"The Lady from Shanghai" Femmes Fatales III

While it proved unpopular with contemporary audiences (Welles had Hayworth play against type, and had her cut and bleach her trademark red locks) and the studio cut almost an hour from the film, The Lady from Shanghai has fared well since its 1946 release and is now considered among the greats of film noir. Married, but in the midst of a divorce, Orson Welles directed and starred oposite Rita Hayworth in this, their only collaboration. While the story is somewhat disjointed and much is left to the viewer to guess at and fill in, the work is suspenseful and exotic. It keeps one's attention, even if it's not fully amenable to comprehension.

Merchant marine Michael "Black Irish" O'Hara (Welles) crosses paths with the elegant Elsa (Hayworth) as she rides through central park in a horse-drawn carriage. Moments later O'Hara saves her from an attempted mugging, using a gun she was carrying, but had tossed aside, explaining to him afterwards that she didn't know how to use it. As he escorts her to safely to her car garage, they talk of crime, and he talks of defense attorneys, and how they can get off anyone with enough money. Is the San Francisco lawyer, Arthur Bannister, who just got a man acquitted for shooting his wife five time in the head the world's greatest lawyer, or the worlds greatest criminal? She offers him a job piloting her and her husband's yacht around South America. Thinking he's making a fool of himself, he say's he's not interested. He rips up her card. As he walks off, two men we'll see later in the film step out of the shadows and walk off. The garage attendant identifies Elsa, who has driven off, the rich and beautiful wife – of none other than Arthur Bannister.

Hayworth is in top form. Her performance in Gilda is unbeatable, but there she plays a jilted lover putting on a tough face. Here she plays the femme fatale, the cold, calculating killer in chic clothing. Having lived in the fleshpots of coastal China, her occupation in such ports as Shanghai going unidentified, Elsa is a woman who "knows how to take care of herself." Part of that taking care of herself is knowing how to appear helpless, to play the victim. The good girl "doesn't smoke." But she knows how to light a cigarette. She "doesn't know how to shoot." But she carries a gun. Michael senses the contradiction. But he too is a man of the world, having killed a man in the Spanish Civil War. He knows that he should know better. But Elsa, or his "Rosalie" as he calls her, is just too enticing a temptation. He knows it's a game, and he figures he'll play.

The film uses footage of Welles' unreleased South American good-will tour from the War. The story ends in San Francisco where scenes were shot on location. The thrilling final scene in a funhouse is a cinematographic classic. Hayworth is like an exotic animal, a caged white tigress whose grace and quiet beauty belie her underlying bestiality. One can easily see flashes of Sharon Stone's Catherine Tramell from Basic Instinct. Welles' work is a tour de force, even if it is hamfistedly edited by studio censors.



The film's minor flaws actually have one accidental benefit. The viewer will want to watch the film over again to figure out just what he might have missed the first time around. And there is a lot that you will notice if you pay close attention, homages to Hayworth's Gilda, recurring themes, a cameo of Errol Flynn. This film is fascinating, and you will want to watch it again and again. I have.

This film should be rented or made a part of your permanent library. It is available from Netflix. Here is a highlight from YouTube:



Here are parts two (lafrshaa) and three (lafrshab).

Read Femmes Fatales Part I and Part II

"Heathers" Femmes Fatales II

A mix of Nietzsche and teen angst ending with the words, "There's a new sheriff in town," Heathers, a 1989 dark comedy starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, is a wicked satire of high school cliques, disfunctional families, and the therapeutic culture. While the film was not a box office success, it has attained cult status, with continuingly solid DVD slaes and rental revenue. It was a critical success for first-time director Michael Lehmann, and the first major lead for co-stars Slater and Ryder after his appearanced in Name of the Rose and hers in Beetlejuice.



Heather Chandler, Heather Duke and Heather McNamara are three vicious, sexually manipulative, and deeply unhappy "popular girls" whose clique terrorizes the student body of Westerburg High. The pretty and intelligent but alienated Veronica Sawyer (Ryder) joins the croquet-playing prank-planning sorority as an "honorary Heather." Her first assignment is to humiliate her former friend, Martha "Dumptruck" Dunnstock. Veronica, whose parents show their concern for her well-being by assuming, as they sip their martinis, that she must be suffering every fad teenage syndrome they hear of on TV, is just going through the motions. There is nothing more empty than a teenage suburban limbo where "that's so 1987" is the worst imaginable put-down.

Then bad-boy Jason "J.D." Dean (Slater) transfers in to Westerburg. With his shades and leather jacket and his disdain not only for authority but also the Heathers, he embodies for Veronica the possibility of a sufficient self. But J.D., for all his apparent bravado, is an empty shell as well. With no real values of his own, this nihilist lives to expose the emptiness in others. Finding the lone wolf in him attractive, Veronica decides to explore the dark side, beginning with a visit to the top Heather who is suffering the effects of a hangover. But J.D. switches the pick-me-up Veronica pours for her with poison. In a frantic attempt to avoid blame for her surpise demise, Veronica forges a suicide note. Not only is the note successful, but Heather's suicide is seen as an example by her classmates, and the ensuing farcical deaths are celebrated as an "opportunity to heal" by the school guidance counselor.



Veronica begins this movie as a burned out cynic. In search of the thrill that she can no longer get from Barbie Dolls, she joins the "elites" of her school to prey on her former friends who are seen as nerds and losers. Finding this even more barren, she turns on the predators with J.D.'s help and takes down the Heathers and top Jocks. J.D., a true psychopath, revels in the destruction. When Veronica abandons him, he plans murder to silence her, and a holocaust for the school. But Veronica, realizing the real worth, if not the supposed glamor of her former true friends, realizes that she has a value she wants to protect. A woman with a mission, she goes up against a killer, and completes her metamorphosis from delinquent to champion.

With its dark humor, over-the-top performances, stylized lunacy, and disdain for convention, Heathers resembles many critical hits of the seventies such as A Clockwork Orange and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The top-grossing teenage flick of the 80's, The Breakfast Club, would have us believe that mean teachers and low self-esteem are the central problems of youth, and that the cure is self-therapeutic weekend bull-sessions. Heathers blows that unintentional farce out of the water. At times surreal, almost psychadelic, Heathers succeeds as black comedy and as biting social commentary. But while Heathers succeeds as satire, it does not settle for mere cynicism. While Veronica flirts with nihilism, she never commits, ultimately withdrawing in horror once she sees the nature of that drooling beast. Beautiful and brilliant, a lack of strength was never Veronica's problem. Once she is wakened from her funk, she acts with courage. Veronica goes beyond the femme fatale, and choses to be a heroine instead.

Rent the film, buy the film, watch the film in full at YouTube:



Read Femmes Fatales, Part I and Part III

"Romeo is Bleeding" Femmes Fatales I

Conflict, says Ayn Rand, is the essence of plot. A plot requires struggle. Man can struggle with nature, with himself, and with other men. A struggle with nature provides a simple, one-sided plot. There is no psychological element, no conflict of human values in such a struggle. A struggle with oneself can be very dramatic, but it affords limited scope unless it is played out in the context of a wider struggle with others. It is in conflict with others that the widest range of plot developments are available. And one of the most popular, if not profound, scenarios for a dramatic plot is the crime story. Inherent in a crime story is the conflict between the criminal and his victim, necessarily with opposing interests.

The femme fatale is a particularly interesting type of character. In the crime story with a femme fatale we have not only the criminal element, with its dimension of good versus evil, we also have a shared romantic interest between the hero and the villain, as well as a conflict in the hero's values. If the hero has a love interest in the villain, then he must struggle "with" her while struggling against her. He may want to love her, but have to kill her. This leads to an internal struggle within the her which allows the dramatist to explore the hero's motivations and to develop his character.

The first femme fatale movie that I would like to examine is Romeo is Bleeding with two of my favorite actors, Gary Oldman (Jack Grimaldi) and Lena Olin (Mona Demarkov). Grimaldi is a cop on the take, working for the NYPD and the Italian Mafia. He has a wife, (Annabella Sciorra) a mistress (Juliette Lewis) and several hundred thousand in cash buried in his back yard. The mob hires him to kill Demarkov, who is being held by the police in a Brooklyn safe-house, but instead, she seduces him and he is found by his colleagues in a compromising position.

Demarkov is a case study in Ayn Rand's dictum that in a struggle between criminals, where the initiation of force determines the mode of interaction, the more ruthless will win. While Jack wants to live a life of crime while keeping the benefits of middle-class domesticity, Demarkov is fully depraved and uncompromisingly brutal. A succubus (she literally ends up sitting on Grimaldi's chest in almost all of their indoor scenes) she combines intelligence and ravishing beauty with the soul of a psychopath. She taunts Jack with the possibility of a partnership. Mona has her charms. She is exotic, brilliant, glamorous, and seems fully self-assured. But when she finally tells Jack of her first "love," and how she left his body on the beach where they had their one encounter, we see that Grimaldi's hope for a possible match is nothing more than fatal wishful thinking.



This fast-paced and very sytlized movie while not gorey in the sickening manner of a horror film, is incredibly violent, so much so as to be over the top. Yet, as it always furthers the plot, the brutality is not gratuitous. We see Grimaldi strangled, bloodied and maimed. Demarkov is shot and loses a limb. Mob Boss Don Falcone (Roy Scheider) gets his comeuppance in a darkly humorous scene.



It is Lena Olin's sultry black widow performance that has made this movie a cult classic. In a climactic scene, where Demarkov has captured and handcuffed Grimaldi to a bed, baring her prosthetic arm, asks as she mounts him, "with or without?" The answer is without.

For movie stills, see http://lenaolin.net/romeo.html

Here is the theatrical trailer:



Read Femmes Fatales, Part II