However, the findings from these films are sufficient enough to refute a surmise we made earlier about how this sub-group would appear on the "Tough-Tender" distribution chart. For those coming into this just now, we use measures from the Noir-o-Meter that quantify the relative strength of noir elements by their root source--either "hard-boiled" ("tough," criminous) or "melo" ("tender," emotional, pyschological). The first uses all elements from the major subgroups--character elements, visual elements, and plot/screenwriting elements--to calculate a "melo" rate. (Somewhat surprisingly, melodrama elements are stronger in overall intensity within film noir as a while than the hard-boiled elements--a finding that lends support to Dan's notion that the "hard-boiled paradigm" has been oversold in terms of defining and understanding noir.)
The second focuses on these relative intensities only in terms of the character elements, and it inverts the measure in order to give us a two-dimensional graphic. (You can see many of these in earlier posts here). The upshot is that the nearer to the left and top a noir graphs by this method, the more "hard-boiled" it is; the nearer to the right and bottom, the more "melo" it is.
So that gets us to the 18 films for which we currently have up-to-date Noir-o-Meter data that have both femme fatales (FF) and women in distress (WID) present in them. Keep in mind that Dan only notes the presence of these character types, he doesn't try to measure the intensity of those characters in the films. With such a small sample size, we probably can't take advantage of the fact that the Noir-o-Meter does provide gradations for various character-based characteristics, including femmes fatales, hommes fatals, and other peril-creating and life-disrupting characters. But we can get a look at the "tough/tender" distribution for these films...here it is:
As you can see, this distribution does not show all of the "Noirs with FF +WID" falling into the "melo" range. While only a plurality of these films are in the "hard-boiled" range, there are enough of them to make us reconsider the dynamics between FFs and WIDs.
Often the FFs and WIDs in a noir do not directly interact--these are often found in policiers (a good example from our list here is Cop Hater (1958), where the two women know each other, but have no interaction in terms of the plot actions which define them as FF or WID).
In a melo-noir such as Jealousy (1945), however, the interaction is more overt--in fact, in that case, the FF actually tries to murder the WID. While that may sound as though it would qualify for the "hard-boiled" side of things, the development of the women's interactions in the film leads to an emotional conflict and a sexual/psychological competition, which is firmly within the "melo" axis.
Interestingly, there are a number of films that score above the overall noir averages for each of these measures. These are the group appearing in the upper right quadrant. One of these films is Hugo Haas' feisty noir potboiler Hit and Run (1957), where the likely femme fatale is inverted into a woman in distress by not one but two scheming males. Here it is male actions that lift the hard-boiled elements more than the presence of an alluring woman who fits the definition of femme fatale but is a late tangential addition to the plot development.
The peril-inducing function is a more active initiator of the narrative action, and is not limited to these two female categorizations. That's why there is no monolithic shift into the "melo" region when a FF is joined by a WID. This is because the policier sub-genre is often distinctive enough to absorb such a character without losing its "toughness."
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