The Strange Woman (1946)

The Strange Woman is a 1946 melodrama directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. It sometimes gets described as a film noir which is a bit of a stretch although it can be considered to belong to that odd sub-genre sometimes known as gaslight noir - period melodramas with a touch of film noir in both content and style.

In the early 1930s Ulmer had been well on the way to establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s top directors until an affair with the wife of a producer got him blackballed from all the top studios. He ended up at PRC, the lowliest of the Poverty Row studios and the absolute bottom of the Hollywood food chain. But in 1946 he had a stroke of luck. Hedy Lamarr had bought the rights to a novel called The Strange Woman by Ben Ames Williams and she hired her childhood friend Ulmer to direct. This gave Ulmer a luxury he hardly ever enjoyed - the chance to work with big name stars who actually knew how to act.

Ben Ames Williams who also wrote the novel Leave Her To Heaven (the basis of the magnificent film of the same name).

Lamarr knew what she was doing when she bought this property. She knew that the role of Jenny Hager would give her the chance to demonstrate her acting chops and she makes the most of that opportunity.

Jenny Hager is a young girl growing up in the seaport of Bangor in Maine. Jenny is ambitious. She wants money and luxury and she knows that the way to get those things is through a rich man. And she knows that the way to land a rich man is by using her very considerable sex appeal. Jenny is gorgeous and she oozes sex.

Her father Tim Hager is a self-pitying drunk who beats Jenny regularly. He beats her once too often. He over-exerts himself and drops dead of a heart attack. It’s a rather daring scene for 1946 since there are definite hints that the beatings have sexual overtones.

Jenny schemes her way into marriage with the rich middle-aged Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockhart). To be fair to her she really does try to be a good and loving wife. Things start to spiral out of control when Isaiah’s son Ephraim (Louis Hayward) returns from Cambridge Massachusetts where he has just qualified as an architect. Jenny and Ephraim has been childhood friends, even childhood sweethearts. There’s a key scene in which Jenny, still a small child, throws Ephraim into the river where, unable to swim, he almost drowns. Ephraim’s cowardice enrages Jenny. It’s a scene which makes some of her later actions more comprehensible. She despises cowardice in men.

Jenny and Ephraim soon decide that they’re in love but Jenny is married to Ephraim’s father Isaiah. If only Isaiah were out of the way Jenny and Ephraim could be happy.

After a complicated series of events Jenny ends up married to Isaiah’s right-hand man John Evered (George Sanders). John had been engaged to Jenny’s girlhood friend Meg Saladine (Hillary Brooke) but Jenny soon takes care of that obstacle.

But this is melodrama and there are further complications in store, and further tragedies.

The Strange Woman’s claims to being film noir are very very thin. Those claims rest entirely on the notion that Jenny is a femme fatale but I think that’s a misunderstanding. She is a character straight out of melodrama. And this movie is pure melodrama. It’s full-blown deliriously overheated overcooked melodrama. And that’s the best kind of melodrama. It is also very much a women’s picture as that term was understood in the 40s. The terms melodrama and women’s picture have always tended to bring out the snarkiness in reviewers but melodrama is a perfectly legitimate genre and it’s a genre of which I’m very fond.

Jenny is certainly a schemer but that judgment has to be qualified. Given her nightmarish childhood and the appalling situation in which she finds herself after her father’s final beating her decision to use sex to get herself out of that situation is entirely understandable. In the mid-19th century a woman in her position would have had no other option unless she wanted to end up as a menial servant.

And while Jenny does wicked things her motivation is always love. In that respect she bears a very close resemblance to Ellen in Leave Her To Heaven. You could say that they’re both women driven to a kind of madness by their need for love. And given Jenny’s relationship with her father she has more excuse than Ellen for being consumed by the need for love.

Hedy Lamarr gives what some consider to be her career-best performance. And they may well be right. She’s terrific. Jenny is a complex woman. There’s bad in her but there’s good as well. Her motivations are not always straightforward. It’s likely that she doesn’t always understand her own motivations.

As far as morality is concerned it’s worth pointing out that Ephraim does at one point admits to Jenny that during his time in Cambridge his leisure hours were occupied with drink and prostitutes. There’s a considerable amount of moralistic hypocrisy in the attitudes of the good folk of Bangor.

George Sanders, Louis Hayward, Gene Lockhart and Dennis Hoey (as Jenny’s father) are all good. George Sanders was perhaps oddly cast here but he manages pretty well. This is however a movie that is entirely focused on Jenny and it’s Hedy Lamarr’s performance that matters and she delivers the goods.

When making judgments on the outrageous plot you always have to keep in mind that this is melodrama, a genre with its own conventions. It’s a fine melodrama plot.

This is a movie about a woman who makes certain choices of which viewers in the 1940s would certainly have disapproved but it’s also a movie about love, about romantic obsession. It’s also, by the standards of 1946, surprisingly frank about sexual desire and surprisingly erotic.

The Film Chest Restored Version DVD offers a fairly good transfer of a movie that was at one time only available in rather dire public domain versions. It would be nice to see this movie get a Blu-Ray release. The DVD is OK but a special edition Blu-Ray with some nice extras might help this overlooked movie reach a wider audience.

It’s impossible not to keep comparing this movie to Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Since they’re both based on novels by the same author it’s not surprising that there are countless thematic similarities. Both are melodramas which have wrongly been labelled film noir and both are movies about women tempted into evil by an overwhelming need for love. Both feature powerhouse performances by superb actresses. Leave Her to Heaven is one of the two or three best Hollywood movies of the 40s but The Strange Woman stands up pretty well in a comparison.

The Strange Woman is an intriguing visually stylish melodrama and it’s highly recommended.

Daisy Kenyon (1947)

Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon is essentially a women’s picture made in a film noir style. Made at Fox in 1947, this is also a superb example of Preminger’s film-making at its best. Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford) is a successful New York commercial artist. She is having an affair with a married man, high-flying lawyer Dan O’Mara (Dana Andrews). Dan’s marriage is obviously an unhappy one - his wife Lucille (Ruth Warrick) would have been described in the 1940s as neurotic and she takes out her frustrations on their two daughters. She is also dating a troubled veteran, Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda). All the main characters are damaged in some way. Peter is still getting over the war and the death of his first wife. Dan is aware that he has been a bad husband and father. He longs for a satisfying relationship with a woman but lacks the courage to either rebuild his marriage or make a clean break. Daisy is lonely and longs for love. Lucille is bitter and jealous and resentful. All four characters need to make decisions about their lives. Daisy does make her choice, but then she seems to regret it. She remains torn between the two men, unable to let go of either. The tension builds as all four people start to unravel and there seems to be a real chance that violence or some other tragedy will be the result. Daisy, Dan and Peter are all well-rounded characters with their own strengths and their own flaw. Even Lucille, the most minor and least-developed of the four, is not entirely unsympathetic. Preminger was famous for his “objectivity” - his refusal to manipulate the audience into making judgments on the characters. He wants the audience to weigh up the evidence and then make their own judgment without being told what that judgment should be. Preminger trained as a lawyer and admired the US legal system and wanted his audience to be as impartial as a jury. It’s also an essential part of Preminger’s approach that his films contain very few simple villains. He preferred stories with complex characters who were a mixture of good and bad and he was careful to show both sides of his characters and to give them a fair hearing. He encouraged the actors to look at things from the point of view of the characters they were playing and to understand that the characters had their own reasons even for actions that might appear to others to be destructive. This is very obvious in Daisy Kenyon - this is a very even-handed film. Preminger is, as always, cool and controlled. This is a strange approach to melodrama but it works. This is melodrama played seriously. The characters are all out of control in their own lives which contrasts nicely with the controlled feel of the film. The viewer is never pushed into taking sides. When Preminger made genre films he never made the mistake of despising such films and in this case he treats the women’s melodrama with respect. We are never made to feel that these people’s lives or their problems are trivial. It’s a movie about love, marriage and families and Preminger understands that these are not trivial subjects. Preminger always took the problems of his women characters seriously. There are no token girlfriend characters in a Preminger movie. Crawford was a decade too old to play Daisy but was very keen and convinced Darryl F. Zanuck she could do it. Whether Preminger was happy about this is uncertain but he gets a fine performance from her, managing to tone down her excesses. Crawford is controlled and she’s excellent. Dana Andrews was always good in Preminger’s movies and he’s superb here. Actors have won Oscars for lesser performances. Henry Fonda is the big surprise - he’s terrific. Both Andrews and Fonda underplay their roles, which is exactly the right approach. The performances are unemotional, but the emotions are suggested subtly. Preminger always trusted the American movie audience to have the intelligence not to need to be spoon-fed and Andrews and Fonda (and Crawford to a great extent as well) give him the sorts of nuanced performances that he valued. Ruth Warrick on the other hand is all barely suppressed hysteria, but again the fact that she’s trying to keep a lid on the cauldron of her emotions adds to the emotional depth of the film. Suppressed emotions are always more disturbing than overt emotionalism. The DVD is typical of Fox’s film noir releases - a glorious print and packed with high-quality extras. Foster Hirsch’s commentary track is well worth the listen and there are two documentaries, one on the movie itself and one on Preminger’s career at 20th Century-Fox. This is what all DVD releases would be like if we lived in an ideal world and Fox are to be congratulated for treating a fine film with the respect it deserves. The DVD era has seen Preminger’s reputation not merely rehabilitated but growing by leaps and bounds. This is only just. This is a superbly crafted movie by a master film-maker. One of the best of all the hybrid women’s noirs of the 40s, and one of Joan Crawford’s best pictures.

The Kiss (1929)

The Kiss was Greta Garbo’s final silent movie. Actually it’s a hybrid, since it has a soundtrack that includes music and sound effects, but no dialogue.

For some reason MGM had convinced themselves that they were going to have a problem with Garbo’s voice in talking pictures. In fact of course her voice turned out to be an asset - not only did she have a fine speaking voice but she had an accent that was exotic and sexy and that complemented her onscreen image perfectly.

The Kiss was helmed by Jacques Feyder, who would go on to direct her first talking picture, Anna Christie. It’s a romantic melodrama and it’s a classic Garbo picture - she plays a woman for whom love is everything.



Irene Guarry (Garbo) is married to a middle-aged industrialist, Charles Guarry. She’s been having an affair with André Dubail (Conrad Nagel) but the lovers have decided they must break it off.

Irene has also attracted the attention of Pierre Lassalle, the 18-year-old son of a friend and business partner of her husband’s. Irene considers him to be a mere boy but she is reluctant to hurt him and assumes that he will soon get over his infatuation. He’s a harmless young man and his belief that he is in love with her is the sort of thing that boys of his age do. She is after all a very beautiful and very sophisticated older woman, and he’s lucky enough to have chosen a woman who is willing to humour him while taking care to ensure he doesn’t get hurt.



Unfortunately her calculations are upset when a harmless incident is misinterpreted. She has agreed to give young Pierre a photograph of herself and when he calls at her house she allows him to kiss her. This is the fateful kiss of the movie’s title, fateful because at that exact moment her husband arrives home and flies into a jealous rage. The upshot of this is that her husband ends up dead, the victim of a gunshot wound.

Irene is accused of murder and stands trial. But what really happened at her home on that fatal night?



Lew Ayres, soon to become a major star, plays the naïve but well-meaning Pierre Lassalle. Conrad Nagel is Irene’s lover, André. Both give performances that are effective and, by the standards of silent movies, restrained and lacking in the exaggerated qualities that so many people find off-putting in silent cinema. Garbo of course was always naturalistic in her performances. The understated acting makes this a good movie for anyone new to the attractions of silent film.

There are some nice art deco-influenced interiors. William H. Daniels became more or less Garbo’s personal cinematographer, working on no less than twenty-one of her films. He always knew exactly how to photograph her and she always trusted him implicitly. It was one of the great partnerships between a cinematographer and a star and it’s one of the strengths of this movie.



The Warner Archive DVD-R look reasonably good but it appears to be the same severely truncated print that has been shown on TCM. It runs for just 62 minutes whereas the original film (according to the IMDb) ran for 89 minutes, and it feels like a movie that has been savagely cut. One assumes however that this is the only cut of the movie that has survived. It’s not a great print by any mean but it’s watchable.

This is one of Garbo’s more overlooked movies and it’s well worth a look.

Imitation of Life (1959)

Douglas Sirk’s 1959 remake of Imitation of Life makes quite a contrast with the 1934 version. There’s obviously a huge contrast in the visual style – the 1959 version is not just in widescreen and in colour, it’s in amazingly sumptuous colour. It has a completely non-realistic look to it, a look I rather enjoy.

The other major contrast is in the relationship between the two women. In the 1934 version they’re business partners; in the 1959 version the African-American woman is the white woman’s maid. And whereas in 1934 the Claudette Colbert character was a successful businesswoman, the 1959 equivalent (played by Lana Turner) is an actress. So really it could be seen as a major step backward in terms of both race and gender.

Also, Colbert’s boyfriend in the 1934 movie respects her and seems to be attracted to her because she’s intelligent and independent. The same character (played by John Gavin) in the 1959 film treats Lana Turner as a empty-headed bimbo who needs a man to tell her what to do.

That’s not to say that the 1959 film doesn’t have its virtues. I also think you could argue that it’s reflecting a more racist and sexist society rather than promoting such values. I think we’re meant to be appalled by the behaviour of the men in Turner’s life. Lana Turner does a reasonable job in this film.

Susan Kohner as the daughter trying to pass as white is very impressive. Sandra Dee as Lana Turner’s daughter is terrifyingly perky. Perkiness on that scale should come with a government health warning.

The two movies (available together on a double-sided DVD) are fascinating to watch back-to-back. Both are important historically in the way they illustrate Hollywood’s attitudes towards important social issues. Both are very entertaining movies. And the opening credits sequence in the 1959 film is simply wonderful, and sets the tone of lushness very nicely.

Written on the Wind (1956)

I’ve now seen two Douglas Sirk movies in two days, firstly Imitation of Life and now Written on the Wind. I had mixed feelings about the former but I absolutely adored Written on the Wind. It’s just so outrageous. It’s like a cross between Dallas and Valley of the Dolls.
And it looks so gorgeous. How did he get such amazingly vivid colours? Even by the standards of Technicolor the colours are dazzling. Everything has an air of unreality, of staginess. The sets are expensive, but they don’t look real. They look like incredibly expensive film sets.

The dialogue is so overheated. The acting is exaggerated almost, but not quite, to the point of parody. But somehow it works. It’s pure melodrama, but it does deal with real issues and real emotions. It deals with them in an exaggerated and heightened way, with more symbolism than you can poke a stick at. The scene with Dorothy Malone stroking the model oil derrick has to be seen to be believed.

All four main actors give the same types of performance, so one has to assume that these were exactly the performances that Sirk wanted. Robert Stack plays Kyle Hadley, a sexually insecure alcoholic oil tycoon. Rock Hudson is his best friend, Mitch Wayne (wonderful character names in this film), who happens to be in love with his wife. Lauren Bacall is Stack’s wife Lucy , while Dorothy Malone is Kyle’s sex-crazed younger sister Marylee.

The actors focus obsessively on one aspect of each character – Kyle’s fears of sexual inadequacy an failure in general, Mitch’s divided loyalties, Lucy’s determination to somehow make her husband happy, Marylee’s sexual frustration. The performances make fascinating contrast to the Method acting that was becoming so fashionable at the time. Although the performances are artificial they do achieve a kind of intensity that is actually more effective than the mumbling incoherence of the Method.

There are also some sharp observations on the emptiness of life in 1950s America. These people have everything, but they’re absolutely miserable. Written on the Wind is insanely entertaining, it looks magnificent, it’s like eating too many overly rich chocolates, but it’s addictive. I loved it. It’s soap opera, but it’s the Citizen Kane of soap opera.

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)

Letter from an Unknown Woman was one of the three movies Max Ophüls made in Hollywood in the late 40s. All three are wonderful in their own ways, but this may be the greatest of them.

The movie follows a circular path, as fate inexorably closes in on the leading characters. It starts with somewhat dissipated pianist and man-about-town Stefan Brand (played by Louis Jourdan) being reminded that the next morning he is to fight a duel, a duel he is unlikely to survive. But Stefan has rarely accepted responsibility or anything, and intends to flee the city before morning. His preparations for flight are delayed by the arrival of a letter, a letter from a woman. He does not know her name, and has no recollection of her at all, but as he reads he discovers that their paths have most certainly crossed and in a most fateful fashion.

In 1900, as a romantic and somewhat dreamy schoolgirl in Vienna, the woman (Lisa, played by Joan Fontaine) had become obsessed by the handsome and charming pianist who lived in the apartment upstairs. On several occasions over the course of the next few years fate has drawn her to make attempts to meet this man. Finally she succeeds, they have a brief but idyllic love affair, but while this is the great love of Lisa’s life for Stefan she is merely another sexual adventure. This has tragic consequences for Lisa, and equally tragic consequences for Stefan as he realises much too late that she could have been much more to him than a casual conquest. She could have been not only the woman with whom he might have found genuine love, she could also have saved him from throwing away his talent.

Joan Fontaine, in her usual self-effacing but oddly compelling way, totally dominates the film. Her understated performance (and of course the consummate skill of Ophüls as a fim-maker) saves it from the danger of maudlin sentimentality. It’s still an emotionally draining experience but there’s nothing false or contrived about the emotion.

A magnificent example of what could be achieved in Hollywood during the 1940s, and one of the great cinematic love stories.

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.

All That Heaven Allows (1955)

After seeing, and falling in love with, Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind I just had to see more of his 1950s melodramas. While All That Heaven Allows isn’t quite as fabulous as Sirk’s Written on the Wind, it’s still pretty wonderful.

It’s the story of middle-aged widow Cary (Jane Wyman) living in a small town who falls in love with her gardener, played by Rock Hudson. Not only is he considered by the county club set (to which the widow belongs) to be a mere tradesman, which is scandal enough, he’s only much younger. And extremely handsome. Scandal piled upon scandal.

And it soon becomes obvious that her children (her truly appalling children) are as narrow-minded as the rest of the town. Early on Cary has a discussion with her daughter (played in outrageously over-the-top style by Gloria Talbott) about the Egyptian custom of walling up widows alive, and remarks that it’s a custom that is no longer followed – not in Egypt, anyway. The custom seems to be alive and well in this small town though.

Photographed by the great Russell Metty, this movie is visually luscious – I can’t think of a better word to describe it. The colours! There’s just so much to take in visually. A very lush score adds to the overheated atmosphere. Wyman is an actress I’ve never liked, but she’s reasonably effective. And while it's not likely that anyone would claim that Rock Hudson was a great actor, he is quite perfect for Sirk’s purposes, and his performance works to perfection.

Sirk was regarded with scorn by serious critics at the time, but his reputation has grown steadily since then. His mastery of visual style is clearly one reason for this. His movies are also admired for their irony, and as scathing criticisms of the emptiness and hypocrisy of the American consumer society of the Eisenhower era. And they are indeed scathing; in fact they’re absolutely savage. You have to wonder how American audiences at the time could have seen these films and not noticed their merciless dissection of the most cherished values of Middle America. What’s really interesting about Sirk’s movies, though, is that he takes his characters seriously – their pain is real, the dilemmas they face are real, and although he mocks the society in which they live he doesn’t mock their suffering.

The really subversive thing about Sirk’s melodramas is that they belonged to a genre, the so-called women’s picture, that was regarded with contempt (and still is when you consider the way “chick flick” is used today as a term of derision), but he was a serious film-maker making serious films. The irony in his movie does not in any way diminish Sirk’s seriousness of purpose. They may be in many ways high camp, but they’re made by a director with a high art sensibility, and they manage to be high camp and high art at the same time. Like the Pop artists who were emerging at the same time, he blurs the line between trash and art.

Now I simply must track down copies of all of Sirk’s other movies!