milefilms wrote:Okay, group mind. Filibus (March 1915) and Les Vampires (Nov. 1915) were early film renditions of the woman criminal. But were their creators influenced by earlier films, fiction or stage plays? Thank you!
Not sure about female villains (other than Sherlock Holmes' Irene Adler), but villains as protagonists were a French thing from before 1900. Arsene Lupin was a criminal who was the hero of a long series of novels (therefore presumably never brought to justice). He may prefigure the Fantomas/Dr. Mabuse-style super-villain.
One web-site I saw posits that the French had such a low opinion of police at this time that no one wanted policeman heroes in their novels.
And it may be that the female super-villain was a logical extension of adapting crime fiction to cinema. I read a lot of Jules Verne novels as a child, and noted that every time one of his books was made into a movie, women were added who weren't in the book. Who wants to watch a bunch of men journey to the center of the Earth? Add in a woman and some dinosaurs and you've got a movie!
Ditto, perhaps, for super-villain stories...