The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

I saw the 1946 Hal Wallis production The Strange Love of Martha Ivers many years ago but remember absolutely nothing about it so seeing it now on Blu-Ray it’s all new to me.

The setting is a small town, Iverstown. We begin with a prologue. It is 1928. Young Martha Ivers is a poor little rich girl living with her sadistic tyrannical aunt. The aunt’s lawyer O’Neil is hoping for a share of the riches to send his bookish timid son Walter to Harvard.

Martha has run away yet again, aided by abetted by young Sam Masterson who shares Martha’s desire for freedom and adventure. Once again Martha gets caught. Then tragedy strikes but maybe it’s good luck for Martha and for the weaselly Walter.

Twenty years later Sam Masterson (Van Heflin) just happens to suffer car troubles and ends up back in Iverstown. He hasn’t seen the place since 1928.

Sam meets an interesting blonde, Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott). It’s a pickup, of a sort. Toni has a bus to catch but now that she’s met Sam the bus doesn’t interest her. She wonders if he would object to having a passenger when his car is repaired and he leaves Iverstown. When Lizabeth Scott makes a suggestion like that you don’t say no.

Toni is fascinating, vulnerable, troubled, lonely and desperate. The kind of gal you just know is going to lead you into a whole world of trouble but Sam doesn’t care. He doesn’t even care when she tells him she’s just been released from prison.

Martha now owns and controls Iverstown and she owns and controls Walter (Kirk Douglas). Walter is now the DA but he takes his orders from Martha.

Walter seems much too worried about Sam’s reappearance. Sam finds this puzzling.

Sam, Toni, Martha and Walter are soon caught in an intricate web of jealousy, suspicion, betrayal, guilt and fear. Fear of the past. In their own ways they’re all haunted by the past. It’s also a web of misunderstandings. None of then know as much as the others fear they do.

There are plot twists but it’s the character twists that are most interesting.

These are complicated people with tangled motivations which they themselves don’t fully understand. They’re unpredictable because they themselves have no idea what they’re going to do next.

These are people who might be evil, or mad, or weak, or deluded or just selfish. There are no straightforward heroes or heroines but also no straightforward villains or villainesses.

It’s interesting to see Kirk Douglas playing a weak, cowardly failure of a man. He’s dangerous in the way that cowards are always dangerous.

Van Heflin gives a nicely nuanced performance.

Lizabeth Scott is excellent. Barbara Stanwyck is at the top of her game. You figure one of these two will be the femme fatale, but which one?

This film is at best marginally film noir. It lacks the noir aesthetic. It’s more of a cruelly twisted melodrama than a noir. It does have some noir touches however so if you want to consider it film noir you can.

Either way The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is an extremely good extremely interesting movie.

It’s on Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber.

Too Late for Tears (1949)

Too Late for Tears is a 1949 film noir B-feature that may well be the ultimate bad girl movie. And since the bad girl in question is played by Lizabeth Scott you can rest assured you’re in for a wild ride. What more could you ask for in a seedy B noir? Well her co-star is Dan Duryea, so that wild ride is going to be very wild indeed.

It has a crackerjack opening. A very ordinary couple, Jane and Alan Palmer (Lizabeth Scott and Arthur Kennedy), are driving on a lonely country road. A car passes them and something is thrown the back seat of the Palmers’ car. That something is a bag. Inside the bag is money. Lots and lots of money.

Apart from being totally illegal it should be obvious that it would be incredibly stupid even to consider the idea of keeping the money. But that is what Jane Palmer intends to do. The idea of turning the money over to the police never even occurs to her.

So immediately we know several extremely important things about Jane Palmer. She is prepared to do absolutely anything for money, and she is crazy.

Alan thinks they should turn the money over to the police. Jane convinces him that they should just hold on to it for a little while. They won’t spend it and of course eventually they’ll give it to the police but surely it won’t do any harm to hide it away somewhere for a for weeks. Just to know it’s there. It’s an obviously crazy idea but Alan gives in, because there’s no point in doing anything else where Jane is concerned. She’s the kind of woman who always gets her way.

Things start to get worrying when Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea) turns up on the doorstep. He informs Jane that the money us his and he’d like it back.

Now Jane starts to try to work out some way in which she can string Danny along without giving him the money. Danny is obviously a hoodlum and he’s obviously extremely dangerous but Jane wants that money. What Danny doesn’t realise at first is that Jane is a whole lot crazier than he is, and she’s a whole lot more dangerous because she combines craziness with breathtaking audacity.

Things get further complicated by a little matter of murder but that’s not the sort of thing to worry Jane. What does worry her is her sister-in-law Kathy (Kristine Miller). Kathy never approved of Jane and now she’s becoming suspicious that something is going on. Alan’s old army buddy Don Blake has also turned up at a very inconvenient moment.

Things are awkward enough but then the money kind of gets misplaced. Or at least the baggage check ticket gets misplaced and without that ticket getting the money will be a challenge.

Meanwhile Jane sees other complications arising and decides they need to be dealt with. Dealt with in a drastic, and final, manner. What’s amusing is that Jane is a suburban housewife and Danny is a gangster but he’s starting to get scared of her. Not physically scared perhaps, but scared of her unpredictability and her ruthlessness. And maybe he’s a bit scared physically as well. She’s the kind of dame who would cheerfully shoot a guy if it seemed to be in her interests to do so. Danny is kind of mean and he’s definitely not a nice guy but he’s isn’t quite evil and he’s isn’t the sort who kills people without a very good reason. Jane is something he has never encountered before.

Lizabeth Scott is in dazzling form. She’s obsessed and she’s scary and she’s frighteningly manipulative. The worst thing about her is that she never gives up. She intends to have that money and she will destroy herself and everyone else around her to get it.

Dan Duryea is of course excellent in a slightly uncharacteristic rôle - right from the start Jane is in the one calling the shots and Danny just has to go along.

Is this a true film noir? It is if you think that Jane was a nice girl who succumbed to temptation and was then drawn into the whirlpool of film noir madness. That’s possible but there’s evidence that Jane was probably already well and truly corrupt. In that sense this movie is quite similar to Double Indemnity - like the two protagonists in that film Jane is a person in whom the moral corruption is already present and it’s just waiting for the right opportunity to blossom forth.

So is Jane a femme fatale? In a way she is. Even though Danny is already a criminal he’s not thoroughly evil but Jane will lead him into doing much worse things than he’s ever done before.

But them maybe film noir is mostly a matter of mood and if that’s true then Too Late For Tears qualifies without any problems.

This movie is in the public domain and some of the DVD editions out there are pretty bad. The one I saw was terrible. There is a fully restored Blu-Ray edition but alas it’s way out of my price range. If you’re independently wealthy the restored edition is probably worthwhile.  It’s certainly a good enough movie to justify a Blu-Ray release and as soon as I win the lottery I’ll be grabbing the Blu-Ray.

Too Late for Tears is a superb B noir. Highly recommended.

Dead Reckoning (1947)

Dead Reckoning, directed by John Cromwell, is a 1947 film noir about a man (played by Humphrey Bogart) who sets out to find out what happened to an army buddy whato disappeared immediately after returning from World War 2. It has all the standard noir elements – smooth gangsters, colourful hoodlums, night clubs, a flashback with voiceover, and of course a femme fatale.

The femme fatale in this case is played by Lizabeth Scott, and she sizzles. But then she always did. Once you hear that husky voice of hers you know you’ve entered the world of film noir. Her performance in this movie has been much criticised, and quite wrongly in my opinion. The movie has its problems but she’s not one of them.



The title is important, dead reckoning being a method of navigation that relies on estimating your position based on estimating your course and speed from a particular starting point, and if you don’t know your starting point accurately you will inevitably get badly lost. And that’s the situation Captain Rip Murdock (Bogart) is in.

Murdock tells the tale in an extended flashback. He and Sergeant Johnny Drake are on their way to Washington. The war is over and they’re both going to collect medals, but Johnny disappears. He disappears because there might be press photographers at the medal presentation and that could be embarrassing since he isn’t Johnny Drake at all. In fact he’s a man wanted for murder who joined up under a false name.



Murdock sets off to find his buddy but what he finds is a badly burned corpse in the morgue. Is the body Johnny’s? Murdock’s starting point is that he knows Johnny couldn’t have been mixed up in murder and know he’s determined to unravel the mystery.

His next step is to find Johnny’s girl. Dusty (Lizabeth Scott) is a singer. He thinks she’s the key to the mystery, and he’s right. But falling in love with her means that Murdock doesn’t want to believe she’s the murderer. He also doesn’t want to believe Johnny is the murderer but somebody shot Dusty’s husband and if it wasn’t Dusty and it wasn’t Johnny then he’s left with an embarrassing lack of plausible suspects.



Dead Reckoning has been accused of having a totally incoherent plot. Which is perfectly true. But this is film noir and plot coherence is less important than atmosphere and style and those qualities it has in spades. It also has enough classic film noir dialogue to keep any fan happy, as when Murdock observes that, “Maybe she was all right. Maybe Christmas comes in July.”

And it has Bogart, and he’s in top form. He knows that Dusty is the kind of girl you should never ever fall in love with but somehow he desperately wants to believe that all his instincts are wrong. Bogart and Scott work well together and Scott not only makes Bogart want to believe in her she makes the audience want to as well even though we know as well as he does that she’s probably no good.



So maybe it’s not one of the great noirs but it’s consistently entertaining, it looks good and it’s dripping with noirness. And it has two of the iconic noir stars demonstrating why they’re such iconic figures. So I say check it out.

Pitfall (1948)

Pitfall is certainly a film noir and although it mostly lacks the characteristic noir visual style it manages very effectively to convey the necessary mood of paranoia and doom.

It was directed by André De Toth, produced by an outfit called Regal Films and released through United artists in 1948.

The basis of the plot is that one small mistake is all it takes to turn a perfectly happy life into a waking nightmare. Johnny Forbes (Dick Powell) works for an insurance company. He has a lovely wife and he has a son and they live in a comfortable suburban house and his life is placid and well-organised. It’s so well-organised that when he leaves for work he can tell his wife he’ll be home at exactly 5.50 pm.



It’s an idyllic life but it’s the sort of life that a man can easily take for granted. Johnny’s problem is that he’s basically quite happy but he doesn’t realise it. He thinks he’s bored. Today we’d probably say he was having mid-life crisis.

The conviction that his life is dull and routine hits him with special force when he meets Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott). Mona’s boyfriend Bill Smiley has been imprisoned for embezzlement and Johnny’s company had to pay out as a result. Johnny’s job is to try to get some of the money back. Smiley had stolen the money to buy expensive presents for Mona.



Mona seems to represent what’s missing from Johnny’s life. She’s sexy and exciting and she’s bad. Or at least she looks like she’s bad. Johnny loses his head completely. Unfortunately he’s not the only one who’s fallen under Mona’s spell. J. B. McDonald (Raymond Burr) is a private investigator who does work for the insurance company from time to time and he’s well and truly obsessed by her. He’s also completely mad, dangerously violent and entirely untroubled by a conscience.

Johnny and Mona on the other hand are very much troubled by pangs of conscience. Mona immediately breaks off their affair when she finds out that Johnny is married. While she looks like a femme fatale and she has the effect of a femme fatale on Johnny’s life she’s actually not bad after all. She never wanted poor Smiley to steal for her and she has no intention of wrecking Johnny’s marriage. But she just can’t help being the sort of woman who makes men crazy.



Johnny has been badly frightened by the whole thing and just wants to go back to being a respectable family man again but McDonald is getting crazier and crazier and he’s not going to leave either Mona or Johnny in peace.

Johnny really hasn’t done very much wrong. The affair with Mona was extremely brief. In the whole of his married life he’s misbehaved for a day or two; all the rest of the time he’s been a devoted husband and father. He has never inhabited the world of film noir. His life has been lived in the sunshine, a life of neatly maintained lawns and duty and responsibility. But that one misstep has changed everything and his orderly life has been plunged into chaos and violence and ultimately murder. He can be accused at most of weakness and poor judgment.



Mona has also done very little wrong. If she has a fault it’s simply that she’s not a very good judge of men. She certainly doesn’t deserve the nightmare that her life becomes.

Dick Powell and Lizabeth Scott are terrific, giving nicely understated performances. Powell is convincing as a nice guy who can’t believe that one little mistake really can destroy his life. Raymond Burr on the other hand goes totally over-the-top, giving us a memorable portrayal of evil and obsession. Jane Wyatt has the relatively thankless role of Johnny’s devoted wife but she does a fine job.



The relative lack of overt noir visuals works to the film’s advantage. This is a nightmare played out in broad daylight and bright sunshine. The ending is where a lot of very good film noirs fall apart but Karl Kamb’s screenplay shows a sure touch in this department - it manages to be both downbeat and hopeful. There is tragedy and there is a price to be paid but there’s no cheap nihilism. These are grownups not teenagers and they don’t have the luxury of adolescent nihilism.

One thing I found amusing was a review describing this as a subversive noir. In fact it’s quite the opposite in most ways. It’s very pro-marriage and the message is that respectability and duty lead to happiness. And I really don’t think this message is intended to be ironic. The lesson Johnny learns is that accepting adult responsibilities is more conducive to happiness than chasing glamorous blondes.

Synergy’s DVD presentation has attracted a lot of negative comment but I have no idea why. It’s a perfectly decent print.

This is film noir at its best. Highly recommended.

Desert Fury (1947)

Desert Fury is a movie that once again raises the question of what makes a film noir. It takes place entirely in a small desert town and it’s in Technicolor, but this 1947 movie still has plenty of noir qualifications.

Two slightly sinister men are taking an extraordinary interest in a bridge on the outskirts of town when Paula Haller (Lizabeth Scott) pulls up behind them in her car. They have to move their car to allow her to pass. A trivial incident, but the bridge will take on considerable significance later and so will this meeting.

Paula has been away and she’s entirely sure she’s pleased to be back. The first thing that happens to her is that two women who know her cut her dead in the street. And then there’s her mother to deal with.

Her mother, Fritzi (Mary Astor), runs the Purple Sage. It’s the local gambling joint. Fritzi is a somewhat larger-than-life character who is accustomed to getting her own way. Fritzi and Paula clash, and it’s obvious that these clashes have been going on for the whole of Paula’s life.



Paula is being wooed by the town’s deputy sheriff, Tom Hamson (Burt Lancaster). Tom’s a nice guy but Paula has fallen for one of the men she met by the bridge at the beginning of the movie. Eddie Bendix is no good. He’s a gangster. Paula knows he’s no good. But she finds him exciting. He spends a lot of time with his shirt of, which of course would be enough to turn any girl’s head.

Eddie is always accompanied by Johnny. They’re partners. Johnny is the junior partner but in some ways he’s the dominant one. He fusses over Eddie like a mother. Their relationship is obviously close and perhaps just a little pathological - not in a sexual sense but there’s clearly a good deal of mutual dependence. Johnny most definitely does not approve of Eddie’s interest in Paula. Paula’s mother doesn’t approve either. All of which makes Paula more determined to have her bad boy.



There’s also the mystery of Eddie’s wife, apparently killed in slightly suspicious circumstances. Her car crashed, at that bridge that we saw in the opening scenes.

This is one of those noir films that reverses the usual gender roles. Paula is basically a nice girl. She’s just a trifle rebellious and she has a weakness for sexy bad boys. Eddie functions in the femme fatale role in this movie. He’s sexy and bad and he threatens to lead our essentially virtuous heroine astray, and it’s sex that provides the temptation for her.



So what we have is an enjoyably trashy combination of film noir and 40s melodrama, with added sparkle added by some lively performances. Burt Lancaster is solid but (unusually) he’s overshadowed by the other players. John Hodiak is sexy and sinister as Eddie while Wendell Corey is wonderfully creepy and even more sinister as Johnny.

But this is really a women’s film and it’s the two female leads who really shine. Mary Astor is a delight as Fritzi - hardheaded and ruthless but in her own ay devoted to her daughter. She’s a strong character and Astor really goes to town. Lizabeth Scott is a terrific heroine driven by rebelliousness and lust. It’s a bit difficult to buy the 25-year-old Scott as a naïve 19-year-old but aside from that it’s impossible to fault her performance.



English-born director Lewis Allen keeps a firm grip on things and the Technicolor cinematography makes the desert setting both impressive and effective.

Sadly the Region 4 DVD has no extras at all but it looks great.

This is a rather overlooked movie that I have no hesitation in recommending.

The Company She Keeps (1951)

With a cast that includes a couple of major film noir icons, Lizabeth Scott and Jane Greer, and with Dennis O’Keefe (who also did some classic noirs including the underrated Raw Deal) as the male lead, and photographed by by one of the great masters of noir cinematography in the person of Nicholas Musuraca, you could be excused for expecting John Cromwell’s The Company She Keeps to be a film noir.

In actual fact it’s a drama/romance, although it does have quite a bit in common with Caged, an excellent women’s prison drama made a year earlier by the same director. The Company She Keeps follows the story of Mildred Lynch, a woman prisoner out on parole. Things get complicated for her when she falls in love with her parole officer’s boyfriend. It makes a fascinating companion piece to Caged. And like that movie, its attitude towards the criminal justice system is a quite a bit more sceptical than you’d expect in a 1951 movie. Although the parole officer is somewhat idealised, the other members of the parole board are portrayed as being rather petty and the police are shown mostly as petty tyrants who enjoy harassing ex-cons. On the other hand there’s also a sympathetic cop willing to give Mildred a break.

The movie’s strong suit is its avoidance of a simplistic good girl/bad girl conflict between the two romantic rivals. Both women are more complex than that. Jane Greer is superb as Mildred. I like the fact that she’s not depicted as an innocent victim. She was guilty of the crimes for which she was sentenced, and had a lengthy record of petty crime before that. Her natural inclination is to return to her previous life, and she’s bitter and suspicious, and tends to lie as a matter of course, and certainly not scrupulously honest. Despite all that, she’s basically a sympathetic character and is making a genuine effort to keep out of trouble.

Lizabeth Scott has the less rewarding role as the parole officer, Joan Wilburn. The part is somewhat underwritten. She doesn’t get enough screen time, and we don’t get sufficient insight into her emotional reaction to the betrayals she suffers. Lizabeth Scott does the best she can with what she’s given, and I like the way she underplays the role. She’s a woman trying to make it in the very male-dominated world of the 1950s prison system, and it makes sense that she would have developed a habit of hiding her emotions. She’s not a paragon of virtue either - she’s aware of the temptations inherent in the power she holds over Mildred, and she doesn’t always resist those temptations. So again we have a character who is not simply black or white, good or bad, but is essentially good with the usual human weaknesses.

Dennis O’Keefe is the man loved by both women. The focus is very much on the two women, but he gives a nicely understated performance.

Overall this is a movie that offers a lot more than you might expect. It’s a good example of a quality B-movie that deals with serious subject matter in a surprisingly subtle way, without resorting to cliches or being excessively obvious. With fine acting, with the very competent John Cromwell directing and with Nick Musuraca’s cinematography it’s a movie that looks good and works rather effectively. This one is well worth a look.