With the Code being enforced, Hollywood films entered an era of symbolism and subtext. The forties and fifties would birth the femme fatale trope, an untrustworthy woman who used her beauty to seduce, trick, and even murder men for money. The femme fatale is synonymous with film noir, a term devised by French film critics to amalgamate the postwar thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s that centered morally complex detectives, devious women, and dangerous criminals. These films were visually moody, as morally ambiguous as the times that spawned them. They were tragedies masquerading as potboilers,
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