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Directed by Lewis Milestone and Written by Robert Rossen
Starring: Barbara Stanwyck
The film begins with a murder on a winding staircase, involving three youths, during a proverbial dark and stormy night. Flash forward twenty years, to a weary rolling stone of a man, Sam Masterson, who left during that violent evening, returning to his hometown Iverston, and to the scene of the crime. During his first day he wrecks his car, meets an even wearier drifter, Toni, and runs into one of his old friends, Walter, who is now the District Attorney.
Walter O’Neil is now a powerful man, running for a higher office and acutely aware that Sam could turn on a dime and reveal their past crime and the cover-up. However, Sam is only interested in helping his new girlfriend, Toni, get out of tangled mess of her own. Enter Barbara Stanwyck, the central character, as Martha Ivers, who has always carried a smoking torch for Sam, and is determined to keep him cozy in Iverston. Well, you get the picture, and the stage is set for plenty of suspense, revenge, double-crosses, twists, and just plain trauma-drama.
Yet, what makes Ivers a classic noir? Two words – Barbara Stanwyck, the undisputed Queen of Classy Noir. Hands-down, The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers belongs hook and fang to her skill as the timeless Spider Woman archetype – ruthless, driven, and amoral – ready to bring down all around her for her own cryptic reasons. It could be for love, and it could just as easily be to savor her undisputed power, or --- ah, but that’s the mystery that *is* the Spider Woman! We just don’t know. But Stanwyck makes it all the more fascinating to watch and savor such sweet exchanges like this:
Sam Masterson: [Recounting the time he was away from Iverstown] That brings us up to my 21st birthday when I became a man officially.
Martha Ivers: How did it feel to become a man - officially?
Sam Masterson: I'd been there before.
Sam Masterson: How did it feel to become a woman, officially?
Martha Ivers: I felt like I'd been there before, too.
Van Heflen’s Sam Masterson is the perfect foil against Kirk Douglas’s Walter, a man who is perfectly content to drown his sorrows in booze while watching his wife, Martha, control every aspect of his life. For every dominatrix must have her submissive, and Walter is only too happy to oblige his autocratic wife, as long as he can occasionally whine about it. Sam and Walter play a long-standing homoerotic game of cat and mouse - subterranean feelings that are perfectly happy to stay simmering.
Rossen’s sub textual theme of sadomasochism – and hence the “strange loves” in the title -reveals itself in the parallel relationships between Martha and Walter, and Sam and Toni. Both Walter and Toni are obviously passive lovers, allowing Martha and Sam to act out their conflicted feelings about loss and abandonment on them throughout the film. Toni at one point even gives Sam permission to physically abuse her, “Go ahead and hit me, Sam. I've got it coming.”
But even an intriguing sexual sub text can’t bring me to give The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers my four-reel Noir seal of approval. First off, Robert Rossen’s brilliant screenplay cops out by having Sam and Toni drive off into the sunset, as he proposes marriage. Sadly, no moment in Noir history feels as false and phony as watching Masterson slip out of character to suddenly pop the question.
The American version of Noir centered on the Spider Woman archetype, which served as not-so-subtle propaganda for working women and their male counterparts returning home from the war. Couldn’t Rosie the Riveter just be happy in her ivy-covered suburban cottage, leaving the decision-making (and jobs!) to her GI Joe? Noir’s warning label on the post-war message for America was skillfully encapsulated in the persona of the Spider Woman – this is what your daughters and wives will become if they continue to do “a man’s work!” The balance of power between Man and Woman are perfectly out of balance in Ivers: Martha runs the town better than any man could and Walter props it up by using the law to justify it. One imagines Walter as the Better Half, docilely awaiting Martha’s return from a hard day of managing Iverston’s Wall Street. Rossen’s false Disneyland ending is typical when the Noir relationship construct consists of two males and two females. Toni Marachek is just another Walter, awaiting her turn at the white picket fence after all.
Secondly, Lizabeth Scott’s sad-sack performance as Toni Marachek is a lackluster jumble of sighs, Pollyanna clichés, and puppy-dog gazes. It’s true that Rossen’s Toni is only serving time in the real world of post-WWII reconstruction until her Sam can masterfully take over her life. (Hence, his last name, Masterson.) Yet most of Lizabeth Scott’s future roles would reflect such one-dimensional expressions. Perhaps Scott’s talents were better suited for television, but by the time Hollywood gave birth to the smaller screen venue, her sexual orientation had already been well-publicized. In retrospect, the character of Toni is a comfortable conservative appendage – hanging around and not really serving any purpose but to give Sam his reason leave Iverson, rescue Toni, and avoid Martha’s compelling spider web of intrigue and sexual power plays.
Such is the tangled world of Noir – ya gotta love it!
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, Kirk Douglas, Van Heflin, Lizabeth Scott, and Dame Judith Anderson.
I've always had a love-hate relationship with the classic noir thriller, The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers. Masterfully directed by veteran director Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front, Of Mice and Men, Mutiny on the Bounty), Ivers captures the essence of noirish cynicism and post WWII angst in spite of its happy-sappy ending and the iffy casting choice of new-comer Lizabeth Scott.
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