But while there's an undeniable moralism in the roots of these kinds of stories, a closer look reveals something more complicated. Like horror — another boundary-pushing genre that has long offered a paradoxical balance of regressive and progressive — noir films also offered substantial, multifaceted, and groundbreaking roles to actresses at a time when depicting a flushing toilet on a movie screen was considered too risqué. When else could a woman play the villain? When else could a woman be overtly sexual? And when else could sex be depicted as such a blatant tool of power and pleasure, so utterly divorced from childbirth and motherhood?

And as modern storytellers reinterpreted the archetype with an increasingly sympathetic lens, it shifted. By the 1990s — a watershed era for the erotic thriller — femme fatales were routinely the heroes, not the villains, of their own stories. Take Sharon Stone's infamous leg-crosser in 1992's Basic Instinct, or Linda Fiorentino's should've-been-nominated-for-an-Oscar performance in 1994's The Last Seduction, or Kim Basinger's actually-won-her-an-Oscar performance in 1997's L.A. Confidential. By and large, the men in these stories are still hapless dupes — but this time, we're invited to empathize and cheer on the women who are savvy enough to exploit them.

And as the femme fatale archetype shifted toward female empowerment, some women began owning it outright. In 2002, Brian De Palma simply dubbed his Rebecca Romijn-starring erotic thriller Femme Fatale, confident that audiences would understand the shorthand. By 2011, no smaller a cultural figure than Britney Spears was proudly dubbing herself a femme fatale on the cover of her seventh studio album. "Sexy and Strong. Dangerous yet mysterious. Cool yet confident!" she wrote as she revealed the album's title. It may be oddly punctuated and capitalized — but for a definition of the modern femme fatale, it's as good as any.

And that brings us back to Hap & Leonard, with Trudy, its uber-femme fatale, springing the entire story into motion. In both the small-screen adaptation and its original literary source, Trudy initially feels like a throwback to those Double Indemnity days, when a woman could correctly be identified as "trouble" the second she walked up with those legs that end at the throat.

But the first three episodes of Hap & Leonard reveal Trudy to be something a little more complicated. The sex appeal is key to the character. So is the sex. But while [Christina] Hendricks herself describes Trudy as a "classic femme fatale," she dismissed the suggestion that she was merely "window dressing," and later explained that she was drawn to the role for its complexity. "She’s trying to be a better person," Hendricks told Variety. "She’s self-aware. She knows she’s a bit of a mess up. She’s made a lot of mistakes and she’s trying to fix it."

Today, if you cast a wide enough net, you'll find the basic DNA of the femme fatale being conjured up and subverted all the time. Take Gone Girl, an icy thriller that drops a femme fatale into a modern disintegrating marriage. Or Justified, Hap & Leonard's fellow southern noir, which introduced a femme fatale that ended up being the show's ultimate hero. Or last year's Ex Machina, an indie noir sci-fi thriller with a femme fatale that happens to be a robot. That's the beauty of archetypes; as soon as you feel like they're set in stone, someone comes along to reinvent them all over again.

(Thanks to Hugh!)

"Phantom Of The Paradise” (1974)

Jack Fisk: When I finished “Badlands,” the producer asked me to come work with De Palma on "Phantom of the Paradise." I'd been doing some stuff with Roger and Gene Corman, but I hadn't done that many films at that point. But I got so excited about doing a musical with Faustian themes, and I loved “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” so I wanted to do a set influenced by that.

We shot a lot in Los Angeles, in Dallas and in New York. I had a minimal budget and no crew, really. I did most of the building myself. One day, the company went to lunch and there was this scene where Winslow breaks out of jail through a brick wall. I was there while everyone was eating lunch, putting brick and mortar on. When the crew came back and I hadn't quite finished, one of the grips started going on about how inexperienced I was and how stupid I was to be doing this at lunch. Suddenly, Brian snapped at him to shut up and said, "Jack's making this film look great." To this day, that was one of the major affirmations that what I was doing was having an effect on the director, that Brian —who could be kind of dour— was suddenly taken with this sort of approach.

On that film, I had an art director who wasn't getting sets done, so Sissy came in and started sewing sheets for Swan's bedroom, the satin sheets that look like records. She did it overnight on a tiny little sewing machine that we had at home. We were doing things like that for the whole shoot. I was so exhausted around that time —I remember flying to Dallas and thinking, "God, if I'm ever going to die in an airplane, make it now." But, you know, I didn't die. [laughs]

“Carrie” (1976)

[Because of 'Phantom'] Brian actually thought of Sissy as a set dresser. When I got together with Brian on “Carrie,” Sissy called him and said, “Brian, I'm coming in for a test for "Carrie," but I've also got an audition for a Vanquish commercial where I can make $10,000. Should I do that or come in?' ” She thought he'd say, "Oh, please come in. I gotta see you." But what he actually said was, "Well Sissy, I think you ought to do the commercial." She got so upset that she sat down in our living room in Topanga Canyon and read the book of “Carrie” from cover to cover. She didn't sleep, got up the next morning, put Vaseline in her hair, and put on a little sailor dress that her mother had made her in seventh grade. Then she went into where they were testing, only wanting to test for one part, for Carrie.

The next day, I met Brian and the producers and cinematographer at the lab where they were looking at the tests. Her test came on, and she just killed it. You looked at her and it was Carrie, but it was a Carrie that you cared about. The lights went up, and everyone turned to Brian, who said, "She's Carrie." He didn't expect to cast her though, so much so that they never negotiated a deal with her. Sissy was waiting in the car outside to hear what happened, and I ran out saying, "You got the part, you can ask whatever you want!" And then a few days later, Sissy, Piper Laurie and Brian started rehearsing, and the rest is history. We just love Brian. He became such a good friend.

Later on, when we were filming the scene where Carrie menstruates for the first time, Sissy was looking for some direction on how to play the scene. And Brian, in a very sort of male way, said, "It's like you're being hit by a truck." And I said, "Well I was run over by a car once!" So Sissy asked me to describe to her how I felt. And I started telling her about the whole thing, and then that turned into me in the shower right beside her in the scene, telling her about getting hit by a car when I was 14. They had me hold in my hand the fake blood that she reaches down into, so it was kind of ridiculous. The bad thing about that was that I was wet the entire time; the good thing was that we finished the scene. I just think Brian was relieved that he didn't have to give her any more description.

Back when Roger Ebert started this festival back in 1999, he called it "Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival," and focused on films that he didn't think had received their fair share of exposure or discussion. Blow Out might have fit that festival description quite well back then, even coming a few years after Quentin Tarantino brought renewed attention to the film by talking it up as one of his favorites and casting John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, etc., etc. These days, however (and thanks in no small part to Criterion), Blow Out is widely seen as De Palma's best film. Yet picking it for Ebertfest still highlights the fact that the film really does remain somewhat overlooked in the grand scheme of things, perhaps as a Travolta film (in the shadow of Pulp Fiction, Saturday Night Fever, Grease), and also as a De Palma film (in the shadow of more, shall we say, dazzling works such as Carrie, Scarface, or The Untouchables).

The blurb in the Ebertfest press announcement reads:

Roger Ebert considered “Blow Out” to be Brian De Palma’s finest film. From his review of “Blow Out”: “’Blow Out” stands by itself. It reminds us of the violence of ‘Dressed to Kill,’ the startling images of ‘The Fury,’ the clouded identities of ‘Sisters,’ the uncertainty of historical ‘facts’ from ‘Obsession,” and it ends with the bleak nihilism of ‘Carrie’.. But it moves beyond those films, because this time De Palma is more successful than ever before at populating his plot with three-dimensional characters.”

For the unforgettable final scene of Brian De Palma’s gangster epic, in which Prohibition agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) brings Al Capone (Robert De Niro) to justice, Morricone presented nine possible options. As he remembers it, he hoped De Palma would choose any of them except the seventh—which, of course, is exactly the one the director wanted. “In the end, he was absolutely right,” the composer says. Celebratory music is a rare mode for Morricone, who favors more hypnotic, moody creations. “But De Palma chose the piece that was most like [the ending]—it showed the triumph of the police over the bad guys.”

With the latter scene mentioned above, I couldn't help but be reminded of Scorsese's mention about going to see Deep Throat with Brian De Palma in the 1970s. The following is from page 116 of Richard Schickel's book, Conversations With Scorsese, during a discussion of Scorsese's Taxi Driver:

Schickel: The woman—a society campaign worker—is attracted to Travis because he’s so out of her league, as it were. Her Junior League, I guess. Which makes this notion of taking her to a porn movie—

Scorsese: Oh! I know. Well, you have to remember, a lot of people don’t remember now, but at that time, they were trying to make porn acceptable, with Deep Throat and Sometimes Sweet Susan, and pictures like that.

Schickel: I went to a few of those.

Scorsese: It was okay to go with a girl. But Brian De Palma and I went to see Deep Throat, and he said, Look at the people around us, it doesn’t feel right. There were couples. I said, You’re right. We should be with all these old guys in raincoats. It was a wonderful kind of hypocritical thing that was happening—it opened up the society.