YEAR 1948: POWDER POUF

Eisner's fierce femme formidable, Powder Pouf, only appeared in a couple of Will Eisner SPIRIT stories.  She's not a great favorite among SPIRIT fans, lacking the tragic dimensions of SILK SATIN or the lovable larceny of P'GELL.

Her most noteworthy quality might be her violence.  Whereas most SPIRIT femmes tended to beguile hapless males with their beauty, Powder Pouf is first seen robbing a shopkeeper by punching him, kicking him, and banging his head on pavement. Why she felt this necessary-- given that she was packing heat-- may never be known.  When an ex-con named Bleaker Moore happened by, she used her gun to force him to be her accomplice.  The Spirit tracked Powder down and kept Bleak from doing any more time.

Since the only other Powder story appeared a few months after the first, and again featured her interaction with sad-sack Bleaker, it would seem that Eisner had little in mind for her but a standard "tough girl."  Bleaker, by contrast, appeared in a few more stories, so he may have been the real character Eisner sought to integrate into the Spirit's adventures.

YEAR 1948: ELSA BANNISTER

Because I've decided to start this blog by making one post apiece for each year and then starting over, I've often been forced to back-burner many significant characters, not least many of the "femmes fatales" of noir fiction and cinema.

Fortunately, 1948 gave us one of the best in Elsa Bannister, played by Orson Welles' then-wife Rita Hayworth in the Welles-directed LADY FROM SHANGHAI.  Welles cast his wife against the "vixen" type that had proven so successful in 1946's GILDA, giving her both an ice-blonde appearance and attitude. 

As LADY has been celebrated on many film-sites, there's no need to outline the virtues of the film here.  Suffice to say that though evil Elsa's initial idea in the film is to get patsy Michael O'Hara (Welles) to kill her aged husband for her, she ends up attempting to do the job herself, in a climactic "hall of mirrors" scene that remains one of Welles' tour-de-force visualizations.  Originally Welles wanted O'Hara to persuade Elsa to kill herself in remorse, but the studio allegedly disapproved of the use of suicide.  Whatever their motives, the studio seems to have forced Welles into crafting a climax that was at least more visually stunning.