Film Noir and the Femme Fatale in the 1940s and 1950s

Question for Discussion: What is behind the dangerous
women, the femme fatales, of film noir? What causes
these women to be dangerous?

Reading: Ebert, "Review of the Third Man" (Web);
Dirks, "Review of the Third Man" (Web);
Berardinelli, "Review of the Third Man (Web)

Critical Reviews of The Third Man

Film Noir in the 1940s and 1950s

American women in the 1950s

The Women's Rights Movement

"Any change in the nature of male and
female roles thus automatically affects
the home, the economy, the school, and
perhaps above all, the definition of who
we are as human beings."

......William Chafe, A History of Our Time (224)

"What is The Third Man is no great mystery: it's one of the greatest expressions of the noir attitude ever committed to film. If noir reflects the cultural anxieties of the day -- as modern noir such as Blue Velvet and Pulp Fiction mirror fears about, respectively, sex and drugs -- then The Third Man may be the truest depiction of the chaos and confusion of the period right after WWII, when national alliances were shifting and the horrors of the war, so recently uncovered, would begin to pale in comparison of those of the politically unstable world the war left in its wake. "
Mary Ann Johanson: Review of The Third Man

"The Third Man reflects the optimism of Americans and the bone-weariness of Europe after the war. It's a story about grown-ups and children: adults like Calloway, who has seen at firsthand the results of Lime's crimes, and children like the trusting Holly, who believesin the simplified good and evil of his Western novels.

The Third Man is like the exhausted aftermath of Casablanca. Both have heroes who are American exiles, awash in a world of treachery and black market intrigue. Both heroes love a woman battered by the war. But Casablanca is bathed in the hope of victory, while The Third Man already reflects the Cold War years of paranoia, betrayal and the Bomb. The hero doesn't get the girl in either movie--but in ``Casablanca,'' Ilsa stays with the resistance leader to help in his fight, while in ``The Third Man'' Anna remains loyal to a rat. Yet Harry Lime saved Anna, a displaced person who faced certain death. Holly will never understand what Anna did to survive the war, and Anna has absolutely no desire to tell him."
Roger Ebert on The Third Man

"Classic film noir developed during and after World War II, taking advantage of the post-war ambience of anxiety, pessimism, and suspicion. These films counter-balanced the optimism of Hollywood's musicals and comedies during this same time period. Fear, mistrust, bleakness and paranoia are readily evident in noir, reflecting the 'chilly' Cold War period when the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present. The criminal, violent, misogynistic or greedy perspectives of anti-heroes in film noir were a metaphoric symptom of society's evils, with a strong undercurrent of moral conflict."
Understanding Film Noir

"The primary moods of classic film noir were melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt, desperation and paranoia. Heroes (or anti-heroes), corrupt characters and villains included down-and-out, conflicted hard-boiled detectives or private eyes, cops, gangsters, government agents, socio-paths, crooks, war veterans, petty criminals, and murderers. These protagonists were often morally-ambiguous low-lifes from the dark and gloomy underworld of violent crime and corruption. Distinctively, they were cynical, tarnished, obsessive (sexual or otherwise), brooding, menacing, sinister, sardonic, disillusioned, frightened and insecure loners (usually men), struggling to survive - and in the end, ultimately losing. "
Understanding Film Noir

"Film noir films (mostly shot in gloomy grays, blacks and whites) showed the dark and inhumane side of human nature with cynicism and doomed love, and they emphasized the brutal, unhealthy, seamy, shadowy, dark and sadistic sides of the human experience. An oppressive atmosphere of menace, pessimism, anxiety, suspicion that anything can go wrong, dingy realism, futility, fatalism, defeat and entrapment were stylized characteristics of film noir . The protagonists in film noir were normally driven by their past or by human weakness to repeat former mistakes. "
Understanding Film Noir

To describe the plot in a linear and logical fashion is almost impossible. That doesn't matter. The movie is essentially a series of conversations punctuated by brief, violent interludes. It's all style. It isn't violence or chases, but the way the actors look, move, speak and embody their characters. Under the style is attitude: Hard men, in a hard season, in a society emerging from Depression and heading for war, are motivated by greed and capable of murder. For an hourly fee, Sam Spade will negotiate this terrain.

Roger Ebert on The Maltese Falcon (1941)

For lovers of film noir, The Third Man is unquestionably a must-see - one of the masterpieces of a genre that has contained everything from milestone motion pictures to low-budget potboilers. Due in large part to the meticulousness of those involved, the movie is virtually without flaw. It's a standout from an era in which there were many great films, and a blueprint for countless second-rate copycat thrillers to come afterwards. The Third Man manages the laudable feat of combining popular entertainment with artistic achievement, making it an engaging and compelling viewing experience for nearly any potential audience member, regardless of his or her background and outlook. "
Conclusion of his film review: James Berardinelli: Review of The Third Man

During World War II, millions of women entered the labor force. They were encouraged to work in industrial factories to help the war effort. The United States government even created a propaganda campaign to convince women they should now work in what were considered "men's jobs," because the same skills they used doing housework would allow them to work in factories. During the war years, millions of women discovered that they could do "men's work" and could earn the higher salaries usually associated with that work. After discovering that they could work in high-paying factory jobs, the majority of women did not want to give these jobs up after World War II. This worried American leaders, business leaders, and returning American veterans, who wanted to return to their traditional high-paying factory jobs.

Faced with the resistance of many women to voluntarily give up their jobs to men, and return to their traditional, low-status sales and clerical jobs, government and business leaders created a campaign to convince women that they should be patriotic and give their men their jobs back. Television and radio ads told women that they would be much happier if they went back home and had children and gave men their jobs back. Women were told that now that the war was over they should return to their more traditional roles as housewives and mothers. Women didn't really need these jobs, but men did. In fact, from the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s there was tremendous pressure on women to accept their more traditional roles as wives and mothers, dependent on their husbands, and committed to living their lives for their families, children, and husbands.

But this campaign to encourage women to return to traditional roles often went too far. As Chafe notes:

"Yet the shrillness of the campaign went too far, suggesting the schizophrenia of American culture and society as much as any uniformity of purpose. While countless suburban housewives (and husbands) carried out their roles as written, there were just as many others who sought new options and wanted to go on changing the world."(The Paradox, 188)

Examples of this campaign going too far were ads telling women that they should enjoy doing the laundry and that they should take classes on how to be good housekeepers. We can also see the American obsession with the traditional housewife in television programs such as Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Indeed, June Cleaver, in Leave it to Beaver, is never shown as having a life of her own; she is always there for Wally, Beaver, and her husband. How do we then explain this obsession with convincing women that they should remain in their traditional roles in the 1950s?

The answer lies in the dramatic changes women experienced in World War II. Many married women discovered that they could work in men's jobs, could earn a good salary, and could do much of the work that men were traditionally responsible for in the family. During the war, many married women were not only forced to work to support the war effort, they were also forced to do most of the tasks that men had done around the house. With their husbands gone to war, many women discovered that they were smart enough to balance a check book, maintain the car, and run the household as their husbands had always done. When their husbands came back from the war, they discovered that their wives were more assertive, confident, and less dependent on them. This troubled many American men, who did not like the changes they saw in American women and their wives.

Faced with the threat from changing women's roles, American men, government, and business went on a campaign to convince women that they should go back to the way they were before the war, they should forget all their experiences and changes that took place during the war. They argued that it was women's patriotic duty to give their jobs back to men. If women didn't stop working, then there would be an economic depression. Just as women were scapegoated for the Great Depression, with many men charging that there wouldn't have been a depression if women had not taken the jobs that rightfully belonged to men. But, in addition to giving up their jobs, American women and wives should also respect the wishes of their men who sacrificed so much during the war and return to their more traditional roles as wives and mothers, dependent on their husbands.

Ironically, despite the increasing success of this campaign to convince women to return to their more traditional roles, millions of married women in the 1950s continued to work, and millions more entered the workforce in the 1950s and 1960s. Why were white, middle-class women, married and with children, entering the labor force in record numbers in the 1950s if the larger society was telling them that they should stay home and be traditional wives and let their husbands support them? More middle-class wives were entering the workforce than working-class wives, who might need to work to support their families. Why, if their husbands were earning good salaries, did middle-class wives begin to enter the laborforce in record numbers? After World War II, these very same women were told to give up their jobs to men. But now they were rushing into the workforce.

In the 1950s, middle-class married women were taking jobs soon after their children started school and worked for the rest of their lives. Despite working, these women were still responsible for doing all their traditional work as wives and mother in the home. Despite the pressure to stay at home and be good wives and mothers, American women were increasingly forced to work in order to keep their families middle class, and allow them to have big homes, nice cars, send their children to college, and take long vacation. Thus, at the very moment when women were told that they should ignore the changes they were experiencing as a result of World War II and their increased presence in the workforce, women were struggling to reconcile their traditional roles with their expanding confidence and independence as working wives. Studies in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated that women who worked has a greater say in the finances, in the marriage, and in the family that women who didn't work. So clearly working women were expanding their roles, demanding more equality and respect from their husbands and families.

Despite these growing changes in women's roles in the 1950s, Americans were told that while some wives might be working, their work wasn't important and it shouldn't get in the way of their responsibilities as wives and mothers. Many Americans were thus trying to benefit from women's increasing participation in the workforce while at the same time denying the social and cultural changes that women's expanding roles were creating. It is this contradiction, I believe, that explains the excesses of the campaign to convince women to be happy in their traditional roles in the 1950s. This campaign for traditional women became more determined and visible as more and more women entered the workforce in 1950s. It was as if Americans were trying to convince themselves that despite the growing changes in women's roles and lives nothing was changing, that women were still content being traditional wives and mothers.

In the early 1960s, many married women were increasingly unhappy with the burdens and the contradictions they faced. They were being bombarded with cultural messages that said that good mothers and wives did not work and dedicated their lives to supporting their husbands and children, but at the same time they were increasingly forced to work to make ends meet. Some women also felt the increased burden of now having two jobs, working outside the home and trying to still do all the work that they used to do inside the home. Many women refer to this as the "double shift." By the early 1960s, feeling guilty and confused about their new roles and responsibilities, many women began to question what Betty Friedan called the feminine mystique, which told women that "they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity." In her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, Friedan challenged women to question the social and cultural messages that told women they should accept their traditional roles as wives and mothers. She challenged women to discover who they were, and develop their individual selves as human being, and not just accept what society called their destiny as women to be wives and mothers.

The women's movement in the 1960s grew out of this increasing contradiction between the growing changes in women's lives and society's efforts to convince women that these changes weren't occurring. But the demand by women that they play larger roles in their families and societies also grew out of another contradiction. At the same time that Americans were told that it was a women's destiny to be a wife and mother, society did not value women's work raising children and supporting their husbands and families. Many women came to feel that they weren't doing anything of value with their lives if they were just wives and mothers. Only by getting educated, holding good jobs, and earning high salaries could many women gain the social respect they felt they deserved. This, of course, is a real tragedy. If society more highly valued women's traditional work as wives and mothers, then many women would not feel that, as Friedan charged, the home was "a comfortable concentration camp."

But the rise of the women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s, as we will see, led to the growth of a backlash and a movement by conservative men and women in the 1980s and early 1990s to once again convince women that it is their destiny to be wives and mothers, dependent on their husbands, living their lives through their children and family. This backlash in response to the gains of the women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s once again demonstrates that American society, especially men, fear changing women's roles and will work hard to try to keep women in their traditional places as wives and mothers. It was, in fact, a similar backlash after World War II that tried to convince women that their changing roles and lives weren't in fact changing at all, they were still happy being traditional wives and mothers. Why, then, does America tend to be so obsessed with limiting women's roles? What is it about women's traditional roles that is so important to the workings of American society and culture? We will look at the struggle over the women's movement and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1960s and 1970s to get a better understanding of this.