The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: D Film: B
A fine Film Noir from Lewis Milestone, The Strange Love
Of Martha Ivers (1946) may have the old Noir convention of making
aggressive femininity linked to and related to criminal behavior, something the
Neo-Noirs of the 1970s took apart, but the film has many other things still
going for it that makes it hold up today, now on its 60th
Anniversary. After the film begins with
an elongated opening of an ugly event from the past that cost someone their
life, way back in 1928, it finally resumes in 1946. The present day offers the now-grown Martha (Barbara Stanwyck)
will, like all Noir characters, experience a return of the repressed.
Future directing great Robert Rossen wrote the screenplay
based on the Jack Patrick story about that title character and how the Ivers
name is all over the town and IS the town.
How that in itself is as inescapable as some sort of fate. Martha’s real last name is not Ivers, but
was “legally changed” as such to essentially ethnically cleanse her from her
natural past, yet she clings on to the memory of her natural father who died
years ago. By 1946, she has married
Walter P. O’Neil (Kirk Douglas in his debut role) who is District Attorney of
the town. Van Heflin plays the adult
version of her young friend who knows her darkest secret. Will it stay that way, or will more lives be
destroyed or lost? Lizabeth Scott also
stars and has a more prominent role, while Douglas plays an alcoholic. An appropriately weird ending to a Noir a
little more melodramatic than average, but at least a minor classic of the
genre that Hollywood did not create.
The 1.33 X 1 image is from a good print and looks even
better than Paramount’s DVD of Sunset Boulevard, a film from four years
later. The camerawork of Victor Milner,
A.S.C., is impressive and this DVD does a great job of representing that. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is not bad either,
being pretty clean and clear for its age as well. The Miklos Rozsa score is a plus, as usual. The combination is pretty good, though it is
unfortunate they have a copy this good and no extras.
- Nicholas Sheffo
