European Journal of American Culture Volume 27 Number 2. © Intellect Ltd 2008.

Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ejac.27.2.133/1

Female monsters: Horror, the ‘FemmeFatale’ and World War IIMark Jancovich University of East Anglia

AbstractThe article is an examination of critical reception of the figure of the femalemonster as it emerged from the horror film during World War II, and it seeks toanalyse discourses through which this figure was understood during the period oftheir initial release. In the process, the article demonstrates that the figure cur-rently referred to as the femme fatale was not understood as a coherent or unifiedphenomenon in the period, and that it did not develop as part of a reaction againstthe working women of wartime. On the contrary, the essay demonstrates theways in which the female monster developed around the start of the war and theway in which she was both identified with the figure of ‘slacker’ and often overtlyopposed to the figure of the independent woman of wartime.

James Naremore has argued that ‘film noir’ can be seen as ‘a nostalgia forsomething that never existed’, an idea invented by later periods and retro-spectively used to associate films with one another (Naremore 1998: 152).As Steve Neale puts it: ‘as a concept film noir seems to homogenise a set ofdistinct and heterogeneous phenomena; it thus inevitably generates con-tradictions, exceptions, anomalies and is doomed in the end, to incoher-ence’ (Neale 2000: 154). Furthermore, much the same can also be said ofthe ‘femme fatale’, a term that conflates different types of figures. One ofthe reasons for this lack of coherence is precisely that, like film noir itself,the ‘femme fatale’ as a term was a product of later periods that was thenretrospectively applied to the mid to late 1940s, a process that selectedcertain female characters to the extent that they could be made toconform to a specific nostalgic image. None the less, despite the problemwith the term ‘femme fatale’, there certainly was a cinematic cycle of filmsfeaturing female monsters, but one that was in no sense restricted to thosefilms commonly identified as examples of film noir. On the contrary, it wasa cycle of films that cut across a range of different generic types, although,as will be demonstrated, it emerged from horror films of the period.

Furthermore, an understanding of the origins of these ‘female monsters’also demonstrates another problem with many accounts of the femme fatale.In most of these accounts, the femme fatale emerges at the end of the war,and the product of ‘the historical need to re-construct an economy based ona division of labour by which men common the means of production and

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Keywordsreception studiesgenrehorrorfilm noirthe femme fataleWorld War IIgender

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women remain within the family, in other words the need to reconstruct afailing patriarchal order’ (Cook 1978: 68). In other words, it was part of aconcerted effort to persuade women to leave the jobs that they had taken onduring the war, and return to their roles as wives and mothers in the domes-tic sphere. It is therefore claimed that the femme fatale is a demonisation ofthe independent woman of the war years.

However, as this essay will demonstrate, the cycle of films that featureddangerous women actually emerges too early to support this argument,and became popular in 1942, at precisely at the point at which womenwere being encouraged to taken on, rather than surrender, non-domesticlabour in aid of the war effort. Furthermore, the monstrous female is oftenclosely associated with domesticity and directly opposed to the indepen-dent women of the war years. As a result, rather than a demonisation ofthe independent woman of wartime, the female monster is actually associ-ated with the figure of the ‘slacker’, a figure that wartime propaganda pre-sented as an ‘arrogant, self absorbed woman’, whose ‘humbling’ was ‘amajor theme in fiction of the recruitment period’ (Honey 1984: 92).

Of course, this is not to say that these films were inherently radicaleither. If they did not work to demonise the independent woman, many his-torians have pointed out that even the wartime discourses that celebratedthe woman war worker did not necessarily present her as an autonomous,self-motivating figure but rather as a figure of self-sacrifice. However, whilesome historians rightly note that this emphasis on self-sacrifice meant thatthe ‘ideal American woman had not changed beyond recognition’, Ruppand others overstate matters when they claim: ‘Beneath her begrimed exte-rior, she remained very much the traditional woman’ (Rupp 1978: 151).Although the propaganda image of the woman war worker was not a com-plete break with the past, it was not simply an image of traditional feminin-ity either, and overtly encouraged women to explore non-domestic modes offemininity. Nor was it simply the reverse: an attack on domestic femininity.There was still a strong value placed on domesticity so long as women werenot simply domestic but also demonstrated ‘a strong sense of citizenship’ byengaging in non-domestic war work (Rupp 1978: 146).

Consequently, as we will see, the films featuring female monsters oftenstaged an encounter between opposed femininities in which publicly activefemininities were presented as heroic, while the female monster wasstrongly associated with the domestic or private sphere. Moreover, thefemale monster is not simply a figure of male fantasy but, on the contrary,the films in which they appeared were often explicitly aimed at women,too. They even featured female stars that were associated with women’sgenres such as the woman’s film and the musical. Nor is the associationwith the horror film exceptional in this context. On the contrary, there wasa strong sense, in the 1940s, that the horror film was a woman’s genreduring the 1940s (see, for example, Jancovich forthcominga and 2007).

The following essay will therefore trace the emergence and develop-ment of the figure of the female monster from the horror films of the early

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1940s to the shift from horrific fantasy in the mid-1940s, and it will seekto do so through an analysis of their critical reception. In other words, itwill examine reviews of the period to understand how these female mon-sters, and the films in which they appeared, were understood in thecontext of their original release in the United States. The first section willtherefore examine the female monster from 1940 to 1944, paying partic-ular attention to the ways in which she is set up against different femi-ninities in the films. The second section will then move on to examine thediffusion of the female monsters into a diverse range of different types ofhorror production in the mid-1940s while the third section focuses on thedevelopment of the more realist thrillers, films that were hardly seen aspresenting the independent working woman as a problem and were oftenassociated with female rather than male audiences. Finally, the fourth sec-tions turns its attention to the film most often used as evidence of the asso-ciation between the femme fatale and the attempt to direct women back tothe domestic sphere, Mildred Pierce (1945). Furthermore, as will bedemonstrated, although there was a shift from gothic fantasy in the femalemonster films of the mid-1940s, this shift was not understood as a shiftfrom horror at the time, and most of the films commonly identified asexamples of film noir today were usually understood as horror at the time,even films such as Double Indemnity (1944) and Mildred Pierce.

Monstrous dualities: the female monster and her othersAfter the start of the new horror cycle in 1939, the first key film in thedevelopment of the cycle of female monsters was Rebecca (1940), which wasproduced by David O Selznick and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Not onlywas it understood as horror at the time, but it featured a heroine who wasmenaced by ‘Rebecca’s Ghost’ (Nugent 1940: 25), the powerful presence ofher husband’s dead first wife which still oppresses the ‘Gothic manor’ ofManderlay and the ‘demon-ridden countryside’ within which it is located.Although she never appears in the film, the first wife remains a monstrouspresence who dominates the film and all the characters within it.

This film was a phenomenal success and it started a vogue for femalecentred horror films, which began in 1942, with Val Lewton’s Cat People, afilm clearly designed to hybridise the werewolf elements of Universal’s1941 hit, The Wolf Man, with the feminine appeal and signifiers of qualitythat had distinguished Rebecca (see Newman 1999; Jancovichb). The mar-keting and reception of the film clearly drew attention to its femalemonster, Irena, who was described as ‘a lady who finds herself possessed ofmystical feline temptations, especially to claw people to death’ (Crowther1942: 22). Furthermore, this female monster is pitted her against a femaleadversary, ‘Alice-at-the-office’ (Anon 1943), an active and independentworking woman, but one who is not presented as a home-wrecker.Although Irena’s monstrous urges are provoked when her husbandbecomes ‘too familiar with his office helper’ (Schallert 1943: 23), it isIrena who is the monster and Alice who is ‘the standby sweetheart for the

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husband’ (F. N. 1943: 8). In other words, while Irena’s possessiveness pro-vokes her murderous urges, her adversary is precisely the smart, non-domestic female office worker of the war years.

This film was also a major box office draw and Lewton followed it upwith a series of female centred horror films, many of which repeated thedualities of Cat People. The success of Cat People also led Universal torespond, and it produced two female monsters of its own in 1943: CaptiveWild Woman and Son of Dracula. If Irena in Cat People was human, butbelieved that an ancient curse would transform her into a murderousfeline creature if she kisses her lover, Captive Wild Woman featured ‘anorangutan which takes on the appearance of Burnu Acquanetta, and viceversa.’ (T.M.P. 1943: 9) Having been subject to experimentation by a madscientist, the orangutan, Cheela, has been transformed into a humanfemale, but she reverts back into a murderous beast when ‘the animaltrainer whom she is helping . . . embraces his fiancée.’ In other words,Cheela ‘has her eye on the trainer, too, and this display of affection foranother causes her to revert back into animal form’. Furthermore,Cheela’s female rival is played by Universal’s key female horror star of the1940s, Everlyn Ankers, a woman who signified modern, independent fem-ininity and, in the previous year, she had even helped Holmes and Watsondefeat the Nazi’s in Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942).

Similarly, Son of Dracula was supposedly designed as a vehicle for LonChaney, who had played all of the other major Universal monsters by thattime. However, as many critics observed, the film shows little interest inDracula himself but seems to focus on his host, Catherine Cauldwell. Asthe New York Times observed: ‘For a twist in the ghoulish goings-on, LonChaney Jr., as a man in quest of a transfusion, acquires a spouse (LouiseAllbritton), who also becomes a vampire. Together they go on to excite andbewilder practically all concerned’ (A.W. 1943: 16). Rather than a victim,Catherine even orchestrates the evil in the film and schemes to usurp thevampire’s power, particularly his immortality: once Dracula has made herhis bride, Catherine plans to destroy him and bestow immortality uponher fiancée, Frank, with whom he intends to live for eternity. This empha-sis on Catherine is also clear in the pressbook which describes her as ‘TheNew Temptress of Terror’ (Anonb 1943). The pressbook also advisedexhibitors to build up the female monster angle and to stress the film’s‘two female leads’ (my emphasis). The reference here is to the presence ofCatherine’s sister, Claire, who is again played by Ankers. Again Claire actsa direct contrast to Catherine and she is not only a modern woman, butone that explicitly lacks Catherine’s neurotic attachment to the past ingeneral, and the family home in particular. Catherine, it becomes clear, isterrified by change and is strongly attached to the family mansion ingeneral and to its nursery in particular. Even her attachment to Frank isclearly based on his association with her childhood. If Catherine is associ-ated with the domestic and the past, Claire has left the family home behindand is associated with the future: she is therefore able to provide Frank

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with the strength that he needs in order to destroy both Dracula andCatherine.

By 1944, the New York Times was therefore commenting on the emer-gence of a ‘new horror cycle’ that was developing in response to thesefilms, and one that existed on ‘a far more ambitious level tan the forerun-ning vampire, werewolf and Frankenstein chillers’ (Stanley 1944: X3). Ittherefore identified a number of films that it saw as part of this cycle, oneof which was Phantom Lady (1944), a film that usually understood as aclassic of film noir today. Although Phantom Lady features a ‘neurotic’male killer (Crowther 1944a: 15), rather than a female monster, the storyrevolves around the murder of a cruel and self-centred wife, while both itstitle and its marketing campaign suggested that it revolved around aseductive but uncanny female. Furthermore, despite the presence of amale, rather than a female killer, the central character is an efficient,young ‘secretary’ who ‘turns amateur detective to unravel a strangemurder’ when her employer is accused of the crime (Walt 1944: 12).

Similarly, Double Indemnity (1944) was also described as a film of ‘sheerhorror’ (Cameron, 1944: 253), and it was this ‘terrifying study’ thatshifted the female monster from the world of gothic fantasy to a ‘realistic’contemporary setting (Winsten 1944c: 253). However, the film’s ‘destruc-tively lurid female’ (Crowther 1944c: 21) is hardly presented as anexample of the new independent working woman of the war years butrather a kept woman: a ‘homicidal wife’ (Barnes 1944: 253) who has‘married a man for what financial security he can offer [but is now] boredwith her bargain’ (Cook 1944: 253). She is also opposed to her step-daughter, Lola, a college student with an independent spirit.

However, even as the female monster was moving from Gothic fantasyto more ‘realistic’ and contemporary settings, it was also developing inother directions. For example, Joan Fontaine had begun to play againsttype with her version of the Daphne du Maurier novel, Frenchman’s Creek(1944), a role that continued her association with the author of Rebecca,while also extending her range beyond the paranoid woman’s film. TheNew York Times clearly saw the film as a woman’s picture that ‘more or lessfaithfully tells’ the story of the novel (Crowther 1944d: 26), one that ‘wasloaded for bear with all the exciting conventions of romantic fiction at itsbest’. However, it also saw the film as a historical romance that centred ona female character that, although not as menacing as many other femalemonsters, still required ‘a blunt and bravura style which is not altogetherin keeping with [its star’s] accustomed delicacy’. She is a ‘beauteousmatron in the time of good King Charles’, who becomes ‘the adoringaccomplice of a French pirate working the Cornish coast’. She is alsoclaimed to puts up a ‘spirited resistance to a courtier who would gladlyhave won her love’ and ‘dispatches her unwanted suitor in a brawl thatplainly tests her feminine grace’.

However, while female monsters such as Irena may have been sympa-thetic as characters, their monstrous urges were clearly negative, a situation

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that is quite different from Frenchman’s Creek. In this film, the heroine’srejection of domestic femininity is only a temporary flirtation, a point thataggravated its unenthusiastic director, Mitchell Leisen: ‘She falls in lovewith a pirate, leaves her husband and comes back in time not to getcaught’ (Quoted in Thompson 2007: 305). Moreover, James Agee alsomade a similar complaint about the film, which he described as ‘a mastur-batory fantasy triple-distilled’ and one for which the audience ‘is unmis-takably that of a suburban fat-mama’ (Agee 1944: 445). In other words,while other monster movies opposed the female monster to the indepen-dent woman, the rejection of domestic femininity in Frenchman’s Creek wasseen as simply vicarious thrill and one that ultimately consoles ratherthan challenges domestic femininity.

‘Man-Power Shortages’: Femme Fatales, product differentiationand the development of the female monster cycleHowever, while these films represent certain trends within the cycle, therewere also others. Universal made a sequel to Captive Wild Woman in whichthe ape woman returned, and it introduced monstrous females into otherfilm series. In the third of its series of Mummy films, The Mummy’s Ghost(1944), a modern young college student, discovers that she is ‘the reincar-nation of the Egyptian Princess Ananka, priestess initiate of Arkham, whodied accursed three thousand years ago’ (T.M.P. 1944: 10). As a result, thefilm is as much concerned with her drama as it is with that of the Mummy,a drama in which she finds herself unable to prevent her gradual transfor-mation into the Princess Anaka. As the New York Daily News claimed, itsstar was simply ‘too pretty a leading lady to deserve the cruel fate in storefor her, and Robert Lowery too nice a guy to see his fiancée disintegratebefore his eyes’ (Masters 1944: 315).

Alternatively, the Sherlock Holmes series saw Holmes pitted against aseries of deadly female masterminds, most particularly his adversary in TheSpider Woman (1944). The New York Journal-American even referred to itsfemale lead, Gale Sondergaard, as an actress who is ‘always good as a femmefatale’ (Blackford 1944: 493), as did the New York Post, which referred to herschemes as ‘diabolical’, the work of ‘a “female Moriarity,” a “femme fatale”’(Winsten 1944a: 494). There was even the sense that many reviewers feltthat the film had refreshed a tired series. While the New York Newspaper PMclaimed that Holmes’s ‘current antagonist, the Spider Woman . . . is for mymoney a much shiftier and certainly a much niftier trick than was Prof.Moriarity of other days’ (McManus 1944: 493), the New York Journal Ameri-can claimed: ‘Inasmuch as the current instalment of the master-sleuth serialis above the average in plausibility, suspense and interest and has been reallyquite well presented, it should do nothing to spoil your appetite for futurereleases’ (Blackford 1944: 493). If these women were not bored, self-centredhousewives like Phyllis in Double Indemnity, they are also far more activethan the classic femme fatale, plotting and executing their own schemes,rather than simply seducing others into acting for them.

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Universal even created a new horror series, based on the InnerSanctum novels and radio series, in which its first two entries both fea-tured evil woman. In Calling Doctor Death (1944), Lon Chaney is tor-mented by ‘a beautiful but unfaithful wife’ (A.W. 1944: 11) who ‘basks inthe comfort of his prestige and income’ (Thirer 1944: 469). When she isfound murdered he begins to suspects himself but the murderer turns outto be his ‘secretary-nurse’ who is ‘obviously in love with her employer’(Thirer 1944: 469). Although this might appear an exception to the rule,in which the ‘evil’ woman is a working woman, it is not her desire forindependence that motivates her but rather her desire to replace to theselfish wife. Similarly, the follow-up, Weird Woman (1944), stars Chaney asa brilliant young sociology professor who has just written ‘Superstition vs.Reason and Fact’, and ‘being one of the Reason-and-Fact boys himself, itwould never do for his wife to go around sticking pins into dolls represent-ing enemies’ (Winsten 1944b: 421–2). He therefore ‘forces his wife tothrow away her magic objects’ but, as soon as she has done so, ‘all hellbreaks loose’ and he becomes the victim of a witch from within his owncommunity, ‘an apparently sedate college wife’, who wants Chaney forherself (Crowther 1944b: 11).

The trend even spread to other genres, and Cobra Woman (1944) wasclaimed to combine ‘two formulas that have coined fortunes for Universal.Into the lush, tropical backgrounds where Maria Montez is accustomed todistort herself in eye-watering Technicolor, a definite note of horror isstrongly injected’ (Anon 1944: 4). The film therefore features Montez as‘two princesses, twins, one cruel and wicked, the other our heroine’(Creelman 1944: 370). While the good girl is the rightful queen of anexotic island, her position has been usurped by her evil twin, ‘now a highpriestess on Cobra Island, [who] rules her subjects through fear’(Creelman 1944: 370). While the newspapers found this film laughable, itwas directed by Robert Siodmak who would make a classier film aboutopposing twins two years later with The Dark Mirror in 1946, a trend thateven attracted the queen of the 1940s woman’s film, Bette Davis, whomade A Stolen Life in the same year.

Other studios also got in on the act, and 1944 also saw the release ofParamount’s ghost story, The Uninvited (1944), which not only made numer-ous references to Rebecca but also featured ‘two female ghosts who are stillwailing over a murder’ (Guernsey 1944a: 463). Furthermore, ‘one of theghosts was the mother of a girl in the village . . . and she is trying to protecther daughter against the other evil spirit’. Nor are things quite as they seem.While all concerned are led to believe that the young girl is the daughter ofMary Meredith and her artist husband, it eventually transpires that Mary isthe destructive ghost and that it is ‘a Spanish gypsy model named Carmel’who is the real mother and protector. In other words, the mistress of thehouse, Mary, turns out to be a cold and unmaternal figure with lesbian asso-ciations (Berenstein 1998), while the truly maternal figure is an outsider, aforeign girl who supported herself by working as an artist’s model.

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Columbia even tried to create its own female horror star with NinaFoch. In The Return of the Vampire (1944), she played the would-be daughter-in-law to ‘a female scientist, played by Freda Inescort, who foils’ BelaLugosi’s vampire, a confrontation that was seen as ‘a significant and patri-otic note in these days of man-power shortages’ (Guernsey 1944b: 479).However, later in the year, she appeared in a range of horror films includ-ing Soul of A Monster (1944) and Cry of the Werewolf (1944). The latter filmfeatured her as ‘Princess Celeste, a winsome gypsy lass, who sprouts fansand claws’ (Hudson 1944: 274). Although she is seen as the product ofthe matriarchal ‘Troiga gypsy tribe’, and pitted against another youngwoman, the reviews seemed a little bewildered by the mildness of thismonster: ‘As a matter of fact, Nina is not a particularly despicable were-wolf. She doesn’t particularly want to harm anyone until of Fritz Leiber,curator of the La Tour museum in New Orleans, learns that Maria LaTour, mother of Nina, had been a werewolf herself ’ (Winsten 1944d: 274).Again, the female monster has a female antagonist in the presence of ElsaChauvet, ‘Leiber’s secretary’, who along with Leiber’s son, ‘starts investi-gating’ the curator’s murder. Significantly, both monster and antagonistare as exotic and mysterious as one another, and although they are overtlysupposed to be competing over Bob, the curator’s son, they seem to have afascination with one another that has strongly lesbian connotations.

‘The Black Widow’: gender, fantasy and the transformation ofthe female monster cycleThese female monster movies continued into 1945 with Holmes encoun-tering more female threats in the form of The Woman in Green (1945) andUniversal completing its third in the Captive Wild Woman films, JungleCaptive (1945). Val Lewton also returned to the form with Isle of the Dead(1945), which was clearly intended as a response to the films initiated byCat People, a film that features the persecution of ‘a healthy youngwoman’, who is accused of being ‘an evil spirit taking lives so that she maylive and grow healthier’ (Hale 1945a: 222).

However, the cycle was becoming dominated by films that featuredmore contemporary setting. For example, The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry(1945) featured ‘Geraldine Fitzgerald as the beautiful and poisoned Lettie’(Creelman 1945c: 240), who is pitted against Deborah, played by EllaRaines, who had also played the female detective in Phantom Lady; spe-cialised in independent working women; and plays an young businesswoman with whom Lettie’s brother, Harry, falls in love. Like many other‘evil’ women, Lettie is not the independent working woman of the waryears, but rather a woman who is dependent on her brother both emo-tionally and financially: she ‘loves him obsessively and pretends illness tobind him to her’ (Winsten 1945a: 240). Indeed, she is a monstrouspassive aggressive who, when wrongfully accused of murder, willingly goes‘to the gallows just to make sure his conscience will never know peaceagain’ (McManus 1945b: 241).

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Alternatively, Hangover Square (1945) featured Linda Darnell ‘who defi-nitely deserves a hand for a good performance as a bad girl’ (Thirer1945a: 470). Darnell is even claimed to have been ‘recognized sinceSummer Storm as one of the screen’s most up-and-coming temptresses’(McManus 1945e: 471), who ‘contributes another of her vibrant lus-ciously sexy versions of a siren’ (Cook 1945a: 471), a role in which she is‘convincingly hateful’ (Guernsey 1945a: 471). Although hardly a figureof domestic femininity, Darnell’s character is also anything but active andindependent. On the contrary, she is a parasite, ‘a frivolous, fickle musichall girl’ (Thirer 1945a: 470) who makes the principle character, a com-poser, into her ‘passionate slave’ and ‘coaxes several themes out of him forsongs on which to build her career’ (McManus 1945e: 471).

However, of the most frequently cited examples of the type, Claire Trevor’srole as Velma in Murder, My Sweet (1945) was one of the few overtly referredto as a ‘femme fatale’ by reviewers at the time (Guernsey 1945b: 443). Eventhen, the term ‘femme fatale’ does not seem to have carried a great deal ofsignificance, unlike the references to her hair colour: she is not only ‘ascheming blonde femme fatale’, but also a ‘a platinum dame’ (McManus1945a: 443), a ‘malevolent blonde’ (T.M.P. 1945a: 16) and ‘a blonde secondwife of an aged millionaire’ (Thirer 1945b: 442). In other words, she is yetagain distinguished as a kept woman, a gold-digger who has married intowealth and power and manipulates others in order to protect her position.She is therefore a ‘calculatedly luscious siren’ (Cook 1945c: 442), who usesher sex appeal to control others and, if she is occasionally referred to as‘femme fatale’, it is this reference to her as a ‘siren’ that was a far morecommon terminology for many of the dangerous women of the period.

However, it is Leave Her to Heaven (1945) that was seen as ‘one of themost savage roles ever conceived’ (Barnes 1945a: 56), in which GeneTierney plays ‘a female monster’ (Hale 1945b: 56), whose ‘diabolicscheming’ and ‘vicious’ acts are the result of an pathological jealousy thatmeans she is unwilling ‘to share her husband’s love and affection withothers’. She is therefore claimed to be ‘rather like the black widow spider.Her love consumes its object’ (Creelman 1945b: 55). As the New YorkTimes puts it, she is ‘so jealous of her author-husband’s love that shepermits his adored brother to drown, kills her own unborn child andfinally destroys herself by trickery when she finds that her husband andher sister are in love’, carefully plotting to implicate them in her murder.In other words, again the deadly female is not an independent woman buta monster of ‘possessive love’ (Pelswick 1945: 56), a woman who isdestructively dependent on her husband, and on her role as his wife.

Furthermore, reviewers were quite clear that this was not a malefantasy but rather a female one: ‘The movie is made of the stuff women gofor – love, hate and sex’ (Hale 1945b: 56). Many of the papers even madeits femininity their key point of complaint. For example, the role wasclearly recognised as one in which Tierney was cast against type in anattempt to extend her range:

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It’s quite a departure in film characterization for Miss Tierney who has beenmore or less identified with wide-eyed ingénue roles, and here gets to everyopportunity to be a very beautiful, very evil young woman who gives audi-ences every chance to dislike her intensely at the same time that they admireher good looks.

(Pelswick 1945: 56)

However, while some praised her performance in the film, others foundher profoundly unconvincing as a bad girl. The New York Sun was pleasedto claim that she had ‘suddenly blossomed into an actress as well as abeauty’ (Creelman 1945b: 55), but others claimed that it was obvious thatshe and her co-star, Cornell Wilde had ‘bit off more than they could chewin the way of dramatics’ (McManus 1945d: 55). However, although thisreference includes Wilde in the criticism, most of the attacks are explicitlydirected at Tierney and presented her beauty as incompatible with herambitions to be taken seriously as an actress. As the New York Post sneered:‘Miss Tierney’s enamelled beauty lifts from her shoulders the burdensomenecessity of powerful acting’ (Winsten 1945b: 55). However, the New YorkTimes, which was never very flattering about Tierney, was even more dis-missive and complained about her ‘petulant performance’, which was sup-posed to be as ‘analytical as a piece of pin-up poster art’ and ‘strictly onedimensional, in the manner of a dot on an I’ (Crowther 1945: 15).

However, as the reference to her ‘enamelled beauty’ also makes clear,she is also associated with the more general criticisms of the film’s femi-ninity. If some reviewers had praised Tierney’s Laura (1944) through anassociation with her femininity, and had claimed that the film displayedrestraint, refinement and class, Leave her to Heaven was attacked for beingpretty, attractive and decorative, terms that were claimed to imply superfi-ciality. For example, the New York Times attacked the film as ‘a cheapfiction done up in Technicolor and expensive sets’ (Crowther 1945: 15),while the New York PM described the film as the ‘most pretentious and cer-tainly the most expensive of the Christmas film offerings’, and one thathad placed its story in an inappropriate ‘modern House & Gardens settings’(McManus 1945d: 55). It was therefore ‘a virtually unrivalled example ofhow Hollywood can squander an idea’. Just as Tierney’s ‘enamelledbeauty’ was claimed to make her incapable of expressing emotional depth,the whole production was accused of being glossy and insubstantial:

The settings, the costuming, the limpidness and grandeur of the exteriors inexquisite Technicolor, the expensive good taste of the interiors – a ranchhouse at Taos among awesome New Mexican mesas; a hunting lodge on abottomless Maine lake; a Bar Harbor cottage – all these are almost ideallyconceived.

Similarly, Time claimed that ‘the central idea might be plausible enough ina dramatically lighted black-&-white picture or in a radio show’, but in the

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rich glare of Technicolor, all its rental-library characteristics are doublyglaring’ (Anon 1946). As a result, the New York Herald Tribune attacked thefilm for being ‘ponderous’, ‘ornamental’ and ‘preposterous’ and claimedthat while it features ‘a florid Technicolor treatment and enough back-grounds to dress up a dozen pictures’, the effect is simply that ‘the bittercore of [its] tale of jealousy is just about smothered’ (Barnes 1945a: 55).

‘Wronged By Everyone’: the critical reception of Mildred PierceLeave Her to Heaven is therefore in direct contrast to one of the key classicsof noir, Mildred Pierce. If the former film was disparaged for its glossy, glam-orous production, the later was seen as a decidedly unglamorous image ofAmerica, which provoked very different reactions among reviewers. Whilethe New York Post claimed that it ‘injects a shot of gall into Hollywood’smilk-and-honeyed vision of Life in America’ (Winsten 1945c: 195), theNew York PM objected to ‘the ugly, rapacious slice of American life repre-sented in Mildred Pierce’ (McManus 1945c: 195). For the New York PM,it was ‘really unimportant’ whether or not ‘all this is well played anddirected’:

The question of import is: are these people us, in our own eyes; are they fit tobe us in the eyes of [the] world? Are they, for example, the American peoplewho rallied to perform the nation’s miracle of war production? Are theAmerican people who rose in their understanding and political strength toreaffirm Roosevelt and his world program in 1944?

In a pig’s eye they are!

In other words, the debate over the film was around its realism. While theNew York PM refused to accept its corrosive vision of America, the NewYork Post argued that the issue was whether it managed to ‘achieve thereality and penetrating observation which are the only worthwhilerewards to be gained from the contemplation of unpleasant humanfrailty’. As a result, while the New York Post finally argued that it ‘fails’ bythis criteria, and certainly when compared to Double Indemnity, which‘was a masterpiece [and] perfect in every respect’, others were more com-plementary: James Agee even went so far as to completely reject the NewYork PM’s verdict and declare: ‘As movies go, it is one of the few anywherenear honest ones, if that is of any importance’ (Agee 1945: 385).

However, despite suggestions to the contrary (Cook 1978), its centralcharacter, Mildred, is not a femme fatale in any sense of the term, andreviews from the period clearly saw her as the only positive figure withinthe ugly world of the film. As most critics observed, the film was populatedby characters that are neither ‘pleasant, nor lovable, nor in any wayadmirable’ (Creelman 1945a: 194) and ‘do not arouse much sympathy’(Winsten 1945c: 195). They therefore claimed that there was a ‘loath-some flavour’ to its ‘fiendishly selfish and cruel characters’ (Cook 1945b:194). However, whether critics loved or hated the film’s corrosive view of

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American life, they all agreed that Mildred was the one exception in thisregard: ‘She is a good-looking American mother, ambitious for her two girlchildren and not above any amount of hard work and enterprise to makethings come out right for them’ (McManus 1945c: 195). As a result,critics generally agreed that, for the filmmakers, ‘the most elevated personis considered to be Mildred’ (Farber 1945: 528), even if some critics weredubious about the film’s celebration of her. For example, Manny Farberclaimed that her virtues were only relative and that her distinction is thather ‘ignoble actions number only about a dozen’, while Agee claims thatan attempt is ‘made to sell Mildred as noble when she is merely idiotic orat best pathetic’ (Agee 1945: 385). However, she is far from being theproblem that needs to be resolved within the film, and most critics saw heras the narrative’s innocent and undeserving victim: ‘Her sordid reminis-cences show her as an unhappy, ambitious woman who is wronged byeveryone she loves: a philandering husband . . . a crooked businesspartner . . . an unscrupulous playboy . . . a predatory daughter’ (Anon1945). In short, her drama is one of ‘gallant suffering’ (T.M.P. 1945b: 12)and, as one critic puts it, ‘what happens to her in the greedy, predatorysocial jungle planted around her by James M. Cain shouldn’t happened toTokyo Rose’ (McManus 1945c: 195).

If the critics did not see her as the problem, they did not see her firsthusband as the solution and, as we have seen, they claimed that all the menthat she encounters (including her ‘philandering’ first husband) were pre-sented as weak, neurotic or complete ‘rats’, and that most of them wereexplicitly out to exploit Mildred. Her ‘husband walks out on her and thekids for a blonde, jaded gin rummy player’; his ‘ex-partner . . . a go-getterreal estate man with the unblushing attitudes of sharper, wolf, and pimp,tries many artifices to move in’; and her second husband is a ‘land-poorPasadena prodigal’ with ‘no visible means of support’, who uses his ‘socialposition for sex pleasures and pocket money’ (McManus 1945c: 195).

As a result, it is not Mildred but her ‘dreadful daughter’ (Creelman1945a: 195), Veda, who is the film’s female monster, ‘an invidious littlepoison flower who works an annulment racket on a rich youth of 17 andthen stops at nothing to try to steal her mother’s lover’ (McManus 1945c:195). Again, then, the female monster is not the independent workingwoman, but the kept woman: ‘a pampered, slimy little monster of coldlyruthless egotism’ who is parasitic on others (Cook 1945b: 194). WhileMildred ‘is willing to do anything – including murder – to provide prettythings for her selfish she-wolf of a daughter’ (Anon 1945), Vida uses hersexuality to control men and feed her ‘insatiable and cunning demands formore and more luxury’ (Cook 1945b: 194).

Certainly, there is the suggestion that Mildred has ‘spoiled andindulged’ her daughters (Creelman 1945a: 194), under the mistakenbelief that she can buy them happiness, and that a bit more disciplinemight have prevented Vida from going bad. As the New York Times put it,‘we couldn’t help feeling that if Mildred had put Veda over her knee twice

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a day at the age of fourteen she might have grown up rather differently’(T.M.P. 1945: 12), while another critic observed ‘when the story is com-plete the dominant moral is apt to persuade any conscientious parent inthe audience to go home and beat up his children, just in case’ (Winsten1945c: 195). Of course, both of these comments are made with a tonguefirmly in one cheek. But, even without this humour, Mildred’s indulgenceof Vida is hardly seen as making her a bad person, particularly when sheis compared to the other characters in the film. On the contrary, she isdescribed as ‘a doting mother’ (Barnes 1945b: 195), who ‘showers thebrat with kindness, suffers the humiliation of seeing Veda make love to theworthless stepfather and then, in a final burst of nobility – and/or motherlove – tries to cover up her daughter’s shame’ (T.M.P. 1945: 12).

As a result, while Manny Farber discusses the final images of the film, hereads them very differently from the account provided by Pam Cook (Cook1978). If Cook reads the end as a proof that Mildred has learned the error ofher ways and accepted a subservient position in relation to her first husband,Farber clearly identified Mildred as the film’s ‘most elevated person’ whosefirst husband ‘has left her to live with another woman’ (Farber 1945: 528).If he therefore agrees with Cook that the end sees Mildred ‘beginning a new,more beautiful existence with her first husband’, it is the husband notMildred who has learned the error of his ways: he ‘has just got work in anairplane factory and [his] mistress has married someone else’. Furthermore,like Pam Cook, Farber even notes the presence of the two ‘charwomen’ inthe final images of the film, but he does not read them as a commentaryupon the rightful position of women, but rather claims that they are‘arranged as though in a Millet painting’. The image is therefore associatedwith Millet’s ‘The Gleaners’, a painting that rejected artistic conventionsprivileging the depiction of dominant social groups and focused instead on agroup of women foraging for leftovers after the harvest. It is therefore apainting that re-evaluated the position of the working classes within art andpresented them, and their lowly labours, as noble and heroic.

ConclusionThe female monster of the 1940s not only emerged from a cycle of horrorproduction but also associated these figures with the domestic ‘slacker’rather than the independent working woman. If independent workingwomen did appear in these films they were usually presented as the femalemonster’s other, a positive figure of femininity. As this cycle gainedmomentum, there was then a shift from Gothic fantasy into more ‘realis-tic’ horror films, many of which are normally identified as film noir ratherthan horror today. However, despite their contemporary settings, thesefilms were still clearly identified as horror in the 1940s, and although thegenre is still largely seen as one that addresses a male spectator, many ofthese films were overtly associated with female audiences. To put itanother way, while the femme fatale is often supposed to speak to malefantasies (and fears), this research suggests that this figure, like the term

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film noir itself, operates as ‘a nostalgia for something that never existed’: itis ‘an idea we have projected onto the past’ that impedes rather thanassists an understanding that past.

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War II’, European Journal of American Culture 27: 2, pp. 133–149, doi:10.1386/ejac.27.2.133/1

Contributor detailsMark Jancovich is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of EastAnglia, UK. He is the author of several books: Horror (Batsford, 1992); The CulturalPolitics of the New Criticism (CUP, 1993); Rational Fears: American Horror in the1950s (MUP, 1996); and The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Con-sumption (with Lucy Faire and Sarah Stubbings, BFI, 2003). He is also the editorseveral collections: Approaches to Popular Film (with Joanne Hollows, MUP, 1995);The Film Studies Reader (with Joanne Hollows and Peter Hutchings, Arnold/OUP,2000); Horror, The Film Reader (Routledge, 2001); Quality Popular Television: Cult TV,the Industry and Fans (with James Lyons, BFI, 2003); Defining Cult Movies: The Cul-tural Politics of Oppositional Taste (with Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, Julian Stringer andAndrew Willis, MUP, 2003); Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader (with PaulGrainge and Sharon Monteith, EUP, 2006); and Film and Comic Books (with IanGordon and Matt McAllister, University Press of Mississippi 2007). He was also thefounder of Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies; and is series editor (with EricSchaefer) of the MUP book series, Inside Popular Film. He is currently researchingthe history of 1940s horror. Contact: School of Film and Television Studies,University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

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