The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Hal Wallis Productions, Paramount, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second movie my husband Charles and I watched on Tuesday, February 28 was another entry from the 50-film “Crime Wave” boxed set of public-domain DVD’s, but it was considerably better than House of Mystery (let’s face it: literally watching paint dry would be better entertainment than House of Mystery): The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Charles was curious about how The Strange Love of Martha Ivers slipped into the public domain since it was a production by a major studio (Paramount), with a major producer (Hal B. Wallis, who became an independent producer at Paramount after he walked out of Warner Bros. following the kerfuffle over the Academy Award for Casablanca, which Jack Warner literally grabbed out of Wallis’s hand at the awards ceremony as if it were the baton in a relay race) witha major director (Lewis Milestone), a major writer (Robert Rossen) and a major cast: Barbara Stanwych, Van Heflin, Lizabeth Scott (well, she was never a major star but Hal Wallis clearly thought she was and cast her accordingly), and a young Kirk Douglas making his film debut. It starts out in the Midwestern company town of Iverstown, run by the imperious aunt Ivers (Judith Anderson) – if she has a first name, we never learn it – whose niece Martha tries to run away from her aunt but always gets caught. In the prologue Martha is played by Janis Wilson, and we’re told that Martha is the product of a brief marriage between her mom, a blood Ivers, and her dad, a mill-hand at the Ivers factory named Smith. During one of their arguments Martha insists that her last name is Smith, and her anut says, “No, your last name is Ivers I had it legally changed.” She also tells Martha, “The only good thing your father did for you was die.”

On the proverbial dark and stormy night (so many scenes ubThe Strange Love of Martha Ivers take place during thunderstorms it practically qualifies as Gothic horror as well as film noir), she plots to run away with Sam Masterson (Darryl Hickman), who plans to join the circus, only she’s ratted out by young Walter O’Neil (Mickey Kuhn) and brought back home to her aunt. Walter’s dad (Roman Bohnen) shows up expecting that Aunt Ivers will reward him by paying for his son to go to Harvard, where he plans to study law, the aunt says that she doesn’t care whether he gets to go to Harvard or not. Martha has secretly been keeping a cat, which Aunt Ivers discovers and starts whipping with a riding crop. When Martha sees her doing that she grabs the crop from her hand and starts beating her with it. The ferocity of her blows is so intense that Aunt Ivers takes a header and falls down the house’s big staircase to her death. Rather than call the police, Martha and Walter claim that the aunt’s death was an accident. The estate hires O’Neil to raise Martha until she comes of age. Sam was on the scene but didn’t actually see Martha kill Aunt Ivers. Flash-forward 18 years and Martha, Sam and Walter have grown up to be Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin and Kirk Douglas, respectively. Sam became a professional gambler and bookmaker,and h e happens to be driving through Iverstown when he gets distracted and plows his car into a lamppost. That leaves him stuck in Iverstown for however long it takes for his car to be repaired. Martha Overs is now the ruler of Iverstown – there’s technically a city government but her will is law – and Walter O’Neil is her husband, a practicing attorney running for re-election as D.A. as the first step towards a political career that Martha is determined will vault him to the state governorship and, eventually, the presidency. Only Walter couldn’t be less interested in politics or power; he’s an alcoholic and misses a big radio speech for his campaign that Martha had arranged for him and goes on to deliver in his place.

He got to be a D.A. in the first place by leading the prosecution of a man whom Martha decided to frame for her aunt’s murder – she even perjured herself by identifying him as her aunt’s killer – and he feels guilty about it but Martha, sounding like an Ayn Rand character, says that even if he didn’t kill her aunt he’s no doubt guilty of something and sacrificing his life for theirs was morally O.K. Meanwhile, Sam has encountered a young woman named Antonia “Toni” Marachek (Lizabeth Scott) who was just paroled from jail – presumably for prostitution, though that’s only hinted at in the coy way forced on filmmakers by the Production Code – only a condition of her release was that she return to her home town and the abusive father he ran away from in the first place. The fear of both Martha and Walter is that Sam, who was there the night Martha killed her aunt, is going to rat them out and spoil all their plans. Walter has Toni arrested for violating her parole by returning the bus ticket she’d been provided to go home, and the two start a relationship based on staying in adjoining rooms in the Drake Hotel. Walter blackmails Toni into framing Sam by having a thug pose as Toni’s husband (she’s unmarried for real) and lure him outside a bar, where h e’s put in a car, driven to the outskirts of town and roughed up. Martha sounds more and more like an Ayn Rand heroine as she boasts that when she took over Iverstown the factory was on one lot and employed 3,000 people; now it’s expanded over several acres and employs 30,000. (This harkens back to one of her early roles at Warner Bros., Edna Ferber’s So Big, in which she played a poor woman forced into a loveless marriage with an older farmer; upon his death she builds his farm into a huge agricultural factory by planting asparagus, which her late husband had refused to do.) At one point Martha imperiously barges into Sam’s room, where she catches him with Toni, and when he questions her presence,s he says, “I have special privileges in this hotel. I own it.”

The only thing that can derail her and Walter’s plans for the future is if Sam rats them out about her aunt’s murder, though in factr he didn’t see it happen and only came on the scene later. Not knowing this, Martha blurts out the big secret. She also starts a seduction attempt on Sam, and Walter tells him in the laconic way the Production Code forced on the filmmakers that Sam shouldn’t think he’s the first guy Martha has tricked with. There’s been a long series of them, all plucked from the Ivers factory’s workforce and ultimately rewarded with more prestigious jobs in the Ivers enterprises. In the end Sam and Toni flee town once his car is repaired, while Martha and Walter confront each other and Milestone cuts away so we don’t see what happens, but we hear twu gunshots and realize that Martha and Walter have shot either themselves or each other. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers began as a story by writer John Patrick (billed as “Jack Patrick” in the credits) called Bleeding Heart, and when I mentioned that to Charles the first time we watched this film together, he said, “You mean someone thought The Strange Love of Martha Ivers was actually better?” According to director Milestone, the only part of Bleeding Heart he actually used was the prologue and the whole idea of a prominent person whose position is jeopardized by an old acquaintance returning to town with a dangerous secret. Milestone discussed the film extensively in his interview with Charles Higham and Joen Greenberg for their1969 book The Celluloid Muse, and he said he read Bleeding Heart int hecompany of Robert Rossen and discussed it with him, then agreed to make themovie for Hal Wallis if Rossen were hired to write it.

He also described the cast members: “barbara Stanwyck was a great trouper and was wonderful to work with; so was Judith Anderson, who played the aunt. This was Kirk Douglas’s first picture, and he was obviously new, very anxious to learn and very modest.” Those qualities show through in his performance and help make him believable as the unscrupulous but also weak character he’s playing. I’ve often lamented that, like Burt Lancaster, Douglas rose to stardom so quickly that eventually he could or would only play heroes, even though many of his best early films – including Out of the Past (1947), in which he played a vicious gangster; or Detective Story (1951), in which he was a corrupt cop – cast him as villains. Milestone also disliked working for Hal Wallis; in his interview for The Celluloid Muse he called Wallis “a nuisance” and said that Wallis re-edited the film after Milestone had left the lot. “The problem was not that he wanted to take things out – he wanted to add things,” Milestone said. “After I left, for example, he had someone shoot big, enormous close-ups of Lizabeth Scott, which he proceeded to insert in the picture.” (It’s not hard to see where the inserts came; they occurred during the big dramatic scenes between her and Van Heflin. and though they’re’ not especially distracting they give the scenes between the two an odd start-and-stop quality.) This time around I liked The Strange Love of Martha Ivers quite a bit better than I have before, and I think it was mainly because of the subtle but unmistakable anti-capitalist message which I suspect Robert Rossen inserted into the script (with, according to imdb.com, uncredited help from Frank Capra’s old writing partner, Robert Riskin). If there ever was a movie that illustrated the old saying that behind every great fortune there is a great crime, The Strange Loive of Martha Ivers is it.