Death of a Temptress

Simone Simon, who died Tuesday at the age of ninety-three, made a tentative jump from Paris to Hollywood in the mid-1930s, where she had some leading roles in non-leading pictures.  I have in mind Seventh Heaven (1937) in which she starred opposite James Stewart who played a French sewer worker named Chico.  (I don't make up these things, you know.)  Her reputation in the US has pretty much hinged on a couple of B efforts from the war years that have, for reasons I've never been able to fathom, become cult favorites: Cat People (1942) and Return of the Cat People (1944), which sounded like a sequel but wasn't.  Her best work was as a woman whose voice (in English, her French accent was like aural Cialis) and radically seductive eyes promised pleasures for which you knew you'd pay a high price but had no intention of passing up all the same.  I think her best work was in 1941's The Devil and Daniel Webster as Bella, the Mephistophelean messenger who tempts Jabez Stone away from his oh-so-good little wife.  Can't say I blame him.  As Séverine Roubaud in Renoir's La bête humaine, she was the temptation Jean Gabin's Lantier could not forswear, and it cost both characters their lives.  It was Gabin's film, but without her, it wouldn't have moved an inch.