THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS

Barbara Stanwyck has everything a woman could want: a business empire, a powerful husband, and a murder nobody knows she committed. In THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS, she rules a Pennsylvania factory town alongside her husband (Kirk Douglas, in his debut), an alcoholic district attorney whose political authority is inversely proportional to his authority at home. Seventeen years after a childhood crime brought them together, the unexpected return of an old sweetheart (Van Heflin) sends their miserable marriage into a fresh crisis. Meanwhile, Lizabeth Scott plays an ex-con who has the bad luck to wander into a town where the respectable citizens are considerably more dangerous than the criminals.

Directed by Lewis Milestone from a screenplay by Robert Rossen, this wonderfully bitter combination of film noir and Gothic melodrama is as much about the corruptions of wealth and power as it is about the terrible things people do for love. Stanwyck is magnificent as a woman who has acquired everything except the ability to enjoy it, while Douglas plays a man who can intimidate an entire town but can't stand up to his own wife. Neither seems quite sure whether they hate each other more than they hate themselves. With its magnificent shadows, feverish performances, and almost operatic emotional cruelty, this is Hollywood melodrama at its most gloriously unhappy.