1957: She Devil

MARI BLANCHARD

 

First she beguiles this schmuck...

And then tells him what a loser he is...


He'd get up and smack her one except he's too lazy to get off the couch...

 Well, it's a cheap 1950s B-pic, so you know the actual action is never going to be as nasty as the promo / title, but what we can see here is the further de-suppression of the male sexual psyche in popular media... What the late 50s / early 60s offered were a lot of chintzy horror films where the actual horror was simply Womanhood... Whether she was 50 feet tall, a wasp, a leech -- the Female had grown into Monster with all of men's fears about Women fully surfacing... This movie presents the "what if" of giving a Woman who had nothing everything -- and rather than be grateful,  the nasty bitch just wants more!  Blanchard is perfect in the role -- she's the Poster Girl for male fear of Unending Female Desire... The Woman who can't get enough of money, clothes, jewelry, and of course the sub-textual inference - sex.  Fulfilling a WOman's Desire is innately man's greatest fear, because he knows sooner or later he's gonna run out of dough (jiz)...