There's no one to root for in Lewis Milestone's 1946 The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Four profoundly damaged characters interact and wound one another; two will survive the movie although barely. The picture is drenched in post-War funk and a general sense of malaise burdens all the characters. Although the War is only obliquely mentioned, the picture proceeds under its shadow. Milestone directs an excellent, if intricate script by Robert Rossen (Lilith and All the King's Men) in a quotidian style -- there's no chiaroscuro and everything is brightly lit. A bar seems as bright as an operating theater. Although everyone in the picture is trapped and some are doomed, the movie doesn't fell like a film noir -- it's too novelistic and eschews the concentrated sense of fatality that is integral to noir. This picture is diffuse and has the feeling of a Russian novel.
In the movie's prologue, the film's essential romantic triangle is established. A young girl has run away from home and, with her cat, is hiding in a boxcar. A tough urchin who likes her brings some food -- this is Sam Montgomery, the child of a local alcoholic. Sam and the girl, Martha Ivers (although she calls herself Martha Smith after her father a mere millhand at the Ivers' family factory) are apprehended by railroad goons, although Sam dives onto one of the cops, knocks him over, and escapes. Martha is returned to her domineering and cruel Aunt, the woman running the big factory in town. The aunt denounces Martha for her allegiance to her ne'er-do-well (and, apparently deceased) father -- he apparently got the daughter of Ivers' dynasty pregnant -- and locks the girl in her room. Martha's tutor is a sycophant who is scheming to get his cowardly and feckless son into Harvard. The boy is named Walter O'Neal and he's a bespectacled weakling, but he also likes Martha and is slavishly loyal to her. Walter comes to Martha's assistance and, then, confronts Sam who has returned through a thunderstorm to rescue the girl. When the Aunt whacks Martha's cat with her cane repeatedly on the steps leading to her niece's room, the girl rips the stick out of the old woman's hand and hits her with it so that she falls down the steps and is killed. Walter witnesses the accident as does, possibly, Sam who runs away. Walter's father apparently knows what has happened but urges both his son and Martha to claim that a "big man" came into the house through the open door left by Sam's departure and that this assailant knocked the nasty old Aunt down the steps. It's this lie that motivates the rest of the action in the film. When Sam returns to town, Walter and Martha assume he knows the truth about the Aunt's death -- but, in fact, in one of the film's many ironies, Sam didn't see the Aunt's death and doesn't know what happened.
After this rather elaborate prelude, we learn by a title that 20 years has passed. A soldier returning from the War is driving in the darkness when he discovers that he is about to enter Iverstown. As he talks to his companion, a sailor who is asleep, about the his childhood in the town, he forgets to watch the highway and crashes into a telephone pole. ("The road curved; I didn't.") In town, he brings the car to a garage to be repaired. This soldier, who is now some kind of professional gambler, is Sam, a war veteran who has killed a number of people in combat and, also, in the course of self-defense in his gambling business. Sam learns that Walter is now the town's DA and is running for high office. Walter is married to Martha Ivers, a marriage of convenience underwritten by their mutual lie about the death of Martha's Aunt. The triangle between Walter O'Neil, who is now a hopeless alcoholic, Martha Ivers, and Sam is complicated in short-order by the appearance of a young woman, Toni. She seems to be a prostitute and has just been released from jail after being framed for the theft of a fur coat apparently given to her by one of her patrons. Toni picks up Sam and starts an affair with him -- a lot of the action occurs at a local hotel. Martha is now in love with Sam and wants to seduce him -- she has had many other affairs due to her husband's inadequacies but she also loves the fact that Walter is hopelessly in love with her and will do anything to gain her affection. Walter, who is completely corrupt, gets some goons to beat up Sam and drop him off, bruised and battered, 25 miles from town. (Sam has been lured into this beating by Toni who betrays him to stay out of jail; Walter has the goods on her, has contacted her probation officer, and threatened her with imprisonment for violation of her probation.) Sam revenges himself on the goons, knocks out Walter, and, angered by Toni's betrayal, succumbs to Martha's blandishments. Toni is wounded and wants to win Sam back. And so it goes.
In this film, everyone betrays everyone else. Sam betrays Toni by allowing himself to be seduced by Martha. Martha cheats on her husband. Walter schemes to have both Toni and Sam eliminated by being thrown in jail. Toni lures Sam into a beating to keep from going to jail. Everyone is compromised and, of course, things don't end well. Barbara Stanwyck plays the feral Martha Ivers --she and Walter lied to pin the death of Martha's niece on some small-time criminal and he has been hanged for the killing. Stanwyck is glib, bland, and exceedingly persuasive as a sociopath. (She defends herself by remarking that she grew the Plant from 3000 to 30,000 workers and has given people jobs galore while contributing to many charities and doing other philanthropic work -- she seems desperate to erase her crimes by philanthropy.) The men are strangely cast: Van Heflin with buggy eyes plays Sam who is conceived in the movie as being irresistably handsome to all women -- for instance, O'Neal's pretty secretary moons over him and seems about to wet her pants when he calls her "honey." The useless drunken Walter is played by Kirk Douglas. This is curious for viewers necessarily acquainted with Douglas' later career as a manly action star -- although a little after this movie Douglas was good in the role of a similarly corrupt and unethical journalist in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. Lizabeth Scott plays the part of Toni -- she seems to be imitating Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, a picture more or less contemporaneous with this movie; Toni is rail thin, cracking wide, and she chain-smokes. The movie expresses a sour sense of war trauma. Women have taken over industry while the men were fighting and, of course, while the GIs were away in various theaters of war, slimy noncombatants like Walter have had their way with them -- of course, with the complicity of the ladies involved. War has made people into opportunists and politics are tainted and Van Heflin's character has brought combat back home when killed someone is an affray involving his gambling business. Everyone betrays everyone else and has blood on their hands and all institutions are radically corrupt. All of this begs the question: just what were we fighting for? There are many excellent lines in the movie including an exchange that may have affected the young John Lewis: "You were looking for trouble..." "Yes, but it was good trouble."
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