'The Lady in the Lake' is a fictional novel written by Raymond Chandler. It is set in the 1940's and is about a private investigator, Phillip Marlowe. The novel has been made into a film noir adaptation directed by Robert Montgomery. The novel is about a wealthy businessman named Derace Kingsley, who hires Marlow (LA private detective) to find his wife who has mysteriously gone missing called Crystal Kingsley.
One of the main characters in the book named Mildred Haviland is a perfect example of a devious femme fatale. She is a murderer and takes the role of having three different identities in the novel (identity being a key theme). She is very manipulative (she marries a man named Bill Chess under the identity of being called Muriel and fakes her love and care to him), she is also cold hearted and charms her way through the story. What make Mildred Haviland such a devious and numb character is that she adopts having three personas and also is not scared to betray the ones 'close' to her, in a way betraying an individual is much worst than betraying a group because it causes much more personal harm.
An interesting post which I hope you'll develop. You can type "femme fatale" into Youtube and you may see how the convention of the bad girl/deviant female is represented in film nor.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to quote from the novel any specific examples of film noir, and/or description of classic femme fatale.
ReplyDeleteI suggest this post could be ongoing if you are still studying the nove.