turning back
by Douglas Messerli
Robert
Rossen and Robert Riskin (screenplay, based in a play Love Lies Bleeding by John Patrick), Lewis Milestone (director) The Strange Love of Martha Ivers / 1946
Lewis
Milestone’s film The Strange Love of
Martha Ivers is a wonderful film noir
with an outrageous plot and an utterly meaningless title, particularly since we
are never able to determine what or who it is that Martha Ivers (Barbara
Stanwyck) really loves. Her husband, Walter O’Neil (Kirk Douglas in his very
first on-screen performance) reports that, despite her marriage to him, she has
had numerous other affairs; and we suspect her sudden attraction to her
childhood boyfriend Sam Masterson (Van Heflin) has more to do with protecting
herself from blackmail or just her hatred of her husband than it has to do with
real love.
Certainly she seems to love power, having
used her inheritance from her much-hated aunt (Judith Anderson) to build a
large factory that employs thousands. She has amazingly turned the formerly
sleepy town of Iverstown into a bustling city, and she is determined that,
despite her disinterest in his love, to turn her district attorney husband into
a successful political candidate. When he bows out of a speech due to a
previous appointment with a bottle of scotch, she is quite ready and willing to
speak in his place.
By the end of the film, we might imagine
that Martha Ivers’ real love, which, perhaps, a bit more strange, is death
itself, which she has managed to evade by lying and luck.
For Martha is a child-murderer, having
detested her domineering aunt so much that she has attempted to run away from
home several times with the younger version of Sam (Darryl Hickman). Each time
she is tracked down and brought home by the local police, but this time—the
first long scene of this melodrama—the aunt not only berates her, but attempts
to beat to death the girl’s beloved cat; instinctually, the young Martha (Janis
Wilson) grabs the old woman’s cane and cracks it over her aunt’s head, her
guardian falling down the long mansion’s staircase to her death.
The only problem is that the young Walter
(Mickey Kuhn) has stood above her on the stairs to witness the act and the
young Sam, perhaps seeing what happened, has fled. Fortunately (or
unfortunately) for her, the terrified young Walter backs up her lie about an
intruder who has killed the aunt, and his tutoring and greedy father (Roman
Bohnen) sees a good situation in backing up her story: for the elder O’Neil,
who suspects the truth, it means a wedge he can use against the child to insert
his son into culture and wealth.
Is it any wonder that, years later, the
clever beauty is dissatisfied with her life? Even her perhaps comprehensible childhood
“lie” has been turned into yet another murder, as the police gather up a
stranger and accuse him of the aunt’s murder; Walter and Martha back each other
up again, sending the man to his death.
By the time the somewhat plodding
storytelling of the past is over, we eagerly await for the other shoe to drop.
And sure enough, with a sailor hitchhiker ensconced in his car (a brief
appearance by later film director Blake Edwards) Sam crashes into his fate as
he stares into a sign welcoming him back to his hometown. Evidently, he’s
forgotten that the Pennsylvania berg might be on the map in his journey, as
vaguely puts it, to “the west.”
He’s now, evidentially, a professional
cynic and sometime gambler, but one who’s apparently got a wad of cash in his
back pocket. It’s all very vague, and we have no idea whether to like him or
not. That is until he meets the very down-and-out Toni Marachek (the great film noir beauty Lizabeth Scott): her
lustrous hair and dusky voice (which, evidentially, producer Hal B. Wallis was
so taken with that after Milestone finished he ordered up more close-up
scenes)—despite the fact, as she struggles to tell him, that she has just been paroled from prison—is enough for Sam to
invite her into his hotel; yet we know he’s good, when he doesn’t bother to
share her bed, leaving the passed-out girl to snuggle up under his tucked-up
covers—with dreams of the sailor-boy, we can only wonder?
Throughout this film, Iverstown seems to
be suffering numerous rainstorms, which reiterates its Pottersville-like
quality—the mythically corrupt city of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life of the very same year—suggesting a world
where no one is safe and everyone is out drinking in bars to forget it. Even
the local garage-man to whom Sam takes his car to get repaired is a curmudgeon.
And hardly anyone other than Toni whom Sam encounters might be described as
“nice.” Toni has been given a ticket to get out of town, and her odd refusal to
catch her train or a later bus, puts her in jeopardy for refusing to follow the
rules of parole, and by morning—despite the innocence of their encounter—she is
arrested again and threatened with three more years. Even her original crime,
when we hear it, seems trumped up, something to do with accepting a fur coat
from a former lover.
Sam’s visit to his continually terrified
childhood acquaintance, Walter, as he attempts to plead for help in getting
Toni released leads, in this paranoid world, only to the district attorney’s
certainty that Sam has returned to blackmail him and his wife. His wife’s
apparent pleasure in once again seeing her old friend further stokes his
jealousy. He releases the girl, but demands that she participate in a double-cross,
which leads to Sam’s being beat up by several thugs and left far out of town
for dead.
Yet Sam survives—he’s always been the
toughest boy in town—and returns, bitter about Toni, but fair enough to hear
her out. Once again, she misses her bus, and, even if the skies are not as dark
over Iverstown, its denizens are just as unfriendly, as the well-dressed Martha
swoops down to pick up her self-declared “prize”: Edith Head’s costumes express
volumes, the innocent Toni having selected, with Sam’s money, a new
polka-dotted tie-top and white shorts, while Martha wears a regal and stylish
hooded outfit that she couldn’t have possibly purchased from her own city dress
shops. The scene says everything, and Toni knows it; by the time Sam stumbles
home after his hilltop outing with his old love (repeated in the later film
about small-town secrets, Peyton Place),
she knows that he’s fallen back into a past that could never have been. The
kiss she witnesses from the window of her smoke-filled bedroom sends her
running in the direction which she has so long refused to move.
Strangely, for all of the O’Neils’ fears,
Sam has known nothing of Martha’s involvement with her aunt’s death. Only
Toni’s innocent urging that he look up his family, leads him to discover the
truth of the situation. He has not seen, nor been corrupted by past events; but
is nonetheless implicated no matter what he might say, with the frightened
Walter determined to either pay him off or get rid of him to maintain his own
unbearable status quo.
The final meeting with Walter and Martha
in their redecorated mansion is worthy of later greater melodramatic directors
such as Douglas Sirk, with the suspicious and untrusting Walter fumbling to
kill Sam, and with Sam easily removing the gun from Walter’s weak hands. A few
minutes later, when the drunken Walter stumbles, almost as had Martha’s aunt,
down that grand staircase, Martha suddenly is ready to kill again, demanding,
somewhat as did Regina in The Little
Foxes (another small town drama about dictatorial city leaders of 1941),
that Sam let him die. But Sam is good, and like a sort of Christ, lifts up the
weakling and terrified rabbit, Walter, into his arms, rescuing him from his
wife’s revenge. The romance is over! But perhaps the comedy has just begun.
Martha trains her gun on Sam, threatening
to do him in if he dares to leave her. She might succeed, suggests Sam, if only
this time, once more, Walter will be willing to collaborate her story of home
intrusion.
With things at a standstill, Sam leaves,
as before, but this time forever; while Walter, taking up the gun and embracing
his wife in a rare caress, puts the gun to her head, she acquiescing and even helping
him to pull the trigger. Yes, perhaps her strange love has all along been death.
Hearing the shot, Sam turns back yet
again, as he and Toni have done over and over, only to watch Walter put the gun
into his own chest and shoot once more.
The
past has been rectified, and suddenly, with Toni’s third and final return, he
and she can move off with presumed love. In fact, this film might be described
as a series of backward movements, as both the “outsiders” and the citizens,
turn again and again back into tortured spins. This time, however, Sam warns
Toni, like Lot’s wife, not to look back. Wherever the “west” is, it is not in
Iverstown or the hundreds of other hometowns represented in films throughout
the 1940s as places anyone with good values and love simply had to escape. As
Thomas Wolfe argued, “you can’t go home again.” Well, maybe you can, if just to
rid of the ghosts!
Los Angeles,
April 3, 2016
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