In 1968, a little movie named Pretty Poison took this decades-old formula and gave it a bracing spin. The film’s male character isn’t a typically hard-edged realist, but, rather, an emotionally immature arsonist with an overripe imagination. And in place of the expectedly glamorous, experienced woman, there’s a 17-year-old, honor-roll vixen whose ruthlessness is concealed [...]

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You know the plot—the one in which a tough, smart, cynical man is duped, and perhaps undone, by a beautiful, deceitful, grasping woman—it’s a staple of black-and-white films of the 1940s, pictures that came to be classified as film noir. Mary Astor feigned helplessness to manipulate detective Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941), and [...]

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