Scarlet Street (1945)

What makes a woman a femme fatale--or more specifically what makes Kitty March a femme fatale? The word fatal implies that death is involved. But the evil female does not directly kill the man. Her evil is more sinister than that. She leaves Chris Cross tormented and haunted by the climactic murder. Why is he so tortured by this event? Because it is so out of the ordinary for his character.  Femme fatales are so dangerous because they drive you to do things you otherwise would not do. It is not simply a matter of seducing you to get what they want but about fundamentally changing the man. I think this is what makes Kitty a crueler femme fatale than Phyllis Dietrichson from Double Indemnity and it is what makes the ending all the more devastating. Chris is the loyal, simple and rather plain company man. He is vulnerable, in a loveless marriage and has lost his youth (and perhaps missed out on his youth). He is perfectly ordinary with a safe and respectable job and a normal hobby. But Kitty takes this man and changes him. You get the sense that it is not all her doing at first, because Johnny really pushes her to go through with the plan. After all, the plot is set off by a meeting in a bar in which both sides wildly (and almost implausibly) misunderstand each other. But in the murder scene in which she maniacally laughs, you see her true colors.

Compare to Neff in Double Indemnity. He is reluctant to take part in murder at first, but he soon devises his own intricate plan and he gets really into it early on in the movie. It does not seem like Phyllis created evil in him, rather she awakened a dormant evil. But good old reliable Chris would never kill--moreover, he would never steal from his employer who has trusted him for decades.  And I think this is reinforced when he almost takes money from the safe the first time, but then he decides against it. At this point, he still had a grasp on his true self.

The Johnny-Kitty dynamic is interesting too. Dan Duryea plans a devilis bad guy. And Kitty acts more naturally when she is with Johnny. But when she is with Chris, she is acting. She over exaggerates her speech and her motions. Joan Bennett is acting as a woman who is acting. And though that is obvious to the viewer, Chris is blinded by her appeal. And though Johnny is the source of the evil, Kitty is the face of the evil and she is the most sinister because it is she who manipulates Chris into losing his former good-natured self.