Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Invention and Deconstruction of the Femme Fatale in ‘Double Indemnity’ (1944) and ‘Chinatown’ (1974) [Retrospective]

I. My Sister/My Daughter

When I reflect on the films that truly shaped my taste, it’s impossible not to think of Double Indemnity and Chinatown. The smallest details still stand out in my mind from my earliest viewings: Barbara Stanwyck and Faye Dunaway in their black birdcage veils (mourning looked good on them), wanting to take care of Jake and his sliced-up nose, wishing Walter would just stop calling Phyllis, “baby.” I watched these movies over and over and studied them intently because I loved the confluence of beauty and menace in each and how it made me feel. I see them as sister films in many ways, but perhaps more specifically as a mother and daughter, with one film creating the blueprint and the other a clear descendant making its own modern mark. They’re both set in late 1930s Los Angeles as the city experienced a surge in crime and disquiet in a post-Depression world. They’re made by European directors who fled their home countries for America to escape the Nazis. Both feature a man just trying to do his job before getting swept up into a whirlwind of corruption alongside a beautiful, enigmatic woman. Just one year separates the stories told in Billy Wilder’s note-perfect noir, Double Indemnity, and Roman Polanski’s bleak neo-noir, Chinatown, but their respective release dates crystallize anxieties that make the genre the perfect template for filmmakers in any era and even richer viewing experiences decades later.

As Double Indemnity hit cinemas in 1944, film noir didn’t even have a name yet and existed as a new interpretation of and response to German Expressionism. Wilder created Double Indemnity before the movement was fully realized, but the genre conventions were already there–dark shadows, relentless smoking, urban unrest. Yet of all the tropes to emerge, one struck a powerful chord above all the rest: the duplicitous woman. In 1944, women had an entirely different standing in the workplace than in the late 1930s. With the men away at war, the economy depended on women entering the workforce, and as the men began to return home, they feared that their usual standing as breadwinner and sole provider would be lost. A woman threatening their masculinity and livelihood? A wife who was happily an interrupter of the status quo? This newfound stress over the social hierarchy was fertile ground for Double Indemnity’s Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), a woman who, above all else, desired her freedom. Thirty years after Double Indemnity made its mark on cinema history, Polanski introduced a new kind of L.A. noir, Chinatown, which brilliantly played with genre convention and audience expectation only to upend it all. In 1974, Los Angeles wasn’t the dreamy, “free love” haven that its residents celebrated in the decade prior, and no one understood this seismic shift more than Polanski, whose wife, Sharon Tate, with her long blonde hair, sweet disposition, and flock of friends, was California personified. When Sharon was murdered by the Manson family in August of 1969, everything changed; that idyllic era had come to an end, and no one was safe. With pessimism and fatalism resurrected from the city’s underbelly, it was time for a neo-noir that accessed the public’s fear in the present as connected to the past. As a film, Chinatown is as gorgeous and clever as a femme fatale, but Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) is emblematic and far from an archetype. Like Dietrichson, she simply desires her freedom, but in her case, the circumstances are far more sinister. 

In Double Indemnity and Chinatown, the women hold the keys to unlocking each film’s staying power decades later. Both characters and the responses they elicit tap into something more profound about society’s shifting, ever-evolving attitudes toward women. Stanwyck’s sexy, wicked Phyllis Dietrichson became the Platonic ideal of the Hollywood femme fatale, while Dunaway’s vulnerable, fragile Evelyn Mulwray turned it inside out. 

II. That Dame Upstairs

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. I had recently turned ten, and that meant gaining privileged access to the film section at my local library. I could finally check out movies and the Old Hollywood bug kicked in. There was just something about the glamour of it all—the way they spoke in those Transatlantic accents and wore sequins and furs at all hours of the day. Everything was heightened and dramatic, but Stanwyck was different. I wasn’t a sophisticated enough filmgoer to articulate it yet, but I was locked into her fearlessness, physicality, and more modern approach to acting than some of her contemporaries. Her risks as an actress separated (and elevated) her from her peers. Like Fred McMurray’s Walter Neff, I was in complete awe of her and her power as Phyllis Dietrichson. She was stunning, knew what she wanted, and knew how to convince a man that it was all his idea. I wanted to be just like her when I grew up. 

Now, that might sound a little alarming when you consider the premise of Double Indemnity. Insurance salesman Walter Neff meets Phyllis Dietrichson one afternoon when he knocks on the door, hoping to sell an insurance policy to her husband. Soon enough, Phyllis regales Walter with details of her lifeless marriage and her desire to get out from under the thumb of her controlling drip of a husband. Phyllis pushes the buttons on this desire and Walter runs with it, interpreting it solely as lust and not as her want to secure the insurance money and be free of the man she married and her new step-daughter Lola (Jean Heather). Walter devises an elaborate murder plot with the double indemnity clause in mind, but once he and Phyllis pull it off flawlessly, everything begins to fall apart. Dozens of filmmakers have tried to make their own version of Double Indemnity, but this film endures as the gold standard eighty years later, primarily because of Wilder and Stanwyck’s audacious choices for Phyllis as a character.

When Walter first meets Phyllis, Wilder immediately alerts us of the shifting power dynamic at play. In a film that opens entirely in darkness and shadow on Walter, Phyllis’ introduction is as a literal bright spot with her blonde hair (an iconic wig) and white towel (in 1944!) blinding the lens from the landing at the top of the stairs. She’s just come in from a sunbath. It recalls Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene, but this time with rotten adults tempting a doomed romance instead of teenaged star-crossed lovers. Wilder composes the scene with a combination of high- and low-angle shots, which at first suggest shifting power between the two but ultimately settle on Phyllis having the clear upper hand. It’s a brilliant way to indicate just how much of a cad Walter is and how he’ll continue to miss that she’s ten steps ahead of him. When she comes down the stairs, he fixates on the golden glimmer of her “honey of an anklet,” a detail he manages to bring up four times within the next few minutes. Phyllis barely acknowledges his comments as a look of ennui falls over her face before she subtly introduces the idea of accident insurance. If you didn’t think she was in control before, you know now. While men at the time, preoccupied with anxiety about their place in the Postwar world, may have felt sorry for a poor sucker like Walter who was just conned from the beginning by a seductress like Phyllis, I’d be surprised if women felt the same way. As a character, Phyllis interrogates our perceived understanding of femininity (especially in the ‘40s) and encourages a certain boldness absent from traditional depictions of wives and mothers. She doesn’t have the stiff upper lip of wartime resolve or the demure mannerisms of a homemaking housewife. She greets a stranger while wearing a towel, gets annoyed with customers interrupting her at the grocery store, and doesn’t really seem to like anyone in her orbit other than herself. She has (implied) sex with a man she just met late one night at his apartment. She’s a modern woman who knows the power of her sexuality and how to wield it to attempt to achieve a different kind of life, one unrestrained by societal expectations. She makes us believe in endless possibilities for her character, something that, even after eighty years, feels revelatory.

Stanwyck creates a complex, tricky portrait, forcing the audience, possibly for the first time, to consider why a woman might consider resorting to violence against her husband, something that would become a core tenet of film noir. Except in Double Indemnity, Stanwyck’s interpretation is far from just a flat, villainous temptress; she unearths Phyllis’ complicated inner life, refusing to paint the character in broad, dramatic strokes and knowing how to illuminate Walter’s fears and assumptions about women. First, she introduces the accident insurance policy as a seemingly genuine concern, telling Walter that she worries about her husband’s safety while he works down in the oil fields. The only thing Walter hears is that she needs to be protected. Then, she muses about her husband’s accidental death via carbon monoxide poisoning, not blinking once throughout the scene, beginning to expose her cold little heart. She’s thought about her husband’s death for a while, and yet she still convinces Walter to invent and execute. “It’ll be on the train, the way you want it,” she purrs, reminding him that he’s on the hook. When it’s time to kill, Phyllis honks three times, and we hear her husband struggle when Walter strangles him, as Wilder keeps the camera on Stanwyck in close-up. She braces herself but is never afraid. Her bright eyes focus intently ahead with a glimmer of wickedness and hope as if she’s almost on the other side. It’s my favorite piece of acting in her entire career, save maybe her weepy final scene in Stella Dallas.  

Walter, blinded by his lust and convinced that he’s the one to save the damsel in distress, has no idea who he’s up against. “I’ve got good eyesight,” he reminds her before sharing in voiceover that he “let her have it straight between the eyes.” In film noir, the eye is an ever-important detail, often symbolizing the truth or a character’s ability to see what’s right in front of them. Conventionally, this establishes Walter as the ultimate truth-teller, a good man who slipped up and needs to confess. By lacing Walter’s present-day voiceover confessing to the murder through the narrative, we’re meant to trust him, knowing that while we’re about to learn the dark details of his past, he had an awakening and feels badly for what he has done. When Phyllis’ step-daughter Lola, with her sweet voice and contrasting purity, tells Walter that she believes Phyllis killed her mother before marrying her father, he’s suddenly not just the victim of everyday lust but of the whims and wiles of a serial killer. Phyllis Dietrichson is a woman to be feared. 

III. A Flaw in the Iris

Before I had seen any of her films, I learned of the legend who is Faye Dunaway from a photograph. As a kid who was getting into Oscar history thanks to her movie history-obsessed father, I needed to know everything, starting with the actresses. I saw a picture of Faye Dunaway sitting poolside in a long champagne-gold wrap dress and spiky heels with her Oscar on the table and newspapers announcing her Best Actress win at her feet. Who was this insanely cool, glamorous woman? I needed to find out. Naturally, I started my Dunaway dive with Network, where Dunaway’s Diana Christensen attacked her work and didn’t apologize, all while wearing perfect ‘70s ensembles. I was obsessed. When I watched Chinatown, I was shocked that she could portray such thorny, wildly different women in two of Hollywood’s signature films of the ‘70s just two years apart. My early impression of her was so connected to her boldest characters and the outlandish stories of her real-life relationships that her flawless embodiment of Evelyn Mulwray’s birdlike fragility came as somewhat of a shock. Fifty years later, Chinatown endures because of how smartly it uses the framework and period details of film noir to disarm and throttle the viewer into the New Hollywood. Understanding Evelyn Mulwray and the complexity of Dunaway’s performance is the linchpin to its legacy. 

In Chinatown, a woman who calls herself Evelyn Mulwray hires private investigator J.J. “Jake” Gittes (Jack Nicholson) when she suspects her husband, Hollis Mulwray, is having an affair. Hollis is the Chief Engineer of the Department of Water and Power and is embroiled in a political scuffle, which intrigues Jake and pushes him to take the case. As Jake begins to investigate, he’s thrown for a loop when a beautiful woman he’s never met arrives at his office, introduces herself as Evelyn Mulwray, and tells him to drop the case, or she’ll sue him. Jake stops by her estate to press her about the supposed affair, and she drops the case. But when Hollis’ body is found in the reservoir, Evelyn and Jake are forced into each other’s orbit again. Was this a suicide or a murder? Was Evelyn involved? Who was impersonating Evelyn, and why? Jake is convinced of foul play and is determined to prove that Hollis’ death was a homicide as he slowly uncovers the city’s (and Evelyn’s) darkest personal and systemic secrets. 

Unlike Double Indemnity and more traditional examples of film noir, Chinatown doesn’t wait until the film’s climax to reveal its first bit of deception and instead does so within the first few minutes of its runtime. When we first meet the true Evelyn Mulwray, she’s waiting in the background at Jake’s office, just over his shoulder. He’s in the middle of telling a racist joke to his colleagues, who attempt to stop him before he embarrasses himself in front of the beauty behind him. She looks on at him and waits patiently, her sharp cheekbones and perfectly drawn red lips striking and still like a doll’s. She’s so beautiful that it feels literally impossible to imagine Hollis Mulwray with his little round wire-rimmed glasses having an affair with another woman. When Jake finally stops to notice her, he’s like a dog caught with his tail between his legs, and when she reveals that she’s the real Evelyn Mulwray, not some garish, fur-clad imitation, he really doesn’t know what to do. She has the upper hand, and because another woman has already tricked Jake, he really doesn’t have a choice but to trust Evelyn, and neither do we. The fake Evelyn, a woman named Ida Sessions, is the film’s first clear example of a duplicitous woman and a mystery that Jake can solve later. Something is amiss, but there is no reason to suspect that Evelyn is hiding something. The way Dunaway introduces Evelyn as an unbreakable, unknowable woman is the perfect intriguing foundation for the character. She isn’t trying to seduce Jake, and she doesn’t want anything from him other than to be left alone. It’s the first indication that it would be unwise to classify Evelyn as a classic femme fatale beat for beat, but that’s especially tempting when Hollis winds up dead in the reservoir, and Evelyn may have a motive to orchestrate his murder. Polanski knows what we’re thinking based on the films we’ve seen before, and Dunaway dares us to believe that we know this character and her desires. 

As Jake gets deeper into the case, he ropes Evelyn in and her porcelain, icy exterior begins to crack, slowly revealing a hidden pain. Jake is so laser-focused on discovering the political machinations at play in the city’s Water Department that he doesn’t pick up on the more elusive personal details Evelyn tempts him to uncover. Her life is intertwined with both Hollis’ death and California’s water supply, but Jake is only really able to interpret her participation alongside him more broadly as a lonely, grieving widow who needs him. Dunaway builds on the foundation she laid in her first scene by incorporating small pauses and double-backs in her line delivery. She has a secret, but it’s not one she wields powerfully. In an intimate moment before Jake and Evelyn sleep together, he notices a spot in her eye, “a flaw in the iris,” as she describes. Polanski’s use of the eye in the film is far more overt than Wilder’s but also more critical to Chinatown’s lessons about attention, assumptions, and uncovering the truth. This specific detail acts as a sort of birthmark, a tainted spot given to Evelyn by her father that obscures the light, further indicating the darkness she’s witnessed.

As Jake pushes on, he uncovers a plethora of details that connect Hollis to Evelyn’s father, Noah Cross (a terrifying John Huston). When Jake mentions to Evelyn that he spoke with her father, she reveals as subtly as she hides. It’s a masterclass from Dunaway, as she first says, “It has to do with my father,” with a touch of pain in her voice. When Jake replies, “I know,” her response of, “You do?” contains multitudes for the character. Here, Dunaway delicately displays Evelyn’s fear of her father and of Jake knowing the truth, gently exposing her painful, tangled interior life. Evelyn knows more than Jake, but my response to this scene is entirely different than when I know that Phyllis is several steps ahead of Walter in Double Indemnity. When I watch classic film noir, I often catch myself smirking at the dark playfulness of the femme fatale and her secrets, which exist so she can continue to outsmart the foolish man blinded by his lust for her. In Chinatown, I just find myself wishing that Evelyn had no secrets to keep. 

When Jake believes he’s about to catch Evelyn punishing the woman Hollis was having an affair with, he stumbles upon an evil secret. Evelyn has been deceitful, but the lie she’s been withholding is far different than a murderous past. When Jake asks Evelyn who she’s hiding in one of the most famous moments in the film, she tries to explain as he slaps her: “She’s my sister…she’s my daughter…my sister, my daughter…she’s my sister and my daughter.” Suddenly, the interest in Hollis’ affair falls away, and Jake realizes the true horror behind Evelyn’s deception. Evelyn is a victim of rape and incest at the hands of her father. Like Phyllis Dietrichson, she desperately needs her freedom, but sadly, she isn’t bursting at the seams with the same sense of possibility. The feeling that she can achieve a better life outside the constraints of the man she’s tied to is absent. Her circumstances are too dark and too connected to larger political power structures that the men in control, namely her father, have upheld for decades. For a moment, Polanski tricks us once again by introducing a small window of Evelyn’s independence as she packs up and gets in the car with a glimmer of hope in her eyes. But that sense of possibility is fleeting. 

In Michael Eaton’s book, BFI Classics: Chinatown, screenwriter Robert Towne describes the film’s climactic reveal: “But stories, of course, save the most significant revelation until last. Maybe it’s because America is a Puritanical country; I felt that the way to drive home the outrage about water and power was to cap it with incest. The rape of the land is not simply mirrored by, it is overtaken by the rape of the daughter.” As a character, Evelyn deconstructs the idea of a femme fatale as a woman emblematic of the violence of the genre, greater American greed, and the destruction of the environment. Fifty years later, the film’s most painful revelation is still all too relevant. Evelyn Mulwray is a woman to be saved, but it may be too late. 

IV. I Didn’t Get the Money and I Didn’t Get the Woman

No matter how many times I’ve seen Double Indemnity and Chinatown, I’m never ready for each woman’s inevitable demise. In film noir, the duplicitous, deceiving blonde has to die, but how the two films execute their respective endings speaks more broadly to the cultural mood at the time of release. 

In Double Indemnity, the Production Code worked in tandem with the conventions of classic film noir, ensuring that goodness prevailed and evil was revealed and punished. At the end of the film, in one of the few moments where we see Phyllis alone without Walter, she hides a gun under the cushion of the chair she once sat in to seduce him. In a striking juxtaposition to her first scene in the film, Phyllis is shrouded entirely in darkness as Walter arrives. It’s an obvious visual metaphor, but it also reveals her true nature in Walter’s eyes and speaks to men’s fear of women’s desire as if to say, “Don’t be fooled by the beautiful woman glowing at the top of the stairs.” She shoots and misses, but Walter successfully returns the favor. He’s ruined, forced to confess to preserve some semblance of moral goodness instead of running off with the wicked woman he once desired. He didn’t get the money, and he didn’t get the woman.     

Contrary to more traditional examples of film noir, the evil of Chinatown exists without shadow and lurks in the blinding Los Angeles sunlight. That is, until the nighttime conclusion in the streets of Chinatown. In Chinatown, the forces are far more pernicious than the death of one man, and the film’s ending reflects that in brutal detail. Evelyn’s death is yet another twist on the convention of the femme fatale. She lies, but the truth she finally tells only reveals her goodness and victimhood, not her cruelty. So, why must she die and be punished? Here, the inevitability feels harsher, darker. Jake can’t help but try to save her; despite various warnings not to put his nose in the situation, he does anyway, only to realize he can’t compete with Noah Cross’ evil. As Evelyn holds a gun up just as Phyllis did, she wails, “He owns the police!” This line about her father feels all the more prescient when viewing the film today. In Sam Wasson’s book The Big Goodbye, Towne questions whether or not Polanski’s grief over the loss of Sharon “clarified or clouded his judgment.” An alternate ending to Chinatown wouldn’t have worked in the tradition of film noir, nor would it have given the film its legacy as the perfect embodiment of New Hollywood filmmaking. No one could save her. Grief clarified everything.   

When Phyllis and Evelyn die, two visual parallels mark them as sister characters one last time. At the beginning of Double Indemnity, Walter is obsessed with Phyllis’ gold anklet as she descends the staircase, asking about it relentlessly. After Walter shoots Phyllis and her body lies on the couch, the camera catches a single spot of light in the darkness: the glint of her anklet. What was once alluring to Walter persists as a reminder of his lust, even in death. In Chinatown, that detail of the flaw in Evelyn’s iris pulls Jake in; despite its darkness, it’s a beauty mark to him. The last image of Evelyn in the film is of her slumped over the steering wheel of her getaway car with that beautiful eye shot out. She and Jake are rendered powerless against larger, unseen forces. 

As two of Hollywood’s most enduring films celebrate anniversaries, I continue to think of Phyllis Dietrichson and Evelyn Mulwray as two women who just wanted to escape the systems that held them captive. But those systems were too sweeping, and they could do nothing to save themselves from the men who got in their way. The 1940s and the 1970s were eras with unique worries that filmmakers reflected on the big screen. In the present, I can’t help but notice similar anxieties bubbling up about gender politics and expression, autonomy, and political corruption. One thing is certain: when a new noir is penned for modern audiences, the interpretation of the femme fatale will hold the key.

Double Indemnity was released by Paramount Pictures on July 6, 1944 and is currently available to rent or buy from Amazon/Prime Video. Chinatown was released by Paramount Pictures on June 20, 1974 and is currently available to stream on Paramount+.