BAD GIRLS GO EVERYWHERE


Lizabeth Scott

"It’s easy to recognize the Bad Girl. She’s usually a bottle blonde, stuffed into a tight sweater that outlines her oddly conical breasts. Her mouth is wide, painted and clamped on a cigarette. Her eyes burn a little too brightly, and her legs, planted in a pair of high-rise pumps, go on forever.


Janis Carter

This exotic specimen began appearing in American movies around 1944, when one of her first interpreters was Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, from the James M. Cain novel. An American variation on the femme fatale of the 19th-century romantics, she was not the figure of mystery and dark allure that her European predecessors were, but a more carnal, blatantly sexual and self-interested creature. She was more fond of chewing gum than smoking opium, less concerned with luring men to their metaphysical doom than cleaning out their bank accounts and moving on to the next sucker. (...) During the war years women had gained a measure of autonomy as factory workers and office clerks, taking over for men absent at the front. In peacetime, though, these emancipated women came to be seen as a threat, holding jobs that now needed to be handed over to returning vets. Those who did not retreat quietly to the kitchens of the new suburbia were duly demonized as domineering monsters in the popular culture, and the Bad Girl, riding a wave of notoriety, remained a prime object of fear and desire well into the 1950s. This week Sony is releasing Bad Girls of Film Noir, a two-volume collection that contains eight little-known titles from the Columbia Pictures archive. As it turns out, not all of the girls in this set are bad, and not all the films noir. But given the barriers to bringing older films to market at a time when DVD sales are diminishing, it would be churlish to complain. (...)" (daqui)

(2010)