Lewis Milestone (1946)
There’s a famous scene in Dark Victory (1939) in which the doomed protagonist, played by Bette Davis, climbs a flight of stairs. The music for the film was composed by Max Steiner. Legend has it that Davis insisted to the director, Edmund Goulding: ‘Either I’m going to climb those stairs or Max Steiner is going to climb those stairs but I’ll be damned if we’re going to climb those stairs together’. A grand staircase is central to the opening scenes of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and the actors on it have competition from not only Miklós Rózsa’s overexcited music but also the visual and sound effects of the major Hollywood storm raging outside. Yet the big impression made by this hyperbolic overture makes sense: what happens to the three principal characters on the night of the storm, when they’re still teenagers, governs the rest of their lives.
The opening events of the story take place in 1928, in Iverstown – a Pennsylvania factory town named for the place’s major employer, the Ivers family. The three teenagers are the orphaned Martha Ivers (Janis Wilson), who lives under the guardianship and the thumb of her rich aunt (Judith Anderson); Sam Masterson (Darryl Hickman), a penniless, streetwise boy who’s about to leave town; and Walter O’Neil (Mickey Kuhn), the conscientious, rather dreary son of Martha’s tutor (Roman Bohnen). After Martha’s initial plan to run away with Sam is thwarted, they make a second attempt, with the assistance of Walter, until the aunt realises what’s afoot and interrupts their escape. For good measure, she sets about Martha’s adored pet cat with a walking cane, as Sam slips out of the dark house unnoticed. (The storm has caused a power cut.) Infuriated, Martha grabs the cane and uses it to hit her aunt, causing her to fall down the staircase to her death. Martha insists to Mr O’Neil that an intruder was responsible. Walter, who witnessed what happened, keeps mum. His father subdues his own suspicions and confirms Martha’s story to the police.
Seventeen or so years later, Sam Masterson (Van Heflin), now a roving gambler, has a minor accident on the Iverstown road and returns to his home town to get his car repaired. Sam looks up the place where he used to live, which is now a boarding house. He gets into conversation with a young woman sitting on the steps outside. She is Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott), newly released from jail and killing time before she catches a bus out of Iverstown. She and Sam go for a drink, and Toni doesn’t get her bus: shortly afterwards, she’s picked up by the police for violating the terms of her probation by having failed to return to her home town. Sam decides to petition the district attorney for Toni’s release. The DA is currently standing for re-election and Sam has seen from posters that he’s none other than Walter O’Neil (Kirk Douglas). Sam also learns that Walter is married to the former Martha Ivers (Barbara Stanwyck), who has put the money she inherited from her aunt to good use. Martha heads up what’s now a thriving business empire. The O’Neils’ marriage is not a happy one. Martha married Walter under pressure from the latter’s father, who threatened to reveal to the police how Martha’s aunt really died. In spite of his elected office, Walter knows that Martha despises him just as she did when they were teenagers. Years after the aunt’s death, the police arrested one of her former employees on suspicion of being the ‘intruder’ at the mansion during the storm: Martha and the O’Neils, father and son, gave evidence to convict this man and send him to his death. Both Martha and Walter are under the misapprehension that Sam saw what happened on the staircase (in fact he’d already left the premises) and suspect that he’s returned to Iverstown to blackmail them. Otherwise, their feelings about him are very different: as the anxious, jealous Walter realises, Martha’s teenage passion for Sam is rekindled the moment she sees him again.
Robert Rossen’s dialogue is drily witty and particularly enjoyable for its associative quality – stuff about hotel rooms, Gideon Bibles and Lot’s wife, for example. Rossen’s script derives from a story written directly for the screen by John Patrick, called ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ – which draws attention to the film’s slightly puzzling title: what’s so strange about Martha’s love? At just under two hours, the picture takes a little too long to work through its romantic and suspenseful permutations, to pay out the wages of sin to Martha and Walter, and to confirm Sam as the one who got away – but this noir melodrama is absorbing. The title character is a combination of femme fatale and successful businesswoman and, because Barbara Stanwyck was famous for playing both types, highly convincing. I’m no expert in film noir but what seemed to me unusual about Martha Ivers was its explicit explanation of what turns an innocent girl into a formidable designing woman. The teenage Martha is variously wronged by her vicious aunt and lashes out at her for good reason. The ordinary-looking face of Janis Wilson stays with you and gives a vulnerable, poignant substrate to the adult Martha. That’s important because, impressive as Stanwyck is, her Martha is less individual than some of her other characters, at least in the fatale aspect. She’s more striking as the hard-headed, pragmatic businesswoman and as a wife whose only feeling for her husband is contempt. The two things fuse in a sequence in which Martha dresses Walter’s injured hand, after he’s made a clumsy, failed attempt to get rid of Sam – Stanwyck is stunningly matter-of-fact and cold-hearted here.
Walter O’Neil was Kirk Douglas’s first screen role. Of course it’s impossible to see him in it as the film’s original audience did, and not to think that Douglas is seriously miscast as an alcoholic weakling who bores his wife stiff. It’s especially hard to agree with Sam when he sees Walter’s re-election posters and remarks to Toni, ‘Don’t you think he still looks like a frightened little boy?’ Besides, there isn’t a believable connection or (as there is with Janis Wilson and Barbara Stanwyck) dramatic disconnection between the teenage and adult versions of Walter. Even so, Kirk Douglas is more subtly compelling than you might expect: there are moments when, remarkably, he succeeds in looking physically weak. The best performance in Martha Ivers comes from Van Heflin. When Sam Masterson first arrives back in Iverstown, the melodramatic pressure eases and the tempo changes: this is thanks not only to Lewis Milestone’s direction but also to Heflin’s dictating the rhythm. As he first talks and gets to know Toni, the viewer gets to know Sam and gets interested in him: Heflin’s undemonstrative but expressive acting supplies the human heart of the story. He’s also highly entertaining. To prepare for playing a gambler, he learned a coin trick and developed a great shadow movement with the fingers of his right hand. (This movement is so striking that eventually it’s imitated by a man who briefly finds himself in Sam’s company.) Lizabeth Scott is best in her early scenes with Heflin. She has a beautiful face and a distinctive husky voice but she’s not able to animate her lines or her character to anything like the extent that Stanwyck, Douglas and Heflin do. You rarely get a sense of the raw, urgent need that’s surely an essential part of Toni Marachek. In the short time she’s on screen, Judith Anderson is expert as the deservedly ill-fated aunt.
1 September 2016
