The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

In Brief: An odd film from director Lewis Milestone, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) starts off in full-blown gothic-thriller style with a prologue set in 1928 that lasts more than 10 minutes. It’s all shadows and thunder and lightning — and grim Judith Anderson in something akin to her Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca (1940). Melodrama — effective melodrama — rules the scenes that set up the situation governing the rest of the film. Then the story leaps ahead 18 years to 1946 and completely shifts gears into the realm of postwar noir. The shift is sudden, but strangely not jarring, and it leads to one of the most effective and underrated noirs of that classic era. What makes The Strange Love of Martha Ivers so compelling — apart from its curious hybrid nature — lies in the performances. The film has four leads that could scarcely be bettered, even if Kirk Douglas in his film debut is playing a character type he’d never undertake again. At the top of the list, though, is Barbara Stanwyck. This is a femme-fatale performance that even tops the one she gave in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) — if only by force of its complexity. She can go from suggesting suffering innocence to light and humorous to duplicitous schemer with the change of an expression. Much like the characters in the film, the viewer never quite understands how to take her, which is the source of her fascination. This excerpt was taken from a review by Ken Hanke, published on June 2, 2010.