In noir, there is always someone who makes promises and someone who lets themselves be convinced. The femme fatale is the woman who promises, and the detective is the man who believes he is smarter than she is. In Tutto in una notte (All in One Night), this figure appears in a peculiar way: we come to know her through Nick's eyes, and this reveals more about him than it does about her.
An Ancient Figure
The woman who seduces and leads to ruin is an archetype far older than cinema. We find her in the Bible, with Delilah and Salome; in mythology, with the sirens; and across medieval and Romantic literature. In the 1930s and 1940s, noir transformed her into an urban persona: an elegant, beautiful, and intelligent woman who knows what she wants and uses the male gaze as a tool.
The classic examples are well known. Brigid O'Shaughnessy in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, who lies to the detective with disarming naturalness. Cora in James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder's 1944 film based on Cain's novel, where a woman persuades an ordinary man to commit a perfect murder.
Two Ways of Reading Her
Critics have interpreted the femme fatale in two contrasting ways. For some, she is a projection of male anxiety—a woman embodying what men fear most: independence, desire, sexual freedom. For others, she is the only female character in noir who truly possesses agency, and whom the genre consequently punishes.
Both readings hold true, and the story holds them together through the narrator's voice.
Margit Through Nick's Eyes
Nick introduces us to Margit Lakatos before we ever see her: she is his client's missing wife, a Hungarian girl who worked as a hostess at a convention hotel in Milan. He describes her with his trademark vulgarity: a woman whose curves cannot be concealed by clothes, an "Eastern doll." Every word reveals far more about the speaker than about the subject. Nick gazes at Margit with the desire and contempt of a man who feels diminished himself, turning her into an object to be contemplated.
In noir, this is already a trap. The femme fatale succeeds because the person observing her is convinced he sees her whole. The more Nick reduces her to a body, the less capable he is of discerning what lies beneath.
The Play of Opposites
| Element | Nick | Margit |
| How they are introduced | Through his own voice | Through the voices of others, above all Nick's |
| Relationship with the body | Insecurity and shame | An overpowering presence |
| Relationship with power | Attempts to reclaim it | Exercises it |
| Primary resource | Irony | Seduction |
The contrast is deliberate. In a traditional noir, the detective possesses a body that endures while a woman puts it to the test; here, the detective has a body that betrays him, and a woman who forces him to confront this vulnerability. The confrontation shifts from the realm of plot to the realm of character.
One Woman, Many Women
Margit is not the only woman in the story. There is Paula, Nick's Swiss partner—calm, patient, reminding him that such things happen to any man. Paula is the antithesis of the femme fatale: she does not seduce to gain an advantage, she does not lie, she asks for nothing. Yet ultimately, it is she who sees Nick more clearly than anyone else.
By juxtaposing these two figures, the story suggests that the true danger for Nick is not the fatal woman, but his own inability to see women as human beings.
Without Giving Too Much Away
Like any respectable femme fatale, Margit is not what she seems, and Nick's night proves it. I will not say how. I will only say that the story does not merely repeat the formula: it takes its conventions and uses them to expose how blind the narrator is, and how the figure of the "dangerous woman" also serves as a convenient excuse for those who must answer for their own failures.
Conclusion
In the next post, I will explore the story's most delicate and, in many respects, most human theme: Nick's virility, his body, and his shame.
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