Femmes Fatales | Jul 20 2022 |
I'm doing okay, thanks for asking. Well, no, come to think of it, not really.
Beverly Michaels looks in reasonable spirits in the first photo in this series made for her 1953 film noir Wicked Woman, but her mood seems to go downhill in the next two shots. That's a progression that occurs nightly in millions of bars across the planet, but particularly in film noir bars, where something nearly always goes wrong. In Wicked Woman Michaels is the thing that goes wrong. She plays a classic femme predator named Billie Nash, who's intent upon corrupting a basically good man. Michaels had only eight credited roles in a short career that ran from 1949 to 1956, but she was highly influential in establishing the bad girl trope in 1950s cinema. Other bad girls followed, but she was one of the first and worst.