Quimby becomes more of a monster, she never completely loses our sympathy. Rather, she is a woman with a large sexual appetite and a hunger for the easy life. She’ll eventually drive her husband to the brink of murder, but Totter never plays Mrs. Claire Quimby, the bored housewife of a milquetoast soda jerk played by Richard Basehardt. Due respect should also be paid to Audrey Totter’s chilling turn in director John Berry’s underrated 1949 Tension. It takes one hell of a woman to bring down those two mountains of masculinity, but, well, Stanwyck was one hell of a woman.
In 1957’s Crime Of Passion she played a reporter who settles down with cop Sterling Hayden and then begins a desperate affair with his boss Raymond Burr. He nods and says, “Only you’re a little more rotten.” Poor bastard doesn’t know the half of it.īoozing it up, a symptom of a happy marriage.Stanwyck continued to torment her onscreen husbands: Kirk Douglas in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Robert Preston in The Lady Gambles, and Paul Douglas in Clash By Night. The two men hated each other, but they gave real fire to the character of Mrs. Cain’s novel, with the help of Raymond Chandler. When insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) comes to her door she seduces him into helping her kill her husband. Dietrichson is the sexy young wife of a rich older man. Dietrichson, star Barbara Stanwyck practically invented archetype of the evil wife. Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder’s 1944 Double Indemnity. The most famous bad wife in classic noir was, of course, Mrs. The sunny suburbs of America were breeding grounds of resentment and infidelity. The home front, it turned out, was a battlefield of disappointment and recrimination.
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When noir turned its full attention to the home front, however-when marriage was the subject of the film rather than a backdrop for a couple of scenes-things took a decidedly nasty twist. This picture of martial bliss could be so sugary it made your teeth hurt. When they did, the wives either smiled guilelessly and cheerfully whipped up dinner, or they fretted about on-the-job danger. Cops and detectives-almost all of whom were men-rarely went home to see the wife and kids. Classic noir usually held the institution of marriage at arm’s length. Then, at least in the lurid world of film noir, comes the inevitable murder attempt (check out Husbands from Hell for a few examples).
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