Lady Macbeth - The First Femme Fatale

The Cambridge dictionary defines femme fatale as  a woman who is very attractive in a mysterious way, usually leading men into danger or causing their destruction.

My interest in film noir has allowed me to view some of the most infamous femme fatales in American cinema specifically films from the 1940s.

Phyllis Dietrichson, portrayed by Barbara Stanwick in Double Indemnity (1944) entices insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) to kill her husband for the insurance money.

Double Indemnity is similar to The Postman Always Rings Twice (both are stories written by James M. Cain), but Barbara Stanwick's character comes off more conniving and dangerous than Cora Smith portrayed by Lana Turner.

Other notable femme fatales are Jane Greer as Kathie in Out of the Past (1947), Jane Palmer portrayed by Lizabeth Scott in Too Late For Tears (1949), and Kitty March played by Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1945).

Some of these notorious woman make me think of one of the most famous femme fatale from fiction, Lady Macbeth in William Shakespeare's great play Macbeth.

For those of you who do not know, Lady Macbeth was the woman who urged her husband to kill the King of Scotland so Macbeth could become king.

After reading a letter from her husband in which he states that his kingship was prophesied, Lady Macbeth invokes the spirits to remove her feminine humanity.

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief!
                                   Act I, scene V

On her husband's return Macbeth informs his wife that King Duncan will stay with them this night but the king plans to take his leave tomorrow, to which Lady Macbeth says:

O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!

She then tells her husband to disguise all his evil intent.

bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,But be the serpent under't. 

Later, when Macbeth appears to waver over killing Duncan, Lady Macbeth chides her husband's weakness and questions his manhood.

Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,

But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail.
                                 Act I, scene VII



My detective novel, Give Me The Daggers is based on Shakespeare's play. In it Lady Macbeth is the dangerously alluring femme fatale who seduces my protagonist the Thane of Lennox when she believes the thane is getting to close to the truth regarding Duncan's murder.

Lady Macbeth smiled readily during dinner. She smiled when she was not complimenting Drummond or telling him how lonely she was since the king left on his pilgrimage. It was a smooth, seamless seduction. Drummond never saw it coming but it struck him squarely between the eyes. He fell smitten, totally captivated by her beauty and grace. Despite being older than Drummond, the queen was quite lovely and the Thane of Lennox was physically attracted to her. She was also charming and elegant, and possessed a regalness born not of her high station but of something within herself.

After dinner she suggested they take a walk upon the castle walls. It was a calm, moonlit night. A myriad of stars pocked the purple canopy overhead. A gentle night breeze brought the scent of henbane and the odor reminded Gowan of death. He did not think long on this, however. Gowan stared at Gruoch and thought she looked even more enchanting in the moonlight. She stood close, facing him. Her palms pressed against his chest. He looked down at her face. It was tilted up to his, her lips open and inviting. Some impulse beyond himself made him bend down and kiss those lips. Gruoch kissed him back and soon they were a tangle in each other’s arms. Drummond did even remember how they got from atop the castle to the queen’s room.

Lady Macbeth is the ultimate femme fatale who induces her husband on a road not only to his destruction, but to her's as well.


Stephen Gaspar's books can be found on Amazon 

Raymond Chandler - The Lady in the Lake

Raymond Chandler's novel The Lady in the Lake (1943) was pieced together from three of Chandler's earlier short stories; Bay City Blues (1938), The Lady in the Lake (1939), and No Crime in the Mountains (1941). The short stories feature Chandler's Philip Marlowe prototype John Dalmas and John Evans.

I liked all three short stories, but particularly enjoyed Bay City Blues. There is a scene in Bay City Blues that does not appear in the Lady in the Lake novel (but Chandler would rework some of it for his novel The High Window). Dalmas walks into a club.

The lobby -they called it a foyer- looked like an MGM set for a night club in the Broadway Melody of 1980.... 
The ceiling had stars in it and they twinkled. Beside the bar entrance, which was dark and vaguely purple, like a half-remembered nightmare, there was a huge round mirror set back in a white tunnel with an Egyptian headdress over the top of it. In front of this a lady in green was preening her metallic blond hair. Her evening gown was cut so low at the back that she was wearing a black beauty patch on her lumbar muscle, about an inch below where her pants would have been, if she had been wearing any pants.
A cigarette girl with a tray the size of a five-pound candy box came down the gangway. She wore feathers in her hair, enough clothes to hide behind a three-cent stamp, and one of her long, beautiful, naked legs was gilded and the other was silvered. She had the cold, disdainful expression of a dame who is dated so far ahead that she would have to think twice before accepting a knockdown to a maharajab with a basket of rubies under his arm. 

In The High Window, Chandler changed this last line to read, She had the utterly disdainful expression of a dame who makes her dates by long distance.



 Bay City Blues has plenty of hardboiled characters and women with wicked mouths. In the nightclub, Dalmas spots the woman he is looking for.

The girl at the table next to me had red hair too. It was parted in the middle and strained back as if she hated it. She had large, dark, hungry eyes, awkward features and no make-up except a mouth that glared like a neon sign. Her street suit had too-wide shoulders, too-flaring lapels. An orange under sweater snuggled her neck and there was a black and-orange quill in her Robin Hood hat, crooked on the back of her head. She smiled at me and her teeth were as thin and sharp as a pauper's Christmas. I didn't smile back.

She emptied her glass and rattled it on the tabletop. A waiter in a neat mess jacket slipped out of nowhere and stood in front of me.

"Scotch and soda," the girl snapped. She had a hard, angular voice with a liquor slur in it.

The waiter looked at her, barely moved his chin and looked back at me. I said: "Bacardi and grenadine."

He went away. The girl said: "That'll make you sicky, big boy."

I didn't look at her. "So you don't want to play," she said loosely. I lit a cigarette and blew a ring in the soft purplish air. "Go chase yourself," the girl said. "I could pick up a dozen gorillas like you on every block on Hollywood Boulevard. Hollywood Boulevard, my foot. A lot of bit players out of work and fish-faced blondes trying to shake a hangover out of their teeth."

"Who said anything about Hollywood Boulevard?" I asked.

"You did. Nobody but a guy from Hollywood Boulevard wouldn't talk back to a girl that insulted him civilly."

A man and a girl at a nearby table turned their heads and stared. The man gave me a short, sympathetic grin. "That goes for you, too," the girl said to him.

"You didn't insult me yet," he said.

"Nature beat me to it, handsome."

The waiter came back with the drinks. He gave me mine first. The girl said loudly: "I guess you're not used to waiting on ladies."

The waiter gave her her Scotch and soda. "I beg your pardon, madam," he said in an icy tone.

"Sure. Come around sometime and I'll give you a manicure, if I can borrow a hoe. Boy friend's paying the ticket on this."

None of this makes it into the novel Lady in the Lake, so you have to read the short story to get it. 

One character that makes it into two of the short stories and the novel is the smalltown sheriff. His description and dialogue are almost word for word. This shows that Chandler was sometimes  either lazy in his writing or when he liked something he stayed with it.

One thing you can be sure of when you read Raymond Chandler is that his detective will get knocked out. They must have suffered multiple concussions. One of my favorite knock-out lines is from Farewell My Lovely (1940). Marlowe narrates; A pool of darkness opened at my feet and was far, far deeper than the blackest night. I dived into it. It had no bottom.

In Bay City Blues, Dalmas gets sapped. Then a naval gun went of in my ear and my head was a large pink firework exploding into the vault of the sky and scattering and falling slow and pale, and then dark into the waves. Blackness ate me up. 

In No Crime in the Mountains, detective John Evans describes his experience. My head came off and went half-way across the lake and did a boomerang turn and came back and slammed on top of my spine with a sickening jar. Somehow on the way it got a mouthful of pine needles.
A short time later Evans gets cold-cocked again. I spun off into the distance, trailing flashes of lightning, and did a nose dive out into space. A couple of thousand years passed. Then I stopped a planet with my back ... .

I like the following exchange between Dalmas and a tough cop in Bay City Blues. It dispels the image of the tough-guy private eye.  

De Spain said: "If this guy you call Big Chin is Moss Lorenz, I'll know him. We might get in. Or maybe we walk ourselves into some hot lead."

"Just like the coppers do on the radio," I said.

"You scared?"

"Me?" I said. "Sure I'm scared." 

The Lady in the Lake short story is very much like the novel. though the solution is not the same. 

The novel has some great quotes: The self-operating elevator was carpeted in red plush. It had an elderly perfume in it, like three widows drinking tea.

However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.

 But my favorite from the novel is: "I'm all done with hating you," I said. "It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long."

There is film version of The Lady in the Lake in 1947 starring and directed by Robert Montgomery. The movie is not exceptional save for the fact that is was filmed from the viewpoint of the central character.