Jewish Directors: Film Noir & the Femme Fatale

Hollywood Film Noir in the 40s and 50s, and later, as Neo-Noir, was dominated by Jewish directors. Prominent among the Jewish directors who emigrated to the US to escape Nazi persecution were Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger. Joining them were Jewish directors who emigrated before World War II, including Jacques Tourneur, William Wyler, Michael Curtiz, Edgar G. Ulmer and Charles Vidor. Also noteworthy was the American-born Jewish director Joseph H. Lewis. 

Distinctive features of film noir were dark, shadowy images and explorations of the concept of the “femme fatale” or fatal woman. 

The quintessential film noir, Wilder’s Double Indemnity, is a story of an insurance man and a femme fatale who conspire to murder her husband. Lang’s Scarlet Street, in which a femme fatale and her pimp drive a mild-mannered clerk to homicide is another seminal masterpiece of the genre. 

The concept of the femme fatale as an evil seducer who is punished was upended in the neo-noir period in Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, in which the villainess gets her lover jailed and ends up in South America with the money. 

Loren Means has a BA from San Francisco State University in Film and Information Science and did graduate work in Film Noir under the mentorship of Professor Jim Kitses, who quoted Loren in his monograph on the film Gun Crazy.