Love Lies Bleeding was the name of the John Patrick short story from which screenwriter Robert Rossen adapted The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. It’s a much more evocative title, if perhaps a bit grisly for movie marquees back in 1946. I’m still not sure what the mouthful of a replacement moniker is supposed to mean, yet the original conjures not just visions of these doomed lovers lying prone in crimson puddles on the floor, but also how the deceptions of their pasts bleed into the present day, staining everything they touch. The story is an unwieldy, noir-tinted melodrama overflowing with operatic emotions and doomy fatalism. Journeyman Lewis Milestone doesn’t so much direct Rossen’s script as he tries to keep up with it. In the hands of a great visual stylist (like Rossen himself) the movie could have been a masterpiece. As is, it’s still a corker.
It’s the tale of three childhood classmates bound together by the events of a dark and stormy evening some 18 years ago, when the title character’s cruel, sadistic, and obscenely wealthy aunt took a tumble down the steps. Our recently orphaned young Martha had tried to run away and join the circus with her beau Sam Masterston – a rakishly charming kid from the wrong side of the tracks. But the two were ratted out by squirmy little Walter O’Neill Jr., son of Martha’s live-in tutor, a weasel with one eye on the old lady’s fortune. After much ado on that staircase after hours, Masterson managed to escape with the elephants, Auntie’s money went to Martha and the O’Neills, and an alcoholic drifter hung for a murder he didn’t commit.
It’s nearly two decades later when Masterson (portrayed as an adult by Van Heflin) comes literally crashing back into his hometown, his car colliding with a signpost and disrupting the slumber of a hitchhiking sailor amusingly played by future Pink Panther director Blake Edwards. In Sam’s absence, Iverstown has become “the fastest growing industrial city in America,” thanks mostly to his old girlfriend Martha, who turned her inheritance into a steel dynasty stretching as far as the eye can see. Not really a surprise, since she grew up to be Barbara Stanwyck, domineering the screen in her usual dazzling array of Edith Head costumes, however inappropriate for casual occasions. What does come as a surprise is that Martha wound up married to wormy little Walter O’Neill Jr. He’s still a spineless little rodent like he was back in grade school, only now he’s played by an unknown actor in his first movie role, who had recently changed his name from Issur Danielovitch to Kirk Douglas.
The way Masterson gets mixed up again with these two schemers is a little more convoluted than it probably needed to be, thanks to producer Hal B. Wallis’ obsession with starlet Lizabeth Scott. Reputed to be the inspiration for All About Eve’s Eve Harrington, Scott’s story could make a pretty wild movie of its own — I’ve always been amused by her claim to have dropped the “E” from her first name as a patriotic gesture to conserve precious ink during wartime. But her small, supporting role in Martha Ivers as a drifter with whom Heflin becomes infatuated is padded out of all proportion by a horny executive coming up with extraneous scenes to look at her in various states of undress. (At one point during post-production, it’s said that Wallis ordered Milestone go back and shoot more close-ups of Scott. The director told him to go do it himself. Which he did, I imagine quite happily.)
Top-heavy and weighed down by laborious dialogue required to get their sleeping arrangements past the Hays Code censors, the flirtation between Scott and Heflin eventually leads to him calling in a favor from his old buddy in the district attorney’s office. This sends Walter Jr. spiraling into suspicious fits and jealous rages, wondering why Masterson has really come to Iverstown. For a man who would go on to play so many larger-than-life heroes, the degree to which Douglas commits to the character’s weakness is shocking. Nakedly needy as he disappears into a bottle, it’s the kind of study in masculine frailty his son Michael would make a career out of 40 years later, but not what one would expect from Spartacus.
This leaves more room for the scorching chemistry between Stanwyck and Heflin, each riffing on the screenplay’s increasingly unsubtle insinuations that these two lost their virginity to each other that night they tried to run away and join the circus. The criminal conflagrations are as avoidable as they are inevitable. Distrust and bad faith readings manifest danger where there was none, almost if we’re pinned to a karmic wheel that keeps spinning back to that night on the staircase so many years ago. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers ends the only way it can – with love, lies and bleeding.
“The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” is streaming on Paramout+ and several SVOD services.
