FATAL(E) CHARACTERS IN US NOIR: A LIST OF THE "TOP OFFENDERS"

A recent essay at the Saturday Evening Post website identified "ten top femme fatales" in film noir. (American film noir, of course: despite efforts by TCM's noir maven Eddie Muller--and yours truly!--to widen the horizons of noir aficionados to the expansive realities of international film noir, many still reflexively see noir as inherently American.)

But that is a battle for another day. The top ten "femme fatales" chosen by Donald Liebenson are solidly within the "region of consensus" for such characters as they appear in US noir. But "top ten" lists seem so perfunctory--so we solicited some help from several more "expansive" experts, who filled in twenty more characters deserving of mention with the Post's top ten.

As you might suspect, however, even that didn't quite satisfy our desire to capture just how pervasive such disruptive characters really are. So we created a much larger list, using the Noir-o-Meter's evaluation of more than 1,000 noirs from around the world.

Sticking with US noir, we look at the "meter's" intensity score for the character element measuring "peril-inducing characters," an element that covers both genders of such "bad faith" presences in noir--the femmes (fatale) and the hommes (fatal). The quantitative gradation method doesn't specify gender, of course: it just grades intensity. So we've compiled a list where the intensity score for this element (weighted at a possible 15 points out of the method's total point allocation of 200) is 11 or higher. 

That turns out to be a lengthy list: 115 US noirs in all. Here's the list, which shows the gender breakdown of such characters, which provides a result that might be quite surprising. Note also that there a number of films containing "bad faith" characters of bold genders whose combined actions brought the overall intensity level of this important noir element to a level where they needed to be included on the list.

As noted, a long list: we've made it large enough for you to read comfortably, but be forewarned--it goes on for a long, long time!

THE surprise (to many of you, perhaps?) is that there are more homme fatal characters radiating significant intensity in these film than femme fatale characters. That suggests that the misogynistic aspect often attributed to film noir (resulting from a fear/loathing of the independent female as a result of her emancipation during World War II) is not a dominating aspect of these films, but more of a transient feature appearing in a compressed time frame within the overall US noir cycle. 

Note that the films selected by the Saturday Evening Post are shown in bold type; the amplifying films (which in a few cases include films that scored less than 11 in this element) are shown in italics (the contributions of Robert Ottoson) or set off with a yellow background (the suggestions of Owen Field). 

This is a fine list that you are encouraged to utilize to seek out any films listed on it that you've not yet seen...