Rent The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Dark Melodrama - The Strange Love of Martha Ivers review by NO

Excellent story,rather dated at start but improved later.Kirk played against type & the under rated Heflin was also good &Stanwyk her usual excellent self.HOLLYWOOD AT ITS

best rather than the all action super heroes films we get now with little or no plots.

I enjoyed it.

Norman.

Secrets, Stanwyck, and Spineless Men - The Strange Love of Martha Ivers review by griggs

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is a gripping little noir four-hander where everyone’s dragging secrets like suitcases full of bricks. It’s a tale packed with betrayal, guilt, and people trying—and failing—to escape their pasts. I really should save films like this for Noirvember. Still, I can’t resist anything with Barbara Stanwyck. She dominates every scene—never second to any man, and certainly not here.

Kirk Douglas, in his debut, gives a surprisingly nuanced turn as the guilt-ridden, spineless husband. He may be a wet lettuce, but he’s compelling all the same. The fact that Stanwyck apparently gave him her seal of approval says a great deal.

The film, while engaging, is overstuffed with side plots, and I kept wanting more of Stanwyck’s magnetic presence. It holds your attention, but now and then, it strays past noir’s sweet spot and tumbles into full-blown melodrama.

Noir Soap. - The Strange Love of Martha Ivers review by Steve

Hyperemotional, genre-blending curiosity which starts with 16 minutes of gaslight melodrama and concludes a lot like film noir. But what it mostly resembles is those glossy '50s melodramas adapted from fat bestsellers about a loner who drifts back to his old home town to uncover the corruption of the powerful people he left behind.

The opening flashback shows the murder of her brutal stepmother by a teenage girl. Who grows into Barbara Stanwyck. Kirk Douglas plays her husband, a witness to the coverup. Between them, they own Iverstown, a small city in the midwest. Van Heflin is her former childhood sweetheart who stumbles back into their toxic marriage and malign influence.

He forms an alliance with a jailbird (Lizabeth Scott). She's on parole for theft, though maybe censorship code for sex worker. Their early scenes are alluring, like restless, rootless nighthawks in an Edward Hopper painting. Stanwyck stars, but has more of a support role, until she ultimately revives her psycho-killer persona from Double Indemnity.

Kirk gets more screen time in his debut, oddly cast as the panicky submissive under her thumb. There's plenty of gloomy noir fatalism, but it more persuasively suggests those febrile, small town melodramas of the next decade, like Some Came Running. This isn't in Technicolor and CinemaScope. But it would feel appropriate if it was.