TCM Morning & Afternoon Movies: Femme Fatales
TCM, Beginning at 5:30 a.m.
Make your daylight hours today a little more deliciously dark with this lineup of films featuring the wiles of memorable femme fatales. First up is an early example of this archetype on the big screen: Aileen Pringle as Paula Vernoff, a sultry woman hired by a gangster to seduce a boxer (Hugh Trevor) into throwing a fight in Night Parade
(1929). Next, in Journal of a Crime (1934), Ruth Chatterton plays Francoise, a jealous woman who resorts to murdering her husband’s mistress. After that, in 1936’s Satan Met a Lady (pictured), a loose adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon, Bette Davis stars as Valerie Purvis, a lying seductress who is among a few shady parties working a detective (Warren Williams) to help them track a priceless artifact. Then, in Madam Satan (1930), a musical comedy directed by Cecil B. Demille, Kay Johnson is socialite Angela Brooks, who masquerades as a notorious femme fatale to win back her straying husband (Reginald Denny). Jane Wyatt headlines the next film, the 1950 film noir The Man Who Cheated Himself, as Lois Frazer, a wealthy socialite in the process of a divorce who shoots her husband (Harlan Warde) and gets her police lieutenant boyfriend (Lee J. Cobb) to help hide the body. Next, Ann Todd stars as the title character in David Lean’s 1950 British film noir Madeleine, a fact-based story about Madeleine Smith, a woman from a wealthy Glasgow family who was tried in 1857 for the murder of her lover (Ivan Desny). Finally, in the Oscar-nominated film noir The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Barbara Stanwyck portrays the title character, an heiress who tries to win back her lost love (Van Heflin) years after a murder drove them apart. Kirk Douglas also stars.