Sick of “sad sack” roles, Joan Fontaine struck out for the border with 1947’s Ivy, a pivot away from the passive wallflowers of Rebecca and Suspicion, roles that had made her Hollywood’s biggest star and won her an Oscar, and towards something much ballsier.
She plays Ivy (as in Poison Ivy), a woman in Edwardian Britain who sets her cap at a rich bachelor and decides to make him her husband no matter what’s in her way. Problem one: wealthy Miles Rushworth (Herbert Marshall) is in a long-standing relationship with young Bella Crail (Molly Lamont), and everyone knows they will soon be engaged. Two: Ivy is already married, to Jervis (Richard Ney), a ninny who has lost all his money. And three: Ivy has a lover, Roger (Patric Knowles), who also needs to be dealt with.
So all Ivy has to do is separate Miles from Bella. Then shuck off Roger. And finally rid herself of her ball and chain, Jervis. That’s the film – watching as she sets about her work, a smile on her face and the dutiful wife superficially, but with a cold scheming heart beneath. Can she do it?
It’s a brilliant Fontaine performance, a layered and complex portrait of a character who is agency itself. Nothing really happens in this movie without Ivy doing it. But with a suggestion that Ivy might be mentally unwell – born a psychopath maybe – Fontaine just about keeps us onside as Ivy ruins one life after another, kills a man, fools the authorities, then tries to lie and scheme her way out of the jaws of justice, represented by Cedric Hardwicke as a police inspector.
It’s a film noir shunted backwards into the Edwardian era, emphasised by Daniele Amfitheatrof’s noirish score of descending angular chords, with dark shimmers of harps and pizzicato basses all contributing to the suggestion of murky morality. The director is Sam Wood, best remembered these days for the Marx Brother’s A Night at the Opera but an old hand at dramas such as Goodbye, Mr Chips. Wood had a reputation for being a plodder, and for turning out static films, but he turns lack of movement to his advantage here – the camera as pitiless observer.
He’s also good at keeping the film out of the abyss of melodrama, into which it often wants to slide. Look, for instance, at the courtroom scene, on a set that’s nightmarishly out of Dickens by way of Kafka. Wood keeps it brisk and tight, resisting the urge to overdo it.
Charles Bennett’s adaptation of the Marie Belloc Lowndes novel hands a lot of the work to women at the periphery of the action – Sara Allgood as Roger’s maid Martha, Rosalind Ivan as Ivy’s maid, Emily, and Lucile Watson as Roger’s mother, who gets some tense hand-wringing scenes against Joan Fontaine. The plot turns on Ivy and these women she hasn’t reckoned on, with Hardwicke’s implacable inspector acting as a go-between connecting up all three. The largely inconsequential Miles Rushworth, played by Herbert Marshall (did he ever get the girl?), adds to the impression that this isn’t one for the chaps.
The race-against-time Death Row finale adds a touch of cliched urgency as the inspector eventually starts to test his suspicions about the guilt or innocence of various parties, and the way the inspector finally comes up with the evidence that will change everything is probably the only truly “oh come on” moment in what’s otherwise been a very carefully and neatly plotted crime drama.
If none of that works for you, watch it for the tailored gowns Fontaine wears, or the cinematography by Russell Metty. He’s one of the greats and shot Touch of Evil for Orson Welles, The Misfits for John Huston and Imitation of Life for Douglas Sirk. This was the first film by Rampart Productions, Fontaine’s own company, and she’s clearly determined to get everything right.
Box office success is another thing, though. The film wasn’t a hit, and so Fontaine tacked again, returning the following year with Letter from an Unknown Woman – a partial return to the fragrant wallflower roles that Ivy was meant to rescue her from. A girl’s got to pay the bills.
Ivy – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
