YEAR 1936: COUNTESS ZALESKA

While 1934 is a rich year and 1935 is just okay, 1936 really drops the ball, as I found no significant femmes formidables for this year except Countess Marya Zaleska, better known by the title of her one film-appearance: DRACULA'S DAUGHTER.

The film never mentions how Zaleska came to be the daughter of the same vampire dispatched in the classic 1931 DRACULA, but the narrative insists repeatedly that she is literally his daughter rather than just one of many victims enthralled to the Count.  She possesses most of the normal traits of the vampire: she's active only at night and sleeps in an earth-filled coffin at night, drinks blood to survive, and can hypnotize anyone with her will and the Dracula ring.

Ironically, the original treatment for this film, as chronicled in David Skal's THE MONSTER SHOW, suggested a dominatrix-type of vampiress rather along the lines of the version of Fah Lo Suee seen in the film MASK OF FU MANCHU.  However, the film censorship board had so many problems with the script that Universal trashed it.  What resulted was a far more sympathetic villainess, who may be the cinema's first *consistent* depiction of a vampire who is tormented by her unnatural urges and who fights for a cure.  However, despite the death of her evil father in the previous film, and her attempt to fight those urges with the help of modern psychology, the vampire persona wins the battle.  Zaleska compounds her surrender to evil by attempting to blackmail a young man (her psychologist, in fact) to join her in the life of the undead.  She's only foiled because she betrays a faithful acolyte, who kills her with a wooden arrow through the heart (probably the first time an arrow took the place of the traditional stake, also).

Actress Gloria Holden, in her most famous role, gives Zaleska a brooding, tormented quality rare for vampires of the early 20th century.  Because Zaleska victimizes two female characters in the film, she has some status in academic gender-studies as an early icon of lesbianism. 

YEAR 1935: THE FLAME

1935 isn't nearly as rich in femmes formidables as 1934, and my choice for this entry-- "the Flame"-- feels derivative of 1934's Dragon Lady.  Artist Will Gould initiates his strip RED BARRY with the introduction of a mysterious female crime-boss in Chinatown-- which not only duplicates the initial antagonist seen in Milton Caniff's TERRY AND THE PIRATES, but also the setup of a white hero struggling against Asian opponents.  However, in terms of attitude the main hero, a roughneck U.S. undercover agent, is less reminiscent of any Caniff hero than of the Dick Tracy of Chester (no relation to Will) Gould.

I suspect Will Gould wasn't all that invested in the character of the Flame, who may also borrow an element from Sax Rohmer's Fah Lo Suee.  Unlike the Dragon Lady, the Flame is tagged as "Eurasian," and is presumably half-Russian (as is Fu Manchu's daughter) since the lady crime-boss also goes by the name "Tanya."  Of the four stories reprinted in the illo above, only two concern the Flame.  She doesn't do all that much in the first narrative, but does assume a more dominant role in the second tale, though as expected she's still womanly enough to fall for the straight-shooting hero.  I don't know how often Gould used her in the remainder of the strip's run, but evidently she didn't impress the producers of the 1938 RED BARRY serial, as she was not adapted to film.  The Flame lacks the intelligence and resourcefulness of the Dragon Lady, and seems most interesting as a pale reflection of a superior character.  

YEAR 1934: THE DRAGON LADY

My notes for years previous to this only show about three or four significant femmes formidables a year up to this point.  However, for some reason 1934 brings a bumper crop of four important characters in comic strips and five in prose (though admittedly three of the latter were authored by Robert E. Howard).

The chief among these figures is the Dragon Lady, the premiere opponent of the heroes of the TERRY AND THE PIRATES comic strip.  Allegedly Milton Caniff's boss Joseph Patterson not only steered Caniff toward the subject matter-- young men having adventures in the China Seas-- but also suggested that the heroes should initially encounter a sexy female pirate.  Caniff apparently based his fictional creation on certain real lady pirates of the period, and in a later continuity he even attributed the name of a real pirate, Lai Choi San, to his creation.

According to Wikipedia Caniff seems to have originated the term "dragon lady" for a tough-minded Asian woman, though the term can sometimes cross ethnic boundaries and be applied to a woman of any ethnicity.  But though Caniff's character was not by any means the first major Asian femme formidable, it's arguable that she's the best-known one.

Though like many villainesses the Dragon Lady is physically bewitching, she's unique among many villainesses in that she usually shows a tough-minded intelligence.  It's a given that she could knock off the strip's heroes Terry Lee and Pat Ryan without half trying; her perennial mistake is giving in to her female emotions and her desire for Ryan.

She may also be the first Asian female character shown to possess some martial arts skill, as a 1934 sequence shows her defend herself successfully from two male attackers with a combination of judo and weapons-skill (both with pistol and knife).

The Dragon Lady remained a presence in the TERRY strip long after Caniff departed it for STEVE CANYON.

YEAR 1933: QUEEN NEMONE

Edgar Rice Burroughs didn’t show a lot of interest in creating femmes formidables, but QUEEN NEMONE, Tarzan’s main opponent in the novel TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD, surpasses the more long-lived LA OF OPAR.  Tarzan finds his way to the City of Gold, where the inhabitants breed tame lions and Nemone rules the citizens with an iron hand.  In a revision of the “Snow White” motif, Nemone ceaselessly persecutes any woman who might be thought more beautiful than she, but she has a vital weakness: she’s spiritually bonded to her pet lion Belthar and feels that she will die when the lion does. If this were an overt fantasy Nemone might be an earthly incarnation of Cybele, who tended to run around with lions, but here her bondedness is mere superstition (though the queen’s name bears an interesting similarity to the “Nemean Lion” of classical myth).  She fancies Tarzan, who plays it cool while secretly working to overthrow her tyranny.  At the climax Belthar attacks Tarzan but the lion is killed by Tarzan's own lion-ally, Jad-Bal-Ja.  In response Nemone stabs herself to death.  Though Tarzan never succumbed to her feminine wiles, the novel ends with him paying his respects at her graveside. 

YEAR 1932: LARCENY LU

This year DICK TRACY did its bit for equal-opportunity villainy with the appearance of his first major female foe, LARCENY LU (seen above in a Big Little Book illustration), mastermind of a car-theft ring.  Compared to later femmes formidables like Breathless Mahoney and Mrs. Pruneface, Lu was small potatoes.  However, in 1934 she did raise her level of nefariousness a bit more, as she allied herself with early TRACY enemy “Steve the Tramp” and tried to run a blackmail scam on Junior Tracy’s mother.

YEAR 1931: FAH LO SUEE

I've assigned the character of Fah Lo Suee to her first named appearance in 1931's DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU, but it's something of a judgment call, since the character-- albeit unnamed-- had appeared in 1917, in a series of stories novelized as THE HAND OF FU MANCHU.

One justification for doing so, though, is the question: "If Sax Rohmer had not written any more than the first three Fu Manchu books, would anyone even remember that he had a daughter?" My verdict is no.  The most noteworthy female in HAND is a woman named Zarmi.  Zarmi dominates the first half of the book and is one of the very few Rohmer females who takes literal violent action rather than manipulating subordinates (she stabs a cop to escape capture).  Early in the book, however, Nayland Smith had told his confidante Petrie a strange story about a mythical Asian woman who is expected to lead the East against the West; a woman who is eternally young due to many reincarnations (sounding not a little like Haggard's SHE).  Several chapters later Petrie stumbles across a gorgeous veiled woman and eventually learns that she is Fu's daughter.  Fu plans to use his captivating child to rally various Eastern factions to his banner, but Nayland Smith's interference foils the plot and Fu never seems inclined to revive the scheme in subsequent outings. The woman who would later be named Fah Lo Suee is little more than a pawn, whom Rohmer never troubles to characterize.

HAND actually ends suggesting that both Fu and his unnamed daughter die at the end, and for a little over 20 years, they remained dead, at least on paper, while Rohmer worked on other books, some of which pursued "femme formidable" themes like 1920's GREEN EYES OF BAST and 1929's EMPEROR OF AMERICA.  It's been suggested that none of the intervening books sold that well, which may have motivated Rohmer's return to his best-known character.  In addition, Hollywood had revived Fu as well: two silent Fu-films appeared in 1923 and 1924, and Paramount then produced an early talkie in 1929, with Warner Oland as Fu.  It may well be that when Rohmer wrote DAUGHTER, he hoped that Hollywood would immediately novelize it. Following a second Oland Fu Manchu film in 1930, Paramount apparently availed itself of the basic idea of Rohmer's new novel-- that the Chinese mastermind had a daughter-- but kept nothing else.

In the novel by Rohmer, Fu Manchu and Fah Lo Suee have escaped death, but Fu is vaguely incapacitated.  Fah Lo Suee seizes her chance to move up in the ranks of the Si-Fan, commanding its thugs to commit various murderous errands for her.  She also takes an erotic interest in young narrator-character Shan Greville.  Like her father she seems to have a limited telepathic ability, and knows how to apply an array of drugs able to sap men of their will to resist.  Both in DAUGHTER and in the subsequent novel MASK OF FU MANCHU, Fah uses drugs to make Greville think that he loves her; it's loosely implied that he may have sex with her as well, though other drugs cause him to forget the experience.  At novel's end Fu Manchu re-asserts control, but for the rest of the series Fah Lo Suee continues to find ways to stymie or inconvenience her mastermind father.

In DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON, Fu Manchu dies early in the story, and his daughter-- named Ling Moy in this incarnation-- sets out to kill the men she holds responsible for her dad's death.  However, the film emphasizes romance over action, as she falls in love with one of the supposedly guilty Caucasians and can't bear to kill him at first, though she has no problem setting other deaths into motion.  Anna May Wong put across a decent performance with the cheapjack material, and there's one interesting moment in which Ling Moy comes up with a new twist on the "Chinese water torture," using acid in place of water.  But overall the first filmic apperance of "Fah Lo Suee" is unmemorable.

In contrast to Wong's fainting performance, in 1932 MGM gave filmgoers a very different interpretation of Fu Manchu's daughter, even if her name was slightly altered to "Fah Lo See."  Without touching on the other delights of this over-the-top adventure (with the immortal Boris Karloff as Fu), MASK's script takes Rohmer's idea of a woman enslaving a man through drugs and ratchets up the intensity, having her put the Caucasian hunk she desires through torture devised to help break his will.  In one scene it's strongly implied that she could have had her way with her studly victim after the torture.  I'd speculate that this might be the first time a cinematic female came close to commiting the rape of a man.  Even the Marquis de Sade never "went there," to the best of my recollection.  This version of Fah Lo Suee is more out-of-control than Rohmer's character, but remains the best cinematic interpretation thus far.  

YEAR 1930: ARDALA VALMAR

In the Philip Nowlan novel on which the "Buck Rogers" comic strip was based, there are no characters comparable to either Killer Kane or his sometime girlfriend Ardala Valmar. Assuming (as some records seem to indicate) that Nowlan wrote the strip for its first few years, he may deserve the credit for creating Kane and Ardala as negative versions of the noble (if occasionally sappy) Buck and Wilma.

As opposed to the versions of Kane and Ardala that appeared in the 1979 teleseries, both characters are denizens of Earth in the 25th century, who start out serving in Earth's armed forces but soon decide to pursue a variety of criminal enterprises.  Ardala starts out as somewhat deferential to Kane, but in future episodes shows little compunction about betraying him, and on occasion pursues some enterprises on her own.  Her first non-comics media appearance consisted of appearing on episodes of the "Buck Rogers" radio show, though at present her greatest media-fame came about as a result of a near-total makeover on the aforementioned teleseries, which will be covered in a separate post.