In Marlowe, Cavendish’s strategic role as eye candy or a caged bird in the detective-protagonist’s diegetic (and moral) quest for answers is flipped on its head precisely because of the character’s resistance to any predetermined sexual politics. She double-crosses both men and women (including her domineering mother, played by Jessica Lange), dresses in demure frocks and men’s slacks, uses her sexuality but never her sex. She is also an Irish parvenu, but sits at the center of Hollywood wealth and privilege. This knotty conflict between the eroticized and empowered femme fatale is at the core of the film, as it is in the entire film noir tradition. Like the classic vamps before her, from Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson to Ann Savage’s Vera and Marlene Dietrich’s Concha Pérez, Kruger’s Clare Cavendish is a feminist character avant la lettre. Kruger agrees. “In a way [the film] is really feminist, because you realize that the women are the ones who are the most intelligent.”
We turn to talking about her childhood in Algermissen, a village outside of Hanover, in what was then the Federal Republic of Germany; and she points out that her grandmother was her first source for seeing movie ingenues and femmes fatales like Dietrich, Hildegard Knef, and Romy Schneider. “[My grandmother] loved Marlene Dietrich and Magda Schneider—who was Romy Schneider’s mother—in the Heimatfilme,” she says. “I remember watching all of Marlene Dietrich’s films by the time I was 10.” She also recalls her grandfather’s anger at seeing Dietrich on television—the actress had been perceived by an entire generation of Germans as a traitor to the country for leaving it during the war. Although Kruger did not know it at the time, expatriates like Dietrich and Romy Schneider would blaze a trail for her to follow in her own career.
In addition to exposing these cinematic icons to her, Kruger says that her grandmother inhabited the figure of a femme fatale in her own rite. As evidence, she recalls following her grandmother on regular walks around the village, when the latter would surreptitiously smoke her cigarettes away from the disapproving eyes of Kruger’s grandfather. When, years later, Kruger lit a cigarette in front of her grandmother, her reaction was fierce: “A lady doesn’t smoke in public,” she chided.
“I loved her so much,” Kruger laughs. “She was the real captain of the boat. Even though she made my grandfather believe he was the man of the house, nothing happened without her knowing about it. In fact, when she passed, he was cleaning out her clothes and he found money everywhere, in every pocket, stashed away. It’s like he discovered this whole other person.”
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