Climb Into My Fur

On Women in Crime and What it Means to be 'Under the Mink'

Hello everyone, and my sincerest apologies for the slower-than-usual arrival of the newsletter this month. Don’t worry: I’ll still be dropping a new film pick and video intro next week! If you know me at all, you may know that I have a tendency to love things the most when they look, sound, and feel frivolous - and happen to be anything but.  So with that in mind, I wanted to introduce you all to my chosen topic for April, famously the cruellest of months, with a subject as cruel as it is frivolous: fur.  

I wrote, in my maiden edition of Sisters Under the Mink, that this name came from a quote. That quote was stolen from 1953 film noir The Big Heat, directed by Fritz Lang. The line comes straight from the mouth of irrepressible gangsters’ moll Gloria Grahame, swathed in her fur coat, lips painted like a signboard, cigarette poised between her elegantly-manicured fingers. ‘We should use first names,’ she says to the girl beside her. ‘We’re sisters under the mink, after all.’ It’s a conspiratorial remark, a world-weary one, and a parting shot: she whooshes away in what I imagine would be a cloud of perfume and smoke.  As I wrote before, to be a sister under the mink is to be complicit, part of a club, swaddled. It’s also to be under something: to pay the price, even if you didn’t pay for the coat. 

Symbolically speaking, it’s all right there. A full-length fur coat will, regardless of your ethical or aesthetic qualms (I have some myself), keep you warmer than nearly any other fabric. To be draped in the heavy softness of real fur is to be cocooned, in some sense, from the extremities of the weather and of the excesses beyond you. There’s a sense of safety inside of one, a sort of protection - even if it’s only fragile. 

Such is the case with Leonora, the young woman played by Barbara Bel Geddes (young here, but perhaps best known as Midge in Hitchcock’s Vertigo) in Max Ophus’ 1949 film noir Caught, a claustrophobic psychological study of a working-class model who thinks she’s won the lottery when she marries a millionaire in the form of the craggily handsome - and nasty - Robert Ryan. But instead she is bullied and isolated, trapped in a domineering marriage with an abusive man. 

Leonora says she wants to marry for love, but she still has a bit of a sparkle in her eye when it comes to the finer things. When she goes to a Los Angeles charm school in the hopes of bagging a good husband, the coach asks her, ‘What’s your favourite fur?’ As if this was a question anybody would have a ready answer to. But Leonora does: mink. And a mink she gets, along with a husband who treats her terribly.

When Leonora runs away from him and becomes a secretary to doctor James Mason, he also buys her a coat. It’s a regular wool peacoat, which he slips onto her shoulders with stern, paternal satisfaction. It isn’t lavish, it’s what he can afford, and he has no clue what she has hanging in her closet back home - or that she’s already married. It provides a quick shorthand for the ways in which he’s the antithesis to Robert Ryan. But is he? Mason is still furnishing her with a gift to imply his protection and love, different in nature but the same in intention, and he still has that unbearable air of a man trying to put his claim on something. 

Ultimately, if I’m being honest, Caught is a crime film in a very loose sense. Ryan, who ensnares Leonora again when she discovers she’s expecting his child, suffers a convenient and sort of implausible ‘accident’ -- and Leonora quite seriously considers letting him die right there. Of course, she doesn’t, because it was 1949 and the Hays Production Code had something to say about this type of thing. Instead, he dies seemingly of natural causes. Then something shocking happens: Leonora conveniently miscarries to a swell of uplifting music. This is a fascinating choice, implying decades before abortion was legal that a woman’s life - and happiness - might depend on terminating a pregnancy. Except, of course, here it’s an accident, because: the Production Code, again. 

But where does this leave us when it comes back to the mink coat? It’s actually the note Ophuls decides to conclude with, as Leonora recovers in hospital and a nurse carries the thing over. The doctor dismisses her, saying: ‘If my diagnosis is correct, she won’t be wanting that, anyway,’ implying that the coat is not just a reminder of the monied lifestyle Leonora had, or of her abusive late husband, but presumably, of the union which resulted in this unwanted baby. In spite of the hurried, not-quite-on-the-level ending that censorship enforced, Ophuls was quietly radical in his rejection, not only of a glamorous piece of clothing, but of its representation of a whole tradition of complicit, long-suffering womanhood. 

40s noir staple Gene Tierney, in a multi-pelt marten stole.

Both Caught and The Big Heat are film noirs, which isn’t exactly a coincidence. The postwar crime genre so beloved by old movie fans, with its slinky femme fatales both sultry and jagged by turns, ran roughly from 1941 to 1953. With its geometric shadows and squinting mistrust in institutions, individuals, and just about everything else, film noir often lands as curiously modern to contemporary viewers, and its cynicism is well-suited to appraising mid-century gender roles in a different light. Its slinky femme fatales are often swathed in fashionable furs, and although they tend to be seen as sexist creations (a point well taken), devious and often punished for that deviousness, they are also, sometimes, wicked outliers and homewreckers of the radical persuasion. 

In the decades preceding and closely paralleling the heyday of the film noir, the fur coat had its time in the spotlight as a key marker of glamour. For women in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, it might be the ultimate sign of conventional, conspicuous wealth in a society obsessed by upward mobility. Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo ensconced themselves in hats, stoles, and coats made of everything from fox and sable to mink and ermine, while ordinary girls would make do with cheaper furs like rabbit and squirrel Particularly alarming to us today is the tendency to see little tails and faces staring up at us from the swanlike necks of film stars, full heads intact and glassy-eyed on the fur. It has a horror to it, suggesting a certain chic ruthlessness in the wearer.

Ruthlessness is absolutely the name of the game in the films of Martin Scorsese: in Goodfellas (1990), a woman’s fur coat is the catalyst for a blazing argument. One of the beneficiaries of the Lufthansa heist, asked to lay low for a while, marches into a bar on Christmas Eve with a new blond wife in a new floor-length mink coat. Memorably, Robert De Niro rips the coat off her and demands her husband return it immediately, kicking the couple out. Only a few scenes later, the couple is found shot dead in their car. Such is the punishment meted out for stupid flashiness in the criminal underworld, making the connection between death and glamour all the more apparent. 

That’s the other major thing about the fur coat, after all: something has to die so you can own one. Usually more than one animal pelt goes into the making of a fur coat, especially the full-length kind, and the ethical dimensions of this have made wearing real fur a taboo in most circles. Even in the past, when fur was deemed the norm and few issues were raised with the culling of animals for it: it announces a certain killer instinct to decide a mink’s coat was better on your back than on his. 

In The Sopranos, ultimate mob wife Carmela (Edie Falco), whose character throughout the show embodies so much of the contradiction and hypocrisy of her station, there’s an episode where she is given a fur coat. (‘It’s alive!!’ her husband Tony yells jokingly when he pulls it out of the garment bag.) But he asks for a little something in return. There’s a showstopping - and rare - scene of sexual congress between husband and wife. Next we see Carmela with the rich brown fur sensuously slipping from her bare shoulders. It’s an almost pat metaphor for the alliance between sex, crime, and death (it’s not alive anymore) that she not only is complict in, but sometimes gets off on. 

Sex and death are closely wrapped up (heh) in the fur coat, making them powerful signifiers for the female crook, especially the ones who have, to some degree or another, used their feminine wiles to get where they are and rely on the goodwill of men to do so.

 In a piece by the always-fascinating writer Katy Kelleher about faux fur, she captures fur’s curious psychological dimensions, explaining, ‘It’s a fetish object. According to some psychoanalysts, it makes us think of genital hair. [...] In fur, we combine fear of being skinned, the child-like joy of being cared for, and the wholly adult interest in pubic hair. Maybe we buy ourselves furs in order to fuck.’

That sexiness is made explicit in Lorene Scafaria’s 2019 film Hustlers, a thrilling tale based on a true story of scheming New York City strippers who concoct a brilliant scam to extract money from their rich male clients. As the girls grow more successful, flipping the switch to take advantage of the Wall Street assholes who regularly insult and degrade them, they adorn themselves in all the Christian Louboutins, diamonds, and luxury goods they can dream of. Early in the film, new girl Destiny (Constance Wu) finds herself shivering on a Manhattan rooftop with a cigarette when Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), queen of the strip joint, says: ‘Climb into my fur.’ 

The two of them huddle together under the voluminous coat, talking, and Ramona offers to look out for Destiny and give her a ‘crash course’ in the business; she’s a tough maternal figure who will soon become a literal partner-in-crime. Destiny clearly admires Ramona’s talent, her social ease, and her ability to make a decent living for herself and her small daughter; this comes neatly full-circle when Ramona later buys Destiny a pristine fur coat for Christmas, gathered round with their criminal cohort/sisterhood. This is thoroughly (capitalistic, but still) feminist slant on what was once the trophy wife’s prize. But Scafaria makes it clear that this is not simply a status symbol purchase. ‘What was it?’ asks Destiny. ‘It was a chinchilla’, says Ramona. An animal has become the bloody sacrifice at the altar of their friendship, their sisterhood; one which protects and girds its insiders just as it violently rejects its outsiders. The coat may not be mink, but it might as well be. 

Rather wonderfully, in a cursory search online, I found that someone had taken it upon themselves to do a seven minute Youtube supercut of all the ‘fur coat’ scenes in Hustlers. This was serendipitous for research purposes, but more-so for the fact of its very existence. A quick look at the person who uploaded it, along with several other movie clips featuring women in fur, underlines a somewhat prurient interest in the fabric. Even though the heyday of the (real) fur coat is long gone, the sisters who live - and die - under the mink continue to do so, collateral damage be damned. 

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