If someone asks, ‘Who is the most iconic femme fatale character in the classic Hollywood noir?’, we would hurry to choose between Phyllis, or Cora, or Gilda; among characters played by Elizabeth Scott or Veronica Lake, and so on. If someone asks us to name the most typical femme fatale in Greek film noir, it would not be so easy to come up with an immediate answer. Only a few film buffs would remember Irene Papas in her first screen appearance in 1948, in the film Hamenoi angeloi/Fallen Angels by Tsiforos, or a couple of dangerous women who appear in Greek noir of the 1960s. One could also think of the imposing, catastrophic protagonists in the films Eva (dir. Plyta, 1953) and Phaedra (dir. Dassin, 1962), but these examples could not be offered without stretching the limits of film noir, as they fall more closely into the category of melodrama or gothic thriller. This chapter thus starts with the question: Are there any ‘real’ femmes fatales in Greek film noir? ‘Real’ not in the sense of being faithful to a stereotypical model, or fulfilling a handful of diegetic criteria regarding their participation in the film's plot, but mostly as iconic characters that remain forged in the memory of the spectator and create a cinephilic image.

Recent academic work on film noir, such as that of Sheri Chinen Biesen (2005) and Helen Hanson (2007), which continues Steve Neale's argument (2000), have shown that the femme fatale is not exclusive to the film noir genre, but can equally be found in melodramas and other genres contemporary with film noir. In the following pages, I will put forward the argument that women who represent power, enigma, menace and sexual aura are not the main focus of Greek film noir of the classic period. I will discuss the absences and presences regarding female representations in the sociohistorical context of the Greek late 1950s and 1960s, taking also into consideration the reception of US and French films noirs in Greece. To address these issues, I will study the range of interesting female characters to be found in Greek film noir, and I will focus on the issue of the female gaze, as it appears in the film O anthropos tou trenou/The Man on the Train (dir. Dimopoulos, 1958).