ABSTRACT
This essay investigates the shady women of neorealist cinema starting from all the elements that compose the form that they assume on screen, i.e. the characters’ typecasting, physiognomy and the actresses’ performances. The purpose is to identify the image that they conjure up in the tradition of Italian film and national history. In the second decade of the 20th century female figures along the lines of the femme fatale left a mark, namely Pina Menichelli, Francesca Bertini and Lyda Borelli. Their traits are noticeable in subsequent cinema, which laboriously reintroduced complex, mysterious, seductive, dangerous and forbidden forms of femininity. After World War I, the heiresses of the fatal woman explore the anxieties of a transforming society. For instance, heroines of Italian resistance such as Pina, preserve some relevant traces of this bequest in Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945). All in all, these archetypes, which gradually disappear, mark a return to order that Italian women had to face after both world wars.
