What exactly is so strange about the love of Martha Ivers in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers? Unfortunate, maybe? Random, perhaps? Convenient, possibly? Strange – not so much. But then that is this noirish, gothic 1946 melodrama all over, promising much and not quite delivering.
It’s largely remembered these days as the film debut of Kirk Douglas, who plays the husband of Barbara Stanwyck’s Martha Ivers, whose birth name was Smith, by the way, and whose married name is O’Neil, and so isn’t really an Ivers at all.
But before all of that, first a preamble brilliantly setting the scene for what’s to follow. A young Martha (played winningly by Janis Wilson) is trying to run away to the circus with poor rapscallion and childhood sweetheart Sam Masterson (Darryl Hickman). But she’s apprehended by the police, who take her back to her adoptive aunt, Mrs Ivers (Judith Anderson, two years on from Rebecca and playing another tyrant), such a big wheel in this town that Iverstown is named after her family.
Against a backdrop of recrimination, guttering candles, dark shadows and an ominous Miklós Rózsa score, Mrs Ivers is soon dead, leaving Martha in the frame for her murder. But it’s covered up by her live-in tutor, Mr O’Neill (Roman Bohnen), and his son, the prissy, do-goody Walter (Mickey Kuhn). The entire plot hangs on whether Sam also witnessed what really went down that fateful night. Unlike Martha he did manage to run away to the circus and it’s strongly suggested that he didn’t witness anything at all, though Martha and Walter evidently both think he did.
None of that matters until 18 years in the future, when Sam (now played by Van Heflin) is back in the town he came from quite by accident. He’s surprised to discover that Martha (Stanwyck) has inherited her aunt’s wealth. He’s even more surprised that she is now married to Walter (Douglas), who has risen to become the local district attorney thanks to his wife’s string-pulling.
It’s a marriage based not on love but on their shared secret, but Sam doesn’t know that. For their part, Martha and Walter are convinced Sam is back on the scene for nefarious reasons and is there to blackmail them. Complicating all this is the fact that Martha still carries a torch for Sam, her equal in gumption if not social status. But it’s not reciprocated, and in any case Sam has just met a sparky blonde, Toni (played by Lizabeth Scott), who is from his side of the tracks and seems like the sort of gal a professional gambler like Sam could have some fun with.
Throughout the production, Stanwyck worried that Scott was going to steal her limelight, fears that turned out to be based on something more than insecurity. After director Lewis Milestone had wrapped, producer Hal Wallis went back and shot extra scenes with Scott. Wallis intuited, as did Stanwyck, that the film is lopsided. While the psychology is all weighted towards Martha and Walter, with questions about identity (her name, his status as a kept man), the interesting characters, those who have nuance and develop as the story progresses, are Sam and Toni.
Sam and Toni are also emblematic. They stand for meritocratic, decent America. Sam even gets a speech in which he tells Toni that he doesn’t like being pushed around and… “I don’t like anybody to get pushed around” – how can elitist, compromised Walter and Martha compete with the embodiment of the country just back from fighting the Second World War?
On top of that Scott is particularly good at playing slightly broken women, and Heflin has brought his A game as the raffish charmer (he could be a bit wan). Faced with all of that, there’s not much that Stanwyck and Douglas can do, though it must be said that they give it their best shot.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
