The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) is a high period film noir telling a complex tale of love, weakness, criminality and fateful meetings. 

As in the mode of any high grade film noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) speaks of the past and its characters' inability to escape it. 

In fact the characters in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) seems to exist around one moment in the past, a fateful once when Martha Ivers committed a murder as young girl.

Everything else in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) is about what this murder brings about, creating a drama of many parts, fixedly rooted in one fateful and distant moment.

Moreover, it's a complex film — not a classic love triangle story, but something more akin to a love parallelogram.

The original Mrs Ivers, who suffers the murder in the film's opening act, is an elitist and insufferable bully of a matriarch. The resulting heir, Martha Ivers, has everything a person could want in terms of wealth and power, but seeks only freedom and escape from the prison of a town that bears her name. 

Lizabeth Scott in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Van Heflin in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) 

Lizabeth Scott in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

 

The characters are complex and flaws are manifest.

Kirk Douglas as Walter O' Neil is a self-loathing weakling who has alcohol as his best friend. He has compromised himself heavily to get hold of two things that it turns out he really didn't want — first the marriage to the wealthy Martha Ivers — and second his role as District Attorney. Even despite his local influence, it still appears that Martha runs his life, and yet this might be because he was never man enough to run it for himself.

Whereas much of noir is about fate and the existential difficulties of being a flawed human in a flawed and corrupt society, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is a film noir which shows characters having already made the descent, and the result is a film which profiles multiple cases of desperation and simultaneous turmoil, from which nobody can escape.

Lizabeth Scott as Toni Marachek is probably the most surprising of all, and the stranger in the mix. Although presented as an innocent and a love interest, she is on the wrong side of the law, and as with Sam (Van Heflin) we're deep in morally ambiguous territory, wondering if these people really could sort themselves out, or if they are congenitally flawed. 

Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Kirk Douglas in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

She plays a former jailbird, who remains in trouble with the law, and like Sam she is sucked into the twisted world of Martha and Walter. Still — unlike the others, Lizabeth Scott's character seems to be looking for something better, and she seems even to be persecuted by the lawmen who have no sympathy for her — she certainly is the most sympathetic of the foursome.

And Van Heflin as Sam Masterson is an ambiguous hero. On one hand he is a problem gambler, something the storytellers decided to show by his constant playing with a coin across his knuckles; and he is also something of a problem drinker. When we meet this guy as an adult he is drunk at the wheel and crashing his car off the road — not much of a hero to be honest. 

Van Heflin and Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

What all of these people have in common is that they have always been broken, and that they have always been destined to fail. None of them will escape from their past, and its this sense of fate whoich hangs over them which make The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) the great film noir it is. There are no other major and visible film noir tropes here, such as the urban detectives

Barbara Stanwyck as Martha Ivers does noir to a complex T. She owns the town and revels in the power of it all, more often in the abstract rather than in practical matters. She loves her power of the town best when looking down on it from the hill at night, or from her office window, where she stands with an electric feeling in her heart.

Better still Barbara Stanwyck as Martha Ivers is turned on by the rough side, requesting to Van Heflin that they have their date in his seedy hotel room, because it thrills her as the sort of scuzzy place she only reads about in novels.

Then in the next scene when she's in the bar, and Van Heflin encounters the thug who had earlier beaten him up, she stays to watch the revenge beating. Even this revenge beating isn't rough enough for her, and when she sidles up to Sam (Van Heflin) after it, she says "you wanted to kill him", even though that is what she clearly wanted, demonstrating a sexual blood lust that is noir of the first water, noir to the core.

There are different types of violence in film as there are in society — there are those who are permitted to commit violence such as soldiers, and in this category are those for whom violence is socially sanctioned — and these are for example, police-people and even business people, and of course sheriffs and other historical authorities. 

Pitted against them are those for whom violence is not socially sanctioned, and they are the criminals and psychopaths, and a general band of rebels and outsiders.

Lizabeth Scott in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Where film noir picks up the ball and runs its hardest are the areas in which the two overlap. Sometimes, and more especially in war films, incredible brutality is sanctioned against those who are marked as the enemy — the Germans and the Japanese in the World War II era. In the case of film westerns, the cinema operated on the understanding that moral people will act defensively and never offensively, and this can help us immediately establish character, motivation and the entirety of a certain story.

A hero's right to kill is never questioned, and this is an interesting factor when the killing is ambiguous as it sometimes is in film noir. There is a certain narrative applicable to film noir as a whole which concerns the rise of the policeman, and although in the broader sense the police tended to be secondary characters in films, this very slowly changed over the course of film noir's golden age, the 1940s and 1950s.

The defining factor which moved the cop from the side-lines and into the spotlight was of course violence and by the time Dirty Harry and The French Connection were made, the police had become the absolute focus of the action, the heroes, and the morally ambiguous and fascination centre of attention.  

Neither of these two films, Dirty Harry and The French Connection, would work however if they featured policemen who followed the rules and did not use violence. 

When violence was introduced into the so-called woman's picture of the 1940s, another pathway was opened. A broad difference in standing already existed between men and women and social roles and cinematic presence, but it is usually argued that World War II empowered women and brought equality through noir insofar as women could become business-people, murderers and detectives too.

It would not be fair to look at the film noir period and say that the cinema treated women poorly, and made of them monsters and harpies driven by list and greed. Film noir was an equal opportunity presenter of moral evil — all it did was usually form separate moral sets for men and women.

Plenty male film noir villains and psychopaths were driven by greed and lust, there isn't any doubt of that. Even some normal working stiffs of noir — like Walter Neff in Double Indemnity — were driven by greed and lust. 

Van Heflin, Barbara Stanwyck and Kirk Douglas in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Therefore it is not film noir that is singling out women, but critics. The fantasies and fears of wartime society were real, and there is no better place to see them on screen than in film noir. But the strong woman is every bit as much a reality as she is a fear, and where as a fantasy maybe seen as a good portrayal — in the mode of the woman as seeker hero or detective — the fear is equally the dark mode, which is the strong woman best represented in the reviled form of the femme fatale. 

To introduce women to the roles of villain in film noir is therefore not to say that women are evil and a subject to be feared. To argue this would of course lead a culture to a point where women could not be portrayed as anything other than heroic, strong, moral and wise. It cannot be held to be true in both ways that for example, Martha Ivers is a demonic portrayal which damns women — and lives up to concocted tropes about cinema-makers and society as a whole demonising women. 

Lizabeth Scott in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

A scheming and materialistic woman such as Martha Ivers in fact is just that — and it becomes difficult in light of these arguments to see that only the character is being demonised and not the entirety of women. But that is what happens.

In a moment of youthful rebellion, a characters murders that character's aunt and then is trapped by the deed —  it could happen to any film noir brute. There follows an irrepressible love of luxury which sees this character living the rest of their life in ironic tribute to their aunt's values. 

This character then becomes a hard, ruthless business person who controls their weakling spouse by depriving them of affection, and then finally this scheming film noir criminal libertine then tries to convince an old childhood flame to murder the spouse.

It would make a great film noir, and it does. Whom however is the man and who is the woman? Money and the drive for success are perfect film noir foils and in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) as in many a film noir production, these are blamed for the amoral and vicious behaviour. The story is known to any film noir fan, as is the moral: violence is the inevitable result of an evil person's ambition.

Only an ideologue or an ill-considering critique-maker would fill in the gender blanks and then go ahead and argue that The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) is a film which damns the female, and if damnation is a factor at all — which it certainly is — it should be observed that Martha damns herself. 

Director Lewis Milestone's pro-Soviet Union film The North Star (1943), which was made at the behest of the US government to encourage American support for its wartime alliance with the USSR against the Axis powers, became a target.

Other pro-Soviet Union wartime films, such as Michael Curtiz's Mission to Moscow (1943), Gregory Ratoff's Song of Russia (1944) and Jacques Tourneur's Days of Glory (1944), were to haunt their creators in the McCarthy era when any hint of sympathy for the Soviet Union was considered subversive to American ideals

Lewis Milestone's alignment with liberal causes such as the Committee for the First Amendment compounded suspicions he harboured pro-communist sentiments during the Red Scare. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) summoned Milestone and other filmmakers for questioning. According to Joseph Millichap:

The Russian-born Milestone, always a liberal intellectual with Leftist inclinations, was a natural target for the witch hunters of the HUAC. As early as November of 1946, Milestone appeared before the committee as an 'unfriendly witness'; in other words, he claimed his constitutional right not to testify. In 1948, the anti-communist writer Myron Fagan implied that Milestone was a Red sympathizer, [a claim made explicit] by Hedda Hopper in her nationally syndicated Hollywood column. Unlike the Hollywood Ten and many others, Milestone was able to keep working.

The effect of the Hollywood blacklist on Lewis Milestone's creative output is unclear. Unlike many of his colleagues, he continued to find work but, according to film critic Michael Barson, the quantity and quality of his work may have been limited through industry "greylisting". Millichap said, "Milestone refused to comment on this side of his life: evidently he found it very painful"

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers on Wikipedia (1946)