The Strange Woman

The Strange Woman – In 1946, the eccentric auteur, Edgar Ulmer, directed this Hedy Lamarr melodrama. Ulmer is known for conjuring interesting films from next to nothing; throughout most of his career, he worked for third-rate studios making stylish pictures with mostly unknown players on microscopic budgets. The Strange Woman is an exception – a picture with an A-list actress, Lamarr attempting unsuccessfully to conceal her mitteleuropaische accent (she plays a Maine temptress), produced to glossy, high-quality studio specifications. The movie is excellent, if baffling, and it contains some of Ulmer’s characteristic flourishes – a love scene in thunderstorm, complete with bursts of vivid lightning, atmospherically lit interiors, and some impressive tracking shots through the squalor of a red-light district, Hell’s Half-Acre, seemingly comprising the greater part of Bangor. Adapted from a novel, the film is digressive and episodic – it obviously compresses into ninety minutes lots of print packed with picturesque events. Certain plot points obstruct the film’s narrative and feel like vestiges of novel episodes that the screenwriter’s fidelity to the book retained in the film, but didn’t really absorb into the picture’s structure. Central to the film is Lamarr’s sheer strangeness – her character’s motives are impossible to decipher: for instance, renowned for her charity, it is unclear whether she acts out of naked self-interest, to conceal her lust and greed, or from a genuine desire to serve the poor and the sick or, perhaps, out of some kind of wounded vanity – after all, she was poor and despised once herself. The film’s strength is the fascinating implication that, indeed, the strange woman’s motives are mixed, convoluted, impure, and, probably, indecipherable to the protagonist herself. In some respects, the film seems to tap the vein that Gone with the Wind exploits – Lamarr’s character is a strong-willed girl, raised by a brutal alcoholic, who uses her beauty and seductive wiles to control men and amass a fortune. She is brash, aggressive, romantic, and quixotic – a bit like Scarlet O’Hara. Bangor, the film’s setting, like the movie’s heroine, is schizoid. Half the town is a muddy slum full of brothels and saloons; the inhabitants of the rest of the city spend their time in church where they are berated by their pastor for not eliminating the red-light district – a district from which, we learn, many of them profit. Lamarr has an eye for handsome men, but she is primarily mercantile – she marries a much older man, then, seduces his son. She urges the son to kill the old man, but, then, rejects him in horror when he seems to have followed her instructions. Instead, she takes up with a hunky lumberjack, played a bit unconvincingly by George Saunders. Saunders is engaged to another woman to whom he returns when the Strange Woman reveals her sociopathic intentions. The Strange Woman, possibly driven mad by a sermon delivered by a buckskin-clad revival preacher, tries to run-down Saunders and his girlfriend, but only succeeds in killing herself. All of this is filmed with dream-like alacrity, events sliding into one another and overlapping – in many ways, the film seems hysterical and half-delirious. But the central enigma in the film is the character of its title figure, a character that the film observes in action but can not really decipher. Lamarr’s performance is suitably obsessive, peculiar, and oneiric – her lovely face is frequently filmed against darkness, floating like an eerie white planet, a mask drifting on shadowy waters. There are repeated shots of candles, people drowning, mud, brawls in the gutter – throughout most of the film Hell’s Half Acre seems to be on fire and the smoke from its blazes drifts into the churches and sitting rooms of the respectable folks. In one sequence, the funeral of an important character is delayed for three days due to rioting in the brothels. Ultimately, the film is a paean to amour fou.