Damsel in distress getting killed

[phouka]

In The Dark Knight, the Joker kidnaps Rachel, the assistant DA and love interest for both Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent. Batman beats the information out of the Joker and rushes to her rescue . . .

only to discover that the Joker had sent him to where Dent (who’d also been captured) was being held. The bombs at both locations expode. Dent is horrible injured, and Rachel is killed outright.

[Dendarii_Dame]

In the novella Borders of Infinity, by Lois McMaster Bujold, Miles infiltrates a prison camp. He gets everyone out on shuttle craft, except for one prisoner, Tris, who slips from his grip. In a later book, he realizes that if she hadn’t, she would have pulled him out and they both would have died.

[jehan]

@SkeptiJess

The one I thought of was the Four Musketeers, from back in the '70s. Constance (played by Raquel Welsh) is killed by Milady DeWinter. As I recall it, the heros were fighting their way to her, and arrived just barely not in time to save her. But I haven’t seen the movie in years (possibly decades) so I may be remembering it wrong.

You are correct. That version of the story was one of the few movie versions that actually followed the plot in Dumas’ book.

[tim-n-va]

Between “A Boy and His Dog” and “City on the Edge of Forever” it sounds like Harlan Ellison is not kind to his damsels in distress.

[Eutychus]

Brazil.

It’s only implied in the theatrical version, but if I recall, in the extended version it is mentioned that Jill Layton was killed in the machine gun blast that occurred when they came to take Sam.

[Sam_A.Robrin]

Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
The landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
[Who] watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

[Kenm]

Pearl White and such other [del]quicksand magnets[/del] fair damsels created the meme. (1:47 mark.)

It’s not quite legit, however, because no hero rides to her rescue; she was left to her own devices. The cads!

I broke a promise to myself to never use “meme.”

[Toxgoddess]

On the TV series Lost, teenage Alex was captured by the mercenaries sent to kill her adoptive father Ben. They have a gun to her head and demand he surrendur. In an attempt to bluff, he tells them “She’s not really my daughter, go ahead and shoot her.” So they do. The horrified look on his face afterwards shows he never thought they’d actually do it.

[Roderick_Femm]

@Otto

Buckaroo Bonzai: [spoiler]Buckaroo rescues Penny Priddy from the evil Red Lectroids and otherwise saves the day, only to learn that Penny did not survive her injuries.

However, the good Black Lectroids bring her back to life, commenting “so what? Biiig deal.”[/spoiler]

Maybe she was

only mostly dead.

Roddy

[The_Peyote_Coyote]

In Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife, the hero fails, by a minute, to save his wife from a terrible fate. I understand they made two movies from this though I’ve never seen either of them.

[Der_Trihs]

I recall a sci-fi novel called IIRC Peacekeepers where a terrorist group whose leader has a nuke wired to a deadman switch (his heart stops, it goes off) captures a female Peacekeeper and they use threats to her so the protagonist surrenders to them. When he discovers she’s already been raped & beaten to death he uses a concealed weapon to fatally wound the terrorist leader, and has just enough time to say to the shocked leader “Did you think you were the only one willing to die for his beliefs?” before the bomb goes off.

@tim314

I came in here to post that one! I think this is also what inspired the scene from the first Spiderman movie, but unlike Gwen Stacy, Mary-Jane survives. Kind of ironic, since I’m pretty sure the comic writers killed Gwen to make more room for the Spidey-MJ relationship.For me, the awesome thing about that comic is that they actually get the physics right. It’s true what they say, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end. Or rather, it’s the suddenness of the stop at the end. I can’t count the number of comics where someone falls from a great height only to be caught by the hero an inch before they hit the ground. Just once I would like to hear Superman say “Yeah, I could catch that falling baby, but there isn’t room left to decelerate him before impact.” Splat!

I recall many years ago watching a scene where Superman stops a train and commenting to my brother "I can see the headline now; ‘SUPERMAN STOPS TRAIN! HUNDREDS REDUCED TO JELLY!’ "

[Push_You_Down]

@Gorsnak

The OP seems to be asking for a somewhat different scenario - one in which the hero has the opportunity to save the damsel, and attempts to do so but fails. The Cliffhanger scene jumped to my mind immediately, but since it’s right at the beginning of the movie, and Sly goes on to succeed where he failed the first time I’m not sure it really counts. Did anyone really think the later scene would turn out the same way? The hero actually failing in an attempt to save the damsel is going to be much less common I think.

I think it’s trumped by being an example of “Initial Failure/Eventual Success” cliche (called by my friends A “Space Camp”). Sure she is A damsel in distress… but not THE damsel in distress.

[GrandWino]

Does “Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog” qualify?

[Horatio_Hellpop]

Teri Hatcher in Tomorrow Never Dies and Aki (“Poison drip girl”) in You Only Live Twice. In addition to the many other Bond girls mentioned, I think Sir James is a trifle overrated as an action hero.

Also: Sally McMillan in McMillan and Wife (thereafter just McMillan).

[Horatio_Hellpop]

And if there’s ever a “dead moms” thread, tuck these away for future use: Joyce in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Andie McDowell in Unstrung Heroes, Edith Bunker on All in the Family and Ashley Judd in Simon Birch.

[Evil_Captor]

@Push_You_Down

I think it’s trumped by being an example of “Initial Failure/Eventual Success” cliche (called by my friends A “Space Camp”). Sure she is A damsel in distress… but not THE damsel in distress.

Which is why I call 'em “red shirt damsels.”

[jali]

@Sam_A.Robrin

Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
The landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
[Who] watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

I read this poem over and over as a pre-teen.

[Malthus]

@Evil_Captor

I don’t think you’re going to find many instances of damsels killed during or just prior to rescues because that runs counter to the whole dramatic point of the rescue. In real life, damsels get killed all the time. Most entertainment are designed to give us all a little relief from grim reality, so the damsel tends to get rescued a lot so we can enjoy the vicarious pleasure of seeing the damsel rescued.

There IS a species of damsel who gets killed regularly, they’re what I’d call “red shirt” damsels and they occur most often in horror movies and in cop shows where the perp is a serial killer.

In horror movies, the red shirt damsel is generally a not-so-well developed character who undergoes whatever horrible experience(s) the horror movie offers so the audience will be horrified as the (hopefully) well-developed character of the female lead finds herself increasingly likely to undergo said horrible experience, whether it’s being eaten by a giant snake/spider/whatever or being put in the pit with the pendulum.

In cop shows with serial killers, there’s almost always a damsel, generally a not well developed character, killed early on by the serial killer so as to establish the urgency of the problem when the main damsel is captured by the serial killer.

I have seen some cop shows, such as CSI or LawnOrder, where the serial killer offs several red shirt damsels prior to capturing the main damsel, and I’m pretty sure that in one or two cases rescue was imminent just before the second or third red shirt damsel was killed, but I can’t remember offhand which episodes they’d be. There have been so many of them and they’ve been such a blur.

The problem for red shirt damsels in horror movies and cop shows with regard to the OP’s scenario is that rescue is rarely imminent for them – their dramatic purpose is to establish how horrible the main damsel’s fate will be if she isn’t rescued, and there’s no need to mount a dramatic rescue attempt to do that.

What about the Hitchcock classic Psycho? In that case, the director has some fun with this, because the audience doesn’t know that the first woman (played by Janet Leigh) is really a “red shirt”, and assumes she isn’t because the story has centred on her initially.

[Morbo]

@Krokodil

Teri Hatcher in Tomorrow Never Dies and Aki (“Poison drip girl”) in You Only Live Twice. In addition to the many other Bond girls mentioned, I think Sir James is a trifle overrated as an action hero.

And Vesper Lynd in both versions of Casino Royale, and of course his wife Tracy di Vicenzo in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

[Evil_Captor]

@Malthus

What about the Hitchcock classic Psycho? In that case, the director has some fun with this, because the audience doesn’t know that the first woman (played by Janet Leigh) is really a “red shirt”, and assumes she isn’t because the story has centred on her initially.

It’s a great example of a master at work, using the audience’s expectations about a character to make her death more shocking.