Having put the adult back into adultery, they have made the most provocative films about two men and a femme fatale since "Jules and Jim," but have they given us more grown-up realism than we can bear?
The film combined a modern sensibility with a vintage-style story about a scheming femme fatale, and it brought the term neo-noir into the critical lexicon.
On its surface the album's concept does not seem exactly Monsters of Rock material: an adaptation of two plays by the proto-Expressionist writer Frank Wedekind (who also wrote "Spring Awakening") about a serial femme fatale who becomes a prostitute and is killed by Jack the Ripper.
The French word was introduced into the English vocabulary in the mid-19th century, possibly by William Makepeace Thackeray's massive novel about a classic femme fatale who poses, when convenient, as an ingénue, Vanity Fair.
She is not a femme fatale about to steal your man (The Robber Bride), she does not have an eating disorder (The Edible Woman), and she is not a woman whose lover committed suicide (Life Before Man), nor a woman searching for her lost father (Surfacing).
"Lulu," Berg's final opera, is in part about art: It features an artist who falls in love with a femme fatale after painting her portrait.
Pichel returned to film noir wth Quicksand (1950), about an auto mechanic (Mickey Rooney) who falls under the spell of a femme fatale (Jeanne Cagney).
