inevitable doom and results in the exposure of the man who framed him for murder. In other noir films, the female is portrayed as an innocent victim caught up in circumstances beyond her control, such as Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell) in They Live by Night (RKO, 1948), who falls in love with a naive petty criminal. Then there are the femmes who are gutsy but sincere, as in High Sierra (Warners, 1941), where Ida Lupino's Marie is hard-boiled and implacable, but also possesses a deep sense of compassion and a propensity for true love.
Finally, there is the assortment of film noir females who use their wiles to get their way, as often as not at the expense of their male counterparts.
Even more than my recent experience with Imogen Sara Smith, this book leaves me staring bitterly at the popular reception of film noir and too much of its criticism. Twenty-five years ago, it was asserting—title notwithstanding—not just a prevalence of female characters in noir beyond the common reductive binary, but their centrality to the genre. It's a nice, solid book: well-bibliographied, interviews, pictures. It's not fluff and it's not unfindable. It came out the same year as Eddie Muller's Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (1998). In 2015, as soon as I had been sucker-punched by The Reckless Moment (1949) and understood from the start of my formal interest in noir that its women were complicated, I should not have had to encounter over and over again female characters tagged as femmes fatales as if it were the only gender designation available in the genre, synopses and interpretation distorted to fit them into the schema unless they could be deemed angels in the house instead. I should not still find myself barking my shins on the claim that one cannot engage with noir without acknowledgement of its inherent, by implication extraordinary misogyny. I have gathered that people have trouble seeing the films in front of them rather than the films they've been told to expect, but this book has been right here for a quarter of a century telling them to expect something not so clear-cut. I am only getting around to it now for idiosyncratic reasons, but what was everyone else's excuse?
Less incensedly, I am charmed that when I opened to the chapter on Lizabeth Scott, as one does, some previous reader had enthusiastically underlined entire passages in pencil. In the chapter on Barbara Stanwyck, the same hand annotated "LOT'S WIFE" at the end of the section on The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). I wonder what they were writing about.
P.S. She loves Jean Hagen!
Aside from visual characteristics, these films contain both heroes and villains who are cynical and disillusioned, inextricably bound to the past and ambivalent about the future.
In addition, most films noirs offer portraits of complex female characters who, to some degree, are fundamental to the development of the plot. Some exist as champions for the male protagonist, as in Phantom Lady (Universal, 1944), where the relentless determination of Ella Raines' Carol lifts the protagonist from his state of inevitable doom and results in the exposure of the man who framed him for murder. In other noir films, the female is portrayed as an innocent victim caught up in circumstances beyond her control, such as Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell) in They Live by Night (RKO, 1948), who falls in love with a naive petty criminal. Then there are the femmes who are gutsy but sincere, as in High Sierra (Warners, 1941), where Ida Lupino's Marie is hard-boiled and implacable, but also possesses a deep sense of compassion and a propensity for true love.
Finally, there is the assortment of film noir females who use their wiles to get their way, as often as not at the expense of their male counterparts.
Even more than my recent experience with Imogen Sara Smith, this book leaves me staring bitterly at the popular reception of film noir and too much of its criticism. Twenty-five years ago, it was asserting—title notwithstanding—not just a prevalence of female characters in noir beyond the common reductive binary, but their centrality to the genre. It's a nice, solid book: well-bibliographied, interviews, pictures. It's not fluff and it's not unfindable. It came out the same year as Eddie Muller's Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (1998). In 2015, as soon as I had been sucker-punched by The Reckless Moment (1949) and understood from the start of my formal interest in noir that its women were complicated, I should not have had to encounter over and over again female characters tagged as femmes fatales as if it were the only gender designation available in the genre, synopses and interpretation distorted to fit them into the schema unless they could be deemed angels in the house instead. I should not still find myself barking my shins on the claim that one cannot engage with noir without acknowledgement of its inherent, by implication extraordinary misogyny. I have gathered that people have trouble seeing the films in front of them rather than the films they've been told to expect, but this book has been right here for a quarter of a century telling them to expect something not so clear-cut. I am only getting around to it now for idiosyncratic reasons, but what was everyone else's excuse?
Less incensedly, I am charmed that when I opened to the chapter on Lizabeth Scott, as one does, some previous reader had enthusiastically underlined entire passages in pencil. In the chapter on Barbara Stanwyck, the same hand annotated "LOT'S WIFE" at the end of the section on The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). I wonder what they were writing about.
P.S. She loves Jean Hagen!
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