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D
ouble Indemnity
heralded a new era, one where Stanwyck dominated many a shadowy thriller, some of them failures, some of them overlooked gems, and some like
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
(1946), which is a qualified success on its own limited terms. The ad campaign for
Martha Ivers
implores us to only “whisper her name!” If that sounds a little corny, it suits the serpentine, simmering yet often ramshackle movie itself, directed by Lewis Milestone, with a script by Robert Rossen, who later directed
Body and Soul
(1947) and
The Hustler
(1961).

Rossen worked his way up writing socially conscious Warner Bros. melodramas, and his tentative leftism sometimes shows up in
Martha Ivers
, with its schematic view of the greedy rich and the tough working class. The film starts out with an astringent sixteen-minute prologue, set in 1928, that acts as a kind of appetizer to the melodrama feast to come. Janis Wilson, the memorably neurotic little girl from
Now, Voyager
, plays Martha Ivers as an unhappy teenager longing to get out from under the influence of her aunt, Mrs. Ivers (a sinister Judith Anderson). The girl was born Martha Smith, the daughter of a working-class father and a rich Ivers mother. Mrs. Ivers has had her name legally changed to her mother's maiden name, but this authoritarian aunt can't change her niece's character.

Martha tries to run away with bad boy Sam Masterson (Darryl Hickman) during a thunderstorm, and Mr. O'Neil (Roman Bohnen), a schoolteacher ambitious for his son Walter (Mickey Kuhn), makes sure
that Martha is caught and brought back to Mrs. Ivers. When Mr. O'Neil says that he wants his boy to go to Harvard, Mrs. Ivers wearily tells him that Walter would probably be happier driving a truck, a touch of 1930s leftism that sounds strange coming from her aristocratic lips. Mrs. Ivers, it seems, owns everything in town (it's even called Iverstown). After Martha is brought back to her, she slaps the girl and says that the best thing her father ever did for her was to die, whereupon Martha snarls out some hatred.

This is a heavy-spirited movie in which it always seems to be raining, as the characters circle their opponents steadily and slowly like boxers until they rush at each other and go in for the kill. Planning to run away again, Martha loses sight of her pet cat. When she sees Mrs. Ivers beating the animal with her cane, Martha pulls the cane out of her aunt's hand and bops her lightly on the head. Mrs. Ivers then falls down some stairs, dead. This sequence of events is all quite weirdly shot and put together, like a macabre silent film set to Miklos Rozsa's hard-driving, ever-percolating score, but it suits the movie's dreamlike unreality, putting us inside Martha's head and the way she sees and experiences things.

We jump to 1946 and our first course on the
Martha Ivers
menu, which involves the grown-up Sam (Van Heflin) and his relations with Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott), a sultry ex-con. Scott is one of those curious ersatz figures of this period who talks like she's seen a lot of movies and is trying to fit herself in with her hissing, sibilant line readings and curdled, tough-girl smiles and tears, both of which make her squinch up her face beseechingly. She's 100 percent artificial. Because of her lack of authenticity, she is the embodiment of some late 1940s films, a collection of movie signs that can only be read legibly if you are immersed in the style she's aping.

Heflin usually didn't play parts as cocky and lover-boyish as Sam Masterson, and he has a lot of fun here, especially when he's roughing up the grown-up, alcoholic Walter (Kirk Douglas), who's now a politico married to Stanwyck's Martha. This is Douglas's first movie, and he's expert at playing Walter's weakness, but he tends to be hammy and too aware of his own charisma (though he had wanted Heflin's role, he took to the weakling like a duck to water).

Martha Ivers
was made during a set decorators' strike. Sometimes, in order to go on working, everyone would have to stay at the studio (they couldn't cross the picket line without the risk of being hurt), and Milestone sided with the strikers, so that some of the film was directed by Byron Haskin.
Martha Ivers
does have a patchwork quality at times; there
are some careless, abrupt cuts here and there, and even some dissolves which seem uncommonly rushed. “Everyone had told me how nice Barbara Stanwyck was,” Douglas wrote in his autobiography,
The Ragman's Son
, “so I was looking forward to working with her in this hostile environment. The crew adored her. They called her ‘Missy,' and when she came on the set she went around hugging them, asking about their wives and children by name. She was a professional, she was there, always prepared, an excellent actress. But she was indifferent to me.”

Later on, Stanwyck noticed that Douglas might be an up-and-comer. “I could see it happening,” he wrote, “like the lens of a camera turning into focus. She looked at me, made eye contact for the first time. She said, ‘Hey, you're pretty good.' I said, ‘Too late, Miss Stanwyck.'” Off-camera, Stanwyck in this peak period could be as ruthless as the characters she played. At Milestone's suggestion, Heflin had worked out a complicated maneuver with a coin moving over his knuckles to show that Sam is a professional gambler, and Stanwyck took this in, warily. Then, like Martha, she went in for the kill: “Van, that's a wonderful piece of business,” she said, “but if you do that during my important lines, I have a bit of business that will draw attention away from yours.” Holding Heflin's eye, Stanwyck pulled her skirt well above her knees. “Any time you start twirling that coin, I'll be fixing my garter. So be sure you don't do that when I have important lines to speak.”

Forewarned, Helfin only does the coin trick once in her presence, when Martha is supposed to be flustered by Sam. Assured of her power, Stanwyck also supervised her own lighting, for she had “her own favorite key light,” at this point. She was now a far cry from the wholly vulnerable girl who let Capra take care of everything for her. The “pro” of
Martha Ivers
is estimable, of course, but sometimes one longs for the still unformed and open Stanwyck from 1930 to 1934 or so.

Stanwyck's first scene with Douglas inaugurates the main course of the movie, which starts a half hour into the running time. To counteract, or combat, Douglas's embroidering style in this scene, Stanwyck holds back and lets him manage everything, keeping a poker face and a ramrod posture (Edith Head costumes Martha in clothes that look suffocating and slightly off-center, with hoods and furs piled on for protection). Then, when she sees her opening, Stanwyck bares down on him, bending slightly at the waist and snapping out, “When did you get drunk, where did you get drunk, why did you get drunk,” in one continuous, punching fashion: BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. When she's made her impact, this stiff, practical woman seduces him a bit, in Stanwyck's lightest, most
distracted seduction mode; Martha knows that she doesn't have to expend too much energy keeping Walter in line. They're joined together by guilt: Walter's father, Mr. O'Neil, had them send an innocent man to the gallows for the murder of Martha's aunt, and when they learn that Sam is back in town, they worry that he's there to blackmail them.

Far too much time is spent on Scott's Toni, who looks less like she got out of the jug and more like she just came from the beauty parlor. And Stanwyck seems to sense that this isn't a particularly serious movie, so she mainly takes it easy and doesn't do any of the character work that might spoil the overall atmosphere of unreality. She sets off one tiny flare behind her eyes when Sam tells Martha that he doesn't really know her, and instead of the all-encompassing moment of recognition Stanwyck achieves in her heavy-hitter roles, she shows Martha thinking, “I hardly know myself.” In her confrontation scene with Heflin, where Martha talks about killing her aunt and then realizes that Sam didn't see her do it, she makes her eyes shine like a wild animal as she comes at him with a burning branch. Stanwyck stays well within the parameters of her role throughout, using just enough of her talent to make us believe in Martha without overselling the part, which could have been disastrous. She's playing here for entertainment rather than acting out the reality of Capra or Ford or Vidor or Sturges.

In another slow-burning scene with Douglas, this time with Heflin standing between them as referee, Stanwyck excitingly chooses to shout him down and then pound on a desk and cry, “Then let go!” in a high-pitched voice. This action shuts everybody up for a moment. Walter at one point calls Martha “a little girl in a cage, waiting for someone to let her out,” and the same could be said for Stanwyck the actress, who is only unleashed briefly at the end. Walter has fallen down the stairs (at least Milestone doesn't have another thunderstorm roaring in the background), and Martha encircles Sam with her spider-like arms. “Now, Sam, do it now,” Martha urges, in Stanwyck's airy purr. “Set me free, set both of us free.” She switches to a harsher tone: “He fell down the stairs and fractured his skull, everybody knows what a heavy drinker he was!” Then she goes back to purring, “Oh, Sam, it can be so easy ….”

Rozsa's score works itself into a fine frenzy as Sam walks down the stairs, and then the camera holds Martha in a close-up as she waits for him to kill Walter, her glistening lips open suggestively in anticipation of the crime. But her face falls in disappointment when she realizes that he won't do what she wants. “Your whole life has been a dream, Martha,” Sam says. The best parts of
Martha Ivers
emphasize the dreamlike quality
of the title character's mind, which Stanwyck physicalizes whenever she has the chance. She pulls a gun on Sam, but she can't shoot him; when he leaves, Walter holds the gun to her waist, and she pulls the trigger for him. “Ivers, Ivers,” rings out a male voice on the soundtrack, and Martha murmurs, “No … no … Martha Smith.” According to Rossen, Martha probably would have been happier driving a truck, or married to a truck driver. This isn't a movie or performance that can stand too much scrutiny, but both have their moments.

The same cannot be said for
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
(1947), a dreadful adaptation of a derivative stage chiller, non-directed by Peter Godfrey. Stanwyck was such good friends with Godfrey off-screen that she even helped bring up his three daughters when he and his wife passed away, so she may have been blind to his faults; his
Christmas in Connecticut
is often poor, but
Carrolls
reaches a whole new level of miscalculation and incompetence. It suffers from a precocious child (Ann Carter) who keeps spouting “adult-sounding” dialogue at a lugubrious pace, from Franz Waxman overdoing his stormy score, from Nigel Bruce overdoing his drunk friend, and from Humphrey Bogart embarrassing himself as a lunatic painter, widening his eyes amateurishly whenever he feels a crazy spell coming on. As his wife, Stanwyck is incongruously chipper in her first scenes, as if she thinks she can save some of this mess by being “starry.” But she's also lazy here; when Alexis Smith starts coming on to her husband, it's hard to tell, at first, whether Stanwyck's character is amused by Smith's man-eating or just oblivious, or both. And later on Stanwyck gives some of her lines a distracted, stilted reading (you can't blame her if her mind is on something else, for she often seems to have wandered onto the wrong set and behaves as if she doesn't want to be noticed).

Bogart keeps trying to do her in with some poisoned milk, à la
Suspicion
(1941); he even offers some milk to the cops who lead him away, an insultingly obvious curtain line. It smells like a stinker from the start and only gets worse, and it's a crime that Stanwyck and Bogart couldn't have collaborated on something more appropriate. She would have made an ideal Brigid O'Shaughnessy in
The Maltese Falcon
(1941), though it's hard to begrudge Mary Astor one of her best roles.

Compared to the travesty of
Carrolls
, Stanwyck's third and thankfully last picture with Godfrey,
Cry Wolf
(1947), at least gives her something to do. As a woman trying to find out the secrets of an old dark house presided over by a seemingly bored or hung over Errol Flynn, Stanwyck rides horses, runs down dark hallways, makes use of a dumbwaiter to enter a secret laboratory, and skitters around on rooftops. There's an
effective scare or two, but the movie is mired in exposition and that deadly Godfrey pacing.

In the immediate post-Code era, Stanwyck was a noble gambling lady, but in the lost weekend of the late forties, in
The Lady Gambles
(1949), she was asked to offer a case study in addiction. She does so admirably, even daringly, all along the way, until the script descends into textbook psychobabble (director Michael Gordon said that Stanwyck hesitated about accepting this role and needed a bit of persuasion to take it, for she had just run the histrionic gauntlet of
Sorry, Wrong Number
[1948]). When we first see her Joan, she's a blondish woman blowing on some dice in a dark alley, deep in noir land. The men she's with soon scatter, and two other men beat her up, pretty violently. We see her wheeled into a hospital on a gurney, passed out, her face bruised, as her husband David (Robert Preston) tries to keep her out of jail by telling her story to an indifferent doctor.

Flashback to Las Vegas, where Joan enters a casino looking all fresh and dewy-eyed, her clothes neat and housewife-cute. Stanwyck pitches her voice slightly higher than usual to portray this gullible, open woman, almost stretching her wide range to the breaking point in these first scenes. But Stanwyck really starts to cook when Joan first catches gambling fever, embracing the illicit, clearly sexual thrill she gets from rolling those dice. When she asks a big-time club manager (Stephen McNally) for more money, Joan looks spent, out of breath and scared, like she's just been through a disaster. When she gets upset about his initial refusal, Stanwyck is desperate in the shamed way of a repressed, bourgeois woman. This is knife-edge, exacting work, always specific to the person she is playing.

BOOK: Barbara Stanwyck
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