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 It calls this movie an "outstanding melodrama" with unrelenting tension.
Barbara Stanwyck plays an "evil young girl" who kills her aunt. Kirk Douglas
watches in "dismay." This is the story of how their lives continue "amid a
vast web of lies and deceit, until their boyhood friend returns to town 18
years later." They wonder if he knows their secret and if he'll keep quiet
about it and how much will it cost. (From the Alpha Video Distributors release) 1946, 116 minutes, VHS
This movie proves the old saw that "you can go home again, but it will probably
suck." Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin star with good support from Kirk Douglas
and Lizabeth Scott in this pot boiler about living with the choices
you made when you were young and dumb. In this case, the act central to
everything is that Stanwyck's character Martha Ivers (though she demands to be
called Martha Smith whenever she wants to assert her independence) decides in a
fit of rage to whack her wicked witch of an aunt on top of her mean old head
with a cane, sending her down a flight of stairs to her death. Now there's a
little more to things than that, but we'll get there in due time. Martha's
parents are dead, so she is a teenager who is living with her aunt, who is one
of those really ornery cusses that usually have to raise dead people's children
in movies like this. I think we wouldn't be too surprised if we found some
flowers in the aunt's attic if you catch my meaning. The aunt pretty much runs
the town they live in which is named Iverstown for some reason (there's some
type of mill that she runs in town) and she's all about stopping Martha from
running away from home with that no good Sam Masterson (that will be Van Heflin
when he's
all growed up). In fact, just to make sure that even those of us who are what
my probation officer calls, "slow on the uptake," gets the point that the aunt
is a
real jerk-o, she even hates little kittens! Martha has a kitty named Bundles
and after the fuzz catch her and Sam trying to run away, Martha brings Bundles
home. Well, Bundles runs out of Martha's room and down the stairs.
Unfortunately, just about this time, the aunt is stomping her way up the stairs
and when she and Bundles spot each other, they throw down. Of course, since
the aunt is throwing down with her cane and Bundles is just a sweet little
kitty, guess who ends up with brains matted into its fur? Martha sees this
and the next thing you know the aunt is resting comfortably (if at an odd
angle) at the bottom of the stairs. While all this was going on, Sam was
hiding behind the stairs (he had snuck into Martha's room). Also present is
Walter, the son of Martha's tutor. Martha quickly demonstrates her aptitude for
being a rich wench without a soul by concocting some blarney about a big man
who came in the house killed the aunt and left. Walter agrees with this
version and Walter's father is sold on it.  Walter's father knows good and well that Martha probably whacked her aunt, but
he's been the aunt's little toady for years in hopes that she would pay his
son's way through college (geez, I wish that guy was my dad!). Since she's an
evil aunt, she refuses, so when she's dead and he sees that he's finally got a
little stroke over the Ivers' money, he goes along with the story so that his
boy will have his way paid through college. Later he would engineer his boy
marrying Martha and together they would rule the town, she through her powerful
business interests and Walter through being the district attorney (which he only
is able to get because of Martha's power and influence). But what about Sam?
After all, it was Sam that Martha always ran away with. It was Sam that Martha
pretended to be strong in front of, because she didn't want him to think less
of her. It was Sam that didn't have a wussy dad that forced him to go to law
school. Sam left town that night in 1928, the last anyone ever saw of him was
when he was hiding behind the stairs before old auntie bought the farm. Only an
open door on a dark and stormy night gave any clue that he'd been there. He'd
left Iverstown and never looked back. Flash forward to 1946 and Van Heflin
(the grown Sam) is just driving through when he realizes that he's near
Iverstown. He hasn't thought about it years (does anyone really believe that?)
and is so lost in thought about what happened there and what might have been
that
he crashes his car outside of town. Wandering into town, he learns from the
mechanic at the garage that Martha has married Walter. Looking at one of
Walter's campaign posters, he remarks that Walter still looks like a scared
little kid. Sam does a little sightseeing and happens upon the house where he
used to live. It's now a rooming house and he runs into Toni (Lizabeth Scott,
doing her husky-voiced blonde gimmick to perfection). Toni says she's getting
on a bus to go someplace else, but manages to miss the bus, so she and Sam hang
out for awhile. We learn that Sam is a gambler who drifts from place to place.
He's been broke several times, but always turns up with a new bankroll. We
know that deep down, he's a good guy, because he's got one of those war hero
records movies always give to world-weary guys who play by their own rules, but
aren't evil dudes.  They get separate rooms at a hotel (he's a war hero for crying out loud!) and
the next morning, Sam is rousted by the cops. It seems that his new gal pal,
Toni, is on probation. One of the conditions of her probation was that she
take a bus back to some other town, but she didn't (what about the condition
where she has to entertain war heroes?) and they caught her at the bus station
this morning trying to cash it in for some dough. She was also supposed to get
a job, so she told them that Sam was her employer. Sam is understandably upset
by this, but I don't think it takes a genius to figure that a blonde with a
husky voice who travels by bus and doesn't have a problem hooking up with a
gambler is probably walking paper. See, now that she's in the clink, they want
to
execute her suspended sentence, which would mean she'd have to do a nickel at
one of the toughest women's prisons in the tri-state area. Good for you and me
maybe, but not such a hot deal for her, I gather. Sam, who up to now, didn't
seem to have much interest in looking up any of the old crowd (Martha and
Walter) decides that now would be a good time to see if his good buddy Wally
can get his chickie sprung. Walter, is one of those guys who's married to a
beautiful woman that probably doesn't love him all that much and he's smart
enough to realize that his life has never been his own and never will be.
First he was living out the dreams of dear old greedy dad, then he was living
the life that suited his rich and powerful wife. It's beaten-down guys like
this that invented the infamous "Scotch and water brunch." Sam moseys in to
see Walter and Walter is still scared because of the big secret the three of
them all carry. Sam asks Walter to help out an old buddy by getting his girl
out of jail and Walter says that he will do what he can, and you can tell that
Walter feels like Sam is putting the pinch on him. Martha shows up and is
surprised to see Sam. They do a meet and greet type thing and agree to kill
another relative together sometime. After Sam leaves, Walter makes some calls
to get a bunch of background information on Sam. Toni gets out of jail and
seems kind of reluctant to hang out with Sam (maybe she was in lock up too
long). They go to a restaurant where Sam's pretty jacked about them being
together and Toni is really subdued when all of a sudden a guy shows up and
says he's Toni's husband.  Sam's a war hero, so he takes it outside with this guy. This guy manages to
take
about four more guys outside with him and even though he's a two-fisted,
dice-playing, war hero, Sam ain't no Rambo and he gets hisself all beat down.
As Toni walks down the street, she sees a car stopped at a red light. Sam is
in the back and still getting his arse whipped. At least they obeyed traffic
signals. Sam gets dumped miles out of town and crawls back on the road all
battered and bruised, a private detective shield clenched in his fist. The bus
to Iverstown rolls by, so he hops on that and heads back to settle things with
everyone involved. He catches Toni at the bus station (that's where she should
get a job, since she pretty much lives there by now) and she tells him
everything. It turns out that those guys told her to lure Sam the way she did
or else she was going to be Large Marge's bitch, but they swore (giggle) that
they (hehehe) wouldn't hurt (HAHAHA) Sam. Sam heads over to the prosecutor's
house to find out why he sandbagged him the way he did. He finds Walter
downing a few (surprise!) and Walter reaches for a gun, but Sam slams his hand
in a drawer. It turns out that the beat down was just to get Sam to leave town
for good . Walter
was worried because Martha had called the mechanic to slow things up on the car
repairs so that Sam wouldn't leave. He's also worried that Sam is going to
spill the beans on the real deal with the dead aunt. See, it's not just the
fact that Martha killed a mean old wench and lied about it. She could probably
get off on that one (youth, accident, mean old bat victim - all mitigating
circumstances). The sticky part of things is that Walter has already tried and
executed an innocent man for doing the crime, a man that Martha identified as
the "real killer." That's going to be a tougher death to finesse. Since
Walter is such an incompetent boob dealing with would-be blackmailers and since
Martha's knickers tingle whenever Sam is around, she invites Sam to go to her
office where they can work out the details of the payoff. Sam says he wants
half, Martha whines about how she built everything all by herself and how crappy
her life has been. She asks Sam why he never came back for her and he tells
her that he waited as long as he could and you can practically see those same
kids that were running away together on that wet night. Even though Sam really
likes Toni, the memories he's had with Martha seems to overwhelm him and he
starts to think maybe there's some way for them to be together. Martha on some
level wants this as well. Toni notices all this and guess where she says she's
headed? The bus station (get over it, that gag hasn't gotten you over it and
it ain't gonna). Things come to a head when Martha, Sam, and Walter all meet. It turns out that
Sam didn't know anything about the aunt being murdered because he had run out
the door before Martha killed her. Now, at Martha's house, the same one she
killed her aunt in, everything comes full circle. Walter gets really wasted
and falls down the stairs. Martha is practically giddy with delight and urges
Sam to kill Walter while he's knocked out, thus allowing them to be together.
Sam pointedly tells her somewhere along way after she says that he's killed
before, "I've killed , but never murdered." Bitty, bitty, BANG! Sam goes down
the stairs to where Walter is in a heap and picks him up (Martha is booing at
this point) and carries him into another room. There Walter comes to, Martha
threatens to kill Sam, Sam walks out, and Walter and Martha meet their fates in
melodramatic (and pretty effective) fashion. Sam leaves town with Toni, telling
her not to look back. This was a fairly involving tale about how the
choices we make shape our lives for years to come. Martha is an interesting
character because of all the power she wields over the rest of the characters
in the movie. She had both these guys on a string when she was younger and
even after Sam was gone for 18 years, he immediately falls under her spell and
gets
sucked back into her twisted world when he returns home. Martha seems to turn
out like the aunt she despised so much. Instead of heartlessly clubbing a
kitten, she urges Sam to heartlessly club Walter, who was as helpless as a
kitten. Yet, she is still able to feel so much for Sam, that she's basically
just that scared little girl sometimes. You can't help but wonder with the
rest of the characters what would have happened if she had just run away with
Sam, instead of staying. It's ironic that greed traps Walter (well, his dad
really traps him) as well as Martha (ask yourself why she really came up with
that lie about killing her aunt - was it to protect herself or all the wealth
she stood to inherit?) yet the character of the gambler that we associate greed
with so much in these movies, escapes. He almost is trapped by his desire to
get half of the Ivers money, but in the end he sees that it wouldn't be worth
the price. Looking at Walter for Sam is probably like looking into a mirror of
what life would have been like had he stayed with Martha. It cost Walter
everything and made him commit perhaps one of the most heinous acts you'll see,
using his power to knowingly send an innocent man to the gallows. Walter knows
this of course and just seems to be waiting to physically die (he's already
dead spiritually and in every other sense), drinking to numb himself and to
speed
the process. Secrets have a way of undoing the lives of those that keep them
and this one had taken a life of its own on for Martha and Walter. Though he
didn't know anything, Martha and Walter assume that Sam is home only to collect
on the secret. He isn't of course, yet they are destroyed by the secret, not
because of anything Sam does, but because his mere presence stirs up everything
that Martha and Walter had papered over for years. Sam was a walking reminder
of
what they had done and finally they had no choice to but to settle up with fate
and themselves. A good movie, that some may feel gets a bit talky in places,
but
those of us in the know call that character development. The performances of
all involved, along with the slightly unconventional (Should I call it
"strange" perhaps?) story should keep fans of movies of this period entertained
for the
two hours it runs.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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