Eddie Muller’s Dangerous ‘Dames’

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TCM host Eddie Muller has become the face of film noir in the 21st century. His Film Noir Foundation preserves and restores movies in danger of being lost, and his weekly “Noir Alley” gig on TCM plays its part in presenting the cinematic shadow side of the American Dream to new audiences.

Muller has written several books on the subject, including his 2001 Dark City Dames, newly reissued in a revised, expanded edition. His subjects are the femmes fatale that prowled the noir genre; they were usually agents of destruction, but they had agency. As Muller writes, they helped put a modern spin “on the ancient male-created myth of female power.” “Male-created” or not, those dames were powerful.

Dark City Dames focuses on 16 actresses who played femmes fatales in the 1940s and ‘50s. Several, such as Rhonda Fleming, are better known for what they did later in their careers. But before such Technicolor pageants as Serpent of the Nile (1953), Fleming was introduced in small roles for Spellbound (1945) and Out of the Past (1947) and a star turn in Cry Danger (1951). Joan Bennett, the dangerous woman of Scarlet Street (1945), became a real-life femme fatale when her producer husband, Walter Wanger, caught wind of her affair with her agent, ambushing them with a gun in a Beverly Hills car park. All of them survived—as did the Bennett-Wanger marriage for another 14 years.

Much of Dark City Dames is drawn from Muller’s interviews with the stars, and most spoke freely, happy to recount their memories of the old Hollywood studio system, a labyrinth as dangerously complicated as the plot twists of a good noir. Billionaire Howard Hughes surfaces repeatedly as a sinister figure too ambiguous to be dismissed as simply a villain. Muller’s occasionally hardboiled prose is apt. Of the notoriously stingy Audrey Totter, he writes, “Audrey could pinch a penny until it squealed.”

Dark City Dames: The Women who Defined Film Noir (Revised and Expanded Edition) is published by TCM/Running Press.