CLARA BOW cavorting in Mantrap is this month’s choice in the Barbican’s season, The Silent Film and the Femme Fatale. Last month it was the ebony fringe of Louise Brooks. Next month it will be Greta Garbo. All strong, unapologetic sirens of sexual temptation and emotional doom.

One can only wish the Barbican luck if they try to run a season of modern femme fatales. Cherchez la femme, but you won’t find too many after Sharon Stone and Basic Instinct in 1992. This year, Stone returns to the role of Catherine Tramell (lesbian, killer, purveyor of secondhand smoke) for Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction. The title is the final icepick into the archetype’s corpse, because it turns the fetishistic need for power into a curable pathology. Smitten, duped males togged out in V-neck sweaters with nothing underneath are going to have to make do with the house-trained charms of Basic Instinct 3: Life After Rehab.

It is a fittingly ironic fate that the movement that inspired the femme fatale has become the very force that has destroyed it. And as with any good noir, the culprit is a powerful woman. In this case, lots of them.

The temptress archetype dates back to Delilah, Salomé, Cleopatra. But the phrase “femme fatale” gained favour around the beginning of the 20th century, amid the growing female emancipation movement. Women got the vote in America in 1920, and femmes fatales blossomed in the movies soon afterwards. The connection between female power and male anxiety is almost embarrassingly Freudian.

The genre got an even bigger boost with the heyday of film noir in the 1940s, when again women gained more power. During the war they took over the roles left behind by their absent men and after the war decided overwhelmingly to stay at work.

But the vamps and noir bad girls were monstrous stylisations of power-hungry femininity who could have no resting place in normal domestic society. “I never loved you, Walter,” says Barbara Stanwyck at the end of Double Indemnity. “Not you, or anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart.”

Rather than embracing the tragic richness of such heroines, in the 1970s feminism branded the archetype as misogynistic. Unsubmissive sexual sirens who died were evidence of the patriarchal fear of female strength. Feminists were clearly unappeased by the humbled Casanova genre and its metaphorically castrated heroes in films like Alfie, The Beguiled and Shampoo.

But even the Boadicea of the 1960s, Germaine Greer, questioned the price of social and sexual liberation when she said of the Pill: “It gave women the right to say yes, at the expense of saying no.”

Feminism and, subsequently, girl power have ensured a similar pyrrhic victory over femmes fatales. It has earned women the right to be portrayed as strong, decisive, active heroines at the expense of being lustful, scheming, nihilistic villainesses.

In a 2001 book, Femme Fatale: Famous Beauties Then and Now (by the sizeable team of Serge Normant, Bridget Foley, Michael Thompson and Ranee Palone Flynn), modern actresses were restyled to look like grand Hollywood heroines from the past. Julia Roberts was made up to look like Louise Brooks and so on. It is a makeover process that is hard to imagine in reverse (Marlene Dietrich as Reese Witherspoon? Joan Crawford as Renée Zellweger?). Even the blonde femmes fatales, such as Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, came with a constructed facade of thick make-up and elaborate costumes. Those white shorts. That ankle bracelet.

Still, there are plenty of contemporary actresses who would make great femmes fatales. Angelina Jolie is the obvious one. She tried something approaching a femme fatale in Original Sin. It even boasted sweaty sex scenes, but its ludicrous melodrama of faked identity removed any sting. Jennifer Lopez and Nicole Kidman can also project the necessary bitch gravitas onscreen. Lopez played a sultry small-town femme fatale in Oliver Stone’s U Turn, but the film was a gonzo, over-edited disaster. And now Lopez does only saintly little-me parts in movies such as Maid in Manhattan.

Kidman played a lethal small-town girl in To Die For, but the film trapped her buzzing ambition under the glass of provincial satire. A stop-at-nothing vamp who kills her husband but never leaves town? At least there was a modish twist in having her be hungry for fame, not money.

But The Last Seduction from 1994 remains the best stab at a contemporary femme fatale. It tapped into the spread of increasingly powerful women into the workplace. The heroine, played by Linda Fiorentino, is first seen as a suited salesman who calls her co-workers eunuchs. The role reversals intensify from there. She is the hero, driving the story, and the sexual aggressor. It is the man who complains that she is interested only in sex and begs for a normal domestic relationship.

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