THE latest Hollywood film to show modern life as a jungle is titled “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” and is a jolting, sour, engrossing work. It deals with four people who have lived cataclysmic, laughterless lives since they were babies. There is Martha (Barbara Stanwyck), who likes to steal, run away from home, murder and hammer her victims with clubs; her husband (Kirk Douglas), who is wracked by guilt because he is made an accomplice in Martha’s evil doings, and is further tormented by her promiscuity with life-guard types and lack of yen for him; a gambler (Van Heflin) and a girl just released from the pen (Lizabeth Scott), who act as if there were no evil that hadn’t been imposed on them. More and more movies are turning up which show life as constantly hair-raising—an affair of hard knocks, hard drinking, hard smoking, sadism, greed, unhappy marriages, bad parents, bad district attorneys, seedy hotel rooms. They are on the right path in trying to show modern life as a battlefield, but they make each second of living more violent than seems possible. The harrowing insecurity of people’s lives runs to double suicides, gangsterism and blackmail instead of the quieter, more subtle destructions that only drive them to psychiatrists. Too much of “Martha Ivers” seems synthetic; but it is unusual in its power to upset you one way or another—by violent acts conceived with imagination, uninhibited acting, and the fact that it is directed and written so that there are no loose ends or lagging. Its gaudy people are ten times more arresting than those in the average picture.
The movie is concerned with numerous love affairs among the four central characters. The most gripping relationship is the one-sided affair between Martha and her loving, alcoholic husband, in which both Miss Stanwyck and Douglas give successful characterizations of people who suffer inwardly a great deal and are involved in a negative marriage. Kirk Douglas is especially good for his voice, beseeching and miserable, and there is one extraordinary scene with the two of them hurt and shouting at each other at once that is as painful as it is convincing. The chaotic scenes are written with unusual ability and are directed so well that they boil and seethe as movie scenes rarely do.
The hero in “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” is a character with more personalized details and complexities than any that has turned up in American movies this year; his actions are unpredictable, erratic and impulsive. Basically Sam Masterson is something of a cliché movie character—the cynical tough guy who is on to everything and as pleased as punch with himself—generally played these days by Dane Clark, John Garfield, Zachary Scott. And usually this character gets on one’s nerves with his self-pity and the too frequent implication that the world has done him wrong. Van Heflin, in an extraordinary job of acting, gives the role a meatiness and individuality that it’s never had before. His Masterson wallows in amazing conceit and scorn. He’s not only superior to everyone, but gives the feeling that he must stand apart from them, too. With all of his mannerisms, Heflin makes Masterson an unusually alert person and, strangely enough, a rather sensitive one.
The movie has too much the quality of the sensational stories in the Hearst Sunday Magazine section. The photography (Victor Milner’s), which is soft and shiny, is more suited to a wispier, pleasanter subject. It makes every detail seem unimportant because the lighting is so confused and the details so blurred. I don’t remember a recent A-budget production that exhibited such indifferent art work. Most of the time the brickwork, billboards, bus-terminal entrance look as if they were whipped up by apprentice carpenters at the studio, and the gingerbread that covers Martha’s mansion filched from your nearest theatre. But every now and then some wonderful, bizarre item turns up in a scene—like the regal blanket in the drab hotel room, or the ghost-white Lord and Taylor slip worn by Miss Scott the day she gets out of the pen. Incidentally, I have never seen a movie so given over to people stocking up on cigarettes, lighting them, stubbing them out, throwing them on the floor, studying them. Sometimes it looked like a busy day at the Chesterfield plant.
The whole job is of the punchy type Clifford Odets turns out in which you feel actors, writers, director worked pretty impetuously and felt like trying almost anything to hold your attention. It is a technique that turns out movies with fire and stuff, and generally I’m all for it. “Martha Ivers” is exciting, though it has odds and ends from every non-musical Warners made in the early thirties.
Other recent movies I liked are “The Big Sleep,” “The Killers” and “The Stranger.”
September 9, 1946