Summer Film Roundup, Part 4: Back to the Golden Age

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Before there was Dr. Strangelove, there was The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.  It's an extraordinarily compelling film noir, or twisted melodrama, if you like.  It owes more than a few debts to Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, released three years earlier, also produced by Paramount, also starring Barbara Stanwyck and with a score by Mikós Rózsa, who shamelessly plagiarizes his work from the earlier, better film. (Some of the melodic themes of the film are virtually identical to the ones in Double Indemnity, so much so that when Barbara Stanwyck is talking to her husband Walter O'Neill and saying "Walter," I almost felt she was talking to Walter Neff in the earlier film.)  Even the story itself bears similarities to Wilder's film, and we pretty much know how it will play out after the first 20 minutes or so, though the ending was a bit more ham-handed than I'd expected. In his debut film, Kirk Douglas is somewhat improbable as a weak-willed alcoholic, but he mostly manages to pull it off, with only a couple of moments where he's obviously "acting."  Judith Anderson is great at playing a cold, sadistic bitch , but Stanwyck gives her a good run for her money. 

The stylish Gothic imagery is courtesy of director Lewis Milestone; the script by Robert Rossen is filled with ominous plot twists and crackling dialogue.  Rossen new thing or two about secrecy and betrayal: he was later blacklisted for refusing to name names to House Committee on Un-American Activities, then changed his mind and named 57 people, enabling him to continue his career and direct his masterpiece, The Hustler (1961).  The relationship between Van Heflin and Lizabeth Scott bears more than a slight resemblance to the one between Paul Newman and Piper Laurie in The Hustler.  In both films the couple "meets cute" in the Hollywood tradition, though they also "meet dark," the romantic and enigmatic dialogue bristling with apprehension.. Rossen seemed to have a fascination for mysterious women  with complicated pasts. (But then who doesn't?)  Things work out a bit better for Heflin and Scott  than for Newman and Laurie, but it's evident that Stanwyck and Douglas are doomed from the start. 

At first I thought the sailor whose hitched a ride with Van Heflin in Heflin's first scene was Kirk Douglas -- we never got a good look at the sailors face, and from a distance it appeared to my eye to be Douglas. It turns out according to the IMDb that the sailor was played by a young Blake Edwards, years before he would achieve fame as a director.

Kirk Douglas turned 100 this year. He's still going strong, and he and his wife of 62 years have a new book out, Kirk and Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter, and a Lifetime in Hollywood.  It's been a long, wild ride since that first film performance in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.

The Last Tycoon (2017)

Inspired by Clive James' recent book, Play All: A Binge-watchers Notebook, I binge-watched a long-form TV series for the first time. It helped that I only had one day left of my free Amazon Prime trial and had until midnight to watch 9 of the 10 episodes of the first season of the Amazon series based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon.  I've long been a hopeless sucker for anything  about Fitzgerald' final years in Hollywood, and have read The Last Tycoon  three or four times and agree with the general consensus that it's the best novel  ever written about Hollywood, even in its incomplete form. (The scholarly consensus now asserts that Fitzgerald's preferred title for the novel was The Love of Last Tycoon: A Western, and some of the new editions of the novel bear that intriguing name.  The series has been called "Mad Men for Hollywood in the 1930s," and there seems little doubt that the producers were interested in playing that angle. It's a handsomely mounted production with fine performances by Kelsey Grammer, Matt Bomer, Lily Collins, Dominique McElligot, Jennifer Beals (yes, that Jennifer Beals) and Rosemarie DeWitt, among many others. Iddo Goldberg as the imperious and perverse Fritz Lang is particularly amusing.   And yet, nearly 10 hours of television each episode is 51 minutes) did not substantially deepen or add to what Fitzgerald created in his unfinished novel of 140 pages. The storyline goes off in many directions that have nothing to do with the original novel -- Nazi interference in Hollywood movies with insistence on script approval, the subject of two recent books, is one area the series explores that Fitzgerald never wrote about. Much as I enjoyed seeing the characters go through twists and turns unimagined by there are original author, I never felt they were adding anything essential to what he had written. 

With that in mind, you can enjoy the series as an entertaining riff on Fitzgerald's work, and appreciate the 21st century sensitivity to the often mistreated young actresses and neglected wives of the Hollywood moguls, as well as the rather wretched conditions that screenwriters were forced to work in despite the high salaries they drew. (Fitzgerald would probably have appreciated the latter point, considering how hard he labored at his novel between screenwriting gigs before dropping dead of a heart attack at the age of 44.)  A factory is a factory, even if the paycheck is much better than the average American's at that time.  And as the series shows, many of these writers weren't simply cynics who took the money and ran but sincerely wanted to write good films, despite the immense odds against them. So sit back and enjoy the ride, which is as filled with wonderful implausibilities as any Hollywood film of the era.

If you enjoy this series, I urge you to read Fitzgerald's novel as well as the excellent examination of how it was written, Matthew J. Bruccoli's "The Last of the Novelist": F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Last Tycoon.  And don't forget to take a look at Aaron Latham's entertaining and heartbreaking book, Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood.