Fatal Femininity in Post-War British Film: Investigating the British Femme

Abstract

The commonly received wisdom is that British cinema of the 1940s failed to produce any femmes fatales. Robert Murphy, in his discussion of the post-war British crime film, argues that ‘there was no equivalent to the glittering femmes fatales who haunted Hollywood cinema’ (1989: 107). He supports his statement with reference to Wolfenstein and Leites’s postwar film survey, which concluded ‘British films do not, on the whole, take the destructive potentialities of women seriously’ (ibid.). Andrew Spicer, who has done much to open up the field of British noir for study, is largely silent on the subject of the femme fatale, despite claims that British noir was preoccupied with ‘a critique of male prowess, potency, sexuality and criminality’ (2002: 202); concerns where we might reasonably expect to find a female influence. How do we explain this curious critical absence, given that the British crime film in all its various manifestations proliferated in the post-war period? Sue Harper’s ground-breaking work on Gainsborough costume drama has convincingly demonstrated the centrality of ‘wicked ladies’ in British cinema between 1943 and 1950. Harper argues that ‘[t]he period is notable for the amount of screen time given to female villainy… [which] quickly spread from costume to modern melodrama and to other generic forms’ (2000: 69). From this statement we might reasonably conclude that the dangerous female was present across a range of genres including — but not limited to — crime. This chapter will draw together the two strands of the crime film and the female villain into a discussion of the femme fatale as she emerges, contrary to previous opinion, within a specifically post-war British film context.