Strange Love of Martha Ivers Review

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

As I began to watch more and more films I became aware of the genres or categories they could fall in. A very special genre that appeals to me is film noir (literally, “black film”) we owe this term to the French who discovered the films immediately following WWII – you will remember they were occupied since 1940 – 45 so they had no access to Hollywood product during those years – but when the back log arrived in their theaters they noticed similarities in many of the films that appealed to their innate love for analysis, thus they compared them to the pulp fiction detective novels by James Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler that were popular before the war. These dime novels were called serie noir and it was only a short leap to call the films based on them film noir.

The French noticed common characteristics such as black and white; urban settings; interior locations; questionable motives; dark protagonists; crime; and a new type of character: the femme fatale – a woman who usually induces the protagonist to get himself killed or thrown in jail by promising her – but giving up nothing. She is out for number 1, just like he is. This fatalism was a new wrinkle in movie making and is probably the most pervasive attribute of real deep down film noir.

The directors of these films like John Ford, John Huston, Howard Hawks, and Anthony Mann were simply making do with what they could get in the wartime shortages. Cheap film stock, potboiler scripts, interior locations and day-for-night shooting were all they could manage in those economically challenged times. Yet the psychological darkness is what appealed to the French, and still appeals to the film noir aficionado today.

The heyday of film noir ran roughly in the twenty years between 1940 and 1960. There have been homages to the genre from time to time but just remember the fatalism – if you want real film noir you can’t have a happy ending; at least not very often.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers starred an interesting quartet of players with Kirk Douglas making his screen debut as Martha’s milquetoast husband. Martha was played by film noir icon Barbara Stanwyck, whom you will remember played the femme fatale in Double Indemnity two years before. Van Heflin plays a guy just passing through town and Lisbeth Scott (a low rent Lauren Bacall clone) plays a girl that gets Van into trouble, in fact she just got out of prison.

The story opens something like 15 years before when the town of Iverstown was owned by Martha’s aunt (Judith Anderson). This was a company town, the company EP Ivers, and the aunt owned the whole kit and caboodle. It turns out that one dark night Auntie gets killed and Martha and the boy Walter (Kirk Douglas) sees how it happened. We flash ahead to the present and Van Heflin, Martha’s long absent teenage beau is just driving thru Iverstown when he has a wreck. It’s a rainy night and the shop will not look at it until morning so he tries to get a hotel and meets Toni Marachek (Lisabeth Scott). They have a drink and she gets him to admit he knows the town. There is a lot of meandering plotting and we learn that Barbara Stanwyck and Kirk Douglas are now married. You will remember they were the teens that saw what happened when Auntie died. The plot meanders around some more and there are beatings, roustings, and harassment of the second couple, while the real buzz is generated between veteran actress Barbara Stanwyck and the newly minted actor Kirk Douglas. Barbara plays a strong bitchy woman, much like her deceased aunt, that owns the town and her pansy husband, whom she has made town District Attorney. He in his self pity has become a hopeless alcoholic and he plays it right to the nines. Kirk Douglas is almost a total antithesis of the strong he-man characters he would specialize in for the rest of his career. Here he very convincingly portrays a weepy intellectual drunkard that comes through occasionally with flashes of brilliance. OK, I won’t spoil it for you, but there is a dire ending just so you know.

The director was Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front) with dark cinematography by Victor Milner and scoring by Miklos Rosza. The score is lush and almost overpowering except it stops every once in a while and that is where the emphasis is. It is almost a reverse or against type scoring, so it works pretty well after all as a score. The movie as a whole is dark and gothic and probably should have been edited down a bit to bring up the pace a bit.

Up till recently only available in bargain basement pressings by public domain publishers, now the Paramount DVD is presented in Black and White, in 1.33:1 format, and 116 minutes. The movie is pristine and you will get to see it like the audience did in 1946. Even the off brand public domain versions like those offered by Alpha are pretty good, so take a look if you get a chance.