Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This romantic melodrama, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer -- the giant of Poverty Row best known for his ability to write, produce, and direct a full-fledged movie on a budget of two cents -- has Hedy Lamarr as a scheming, poor, young wanton in 19th-century Bangor, Maine. Of course all the men are after her because she's beautiful. She really is. It doesn't matter that her name isn't actually Hedy Lamarr. Nobody is named Hedy Lamarr. She was born Cosima Ausgang von Bahnhof in Furzheim, Germany. But, honestly, it doesn't detract from her appeal, nor does the fact that she got into Hollywood movies by seducing a move mogul on a trans-Atlantic passage.She insinuates herself into the arms of the lustful and rotund Gene Lockhart. He believes he's tricked her into marriage but it's the other way around. He's the richest merchant in the port of Bangor and besides he has a handsome young son, Louis Hayward, away at Harvard. Once properly ensconced in Lockhart's home, she writes Hayward, who is her age, to hurry back to Bangor so "I can show you how warm a mother can be," the slut. The thoughtful decent architect returns to his home. Lamarr at once puts tantalizing moves on him.Ulmer has a reasonable budget here and makes good use of it, and there are some adequate performances. Gene Lockhart in particular knows his way around a rather complicated role. Hayward is less jaunty than usual. In fact, he's something of a milquetoast. When a mob abuses a young working woman, it's Lamarr who intervenes, not Hayward. Lamarr herself, hobbled by a slight accent, projects the workings of her mind the way a traffic light signals "go" or "caution" or "halt." There's not the slightest hint of subtlety. But, honestly, it doesn't detract from her appeal.Halfway through, George Sanders shows up. He's Lockhart's foreman at the lumber camp. A foreman, yes, but a dapper one. I've never really thought of George Sanders as a rough-and-tumble man of the woods, a Sebastian Junger, but rather the cad he usually is. However, his smooth posh baritone saves his bacon. He's the beau of Hillary Brooke, a childhood friend of Lamarr's. But the moment he appears, Lamarr's features become incandescent and glandular. She begins to avoid her son. Has Hayward shown himself to be not enough of a man? Is there any end to Lamarr's depravity? It has to be said that the plot is a little unraveled somewhere around the mid-point. Things kind of nudge themselves into the plot without adumbration. A riot erupts out of nowhere. The selfish Lamarr begins distributing money, leading the Temperance League, and doing community service without explanation. Maybe we're meant to exercise our inferential faculties with more vigor. I think it's bad screen writing.Then, when Hayward is packing for a trip up river and they're alone in the house, she lets her hair down, descends the grand staircase, snuffs out the lights and silently approaches him while he gawks at her in fright. For a moment, it looks like a vampire movie. But instead of sucking his blood, she extorts the poor guy, blackmailing him into thinking that he must snuff his own father. Patricide is a serious business. If you were a patricide in traditional China, you would be subject to a long and lingering death, your relatives would have curses tattooed on their faces, and the bones of your ancestors would be exhumed and scattered to the winds, no kidding. The moral is: don't do it unless you feel really strongly about it.As it turns out, Hayward is accidentally instrumental in causing his father's death when in a panic he overturns the canoe running the rapids. I don't want to bother looking it up, but it seems to me the shots of the canoes and the rapids are from an old John Ford movie. It's exactly what Lamarr wants. Lockhart is out of the way and the wretched Hayward is somehow responsible, so she kicks him out and turns her attention to George Sanders. Hayward, ridden with guilt, turns into a drunk.Situation report: Lamarr has become the doyen of Bangor, Maine. She has done so by seducing Gene Lockhart, Louis Hayward, and George Sanders, by seeing to it that Lockhart has met his death, by prompting the despairing Hawyard to hang himself, and by stealing away the beau of her best friend, Hillary Brooke. She's now "the richest woman in New England." Little does she know, tragedy lies just around the corner..

The Strange Woman is an interesting piece of experimentation by Hedy Lamarr. Though her Viennese accent is hardly suggestive of down home Maine, the idea was to cast a woman that men are just drooling over. Half the population of 1820s Bangor, Maine certainly was. Her accent is also a hindrance in that Dennis Hoey is supposed to be her father. She sure didn't learn to talk the way she does from him.Watching this film ought to make people realize that the newly admitted state of Maine was as much a frontier as the west was. It was part of Massachusetts until it was split off and admitted as its own state in 1821. Those scenes of the drunken loggers and sailors are very much like Dodge City when the Texas cattlemen are in town and on a tear. And there was no Wyatt Earp to keep them in line.There's a prologue where we see the characters of Hedy Lamarr and Louis Hayward as children. This is one pretty girl who later becomes a beautiful woman, but is as ruthless and evil in getting what she wants.What she wants is to get out of Hoey's home and influence so she sets her cap for rich logging merchant Gene Lockhart. Hayward is his weakling son who wants her bad. He does anything for her and it destroys him in the end.After Lockhart dies she decides she wants George Sanders as her second husband. Sanders is the manager of the logging camp and he and Hillary Brooke are an item. Never mind that, Sanders is putty in her hands as Hayward was. Hayward is an actor waiting to be rediscovered. That man could and did play all kinds of roles and was never afraid of being a villain.Except for an incredibly contrived cop out ending which ruined the film, The Strange Woman will make for some interesting viewing.

Taking on the type of role that the equally exotic Margaret Lockwood played in exciting melodramas such as "The Wicked Lady" and "The Man in Grey", Hedy Lamarr gives one of her more interesting performances. She always looks great in period clothes, and is also aided by the very multi-dimensional character she plays. As a guttersnipe who marries older Gene Lockhart for position, she flirts openly with his son, then sets her corset and eyes on his mine manager. Lamarr never fully makes this character totally evil, giving her obvious compassion towards the sick, even volunteering a large donation to the local church which suddenly opens up the wallets of the tightwad rich parishioners who at first snubbed her. But with muscular bucks coming down from the mines, you know its only a matter of time before her lustiness returns Joining in on the action are Louis Hayward as Lockhart's black sheep son and George Sanders as the possibly amoral henchman who can't resist Lamarr's sultry stares. They play, respectively, the same parts that Stewart Granger and James Mason would play opposite Lockwood. Technically, the film is beautiful to look at, but it has the tendency to overdo the dramatic music in the love scenes. This will probably increase in popularity as the cult fans of director Edgar G. Ulmer increases.

Sigmund Freud killed Pierre Janet. The French School of "psychopathology driven by child abuse" of the late 1800s and early 1900s was crushed by the German-Austrian School of "innate drives in conflict with morality" in the early 20th century. (Hey! The latter fit so much better with authoritarian religion.) So what does –that- have to do with "The Strange Woman?" Plenty, if one views the script through the lens of modern-day interpersonal psychology. Beat and molest a beautiful female child; figure on a physically empowered, castration-bent sexual predator in adulthood whose ego has split into warring fragments of viciousness and guilt. Janet was the only major figure in the study of human behavior who'd written extensively on what we see in Lamarr's character up to the time "TSW" was made. Sharron Stone has done the nasty half of the character with a lot more vitality in a number of films, but the fact that the resentful, revenge-obsessed, adult molestee was the central character in any Hollywood production in 1946 is remarkable.I'd love to know how this project came together. My (educated) guess is that co-writer Hunt Stromberg was in the middle of it from the inception. According to Aberdeen's book, Hollywood Renegades, Stromberg had formed an independent production company to produce films like "Lady of Burlesque" with "Bad Barbara" Stanwyck (well, that's what they called her in those days) in 1942. He followed up on "TSW" with another (somewhat better) Lamarr vehicle called "Dishonored Lady" featuring a similar theme.Director Ulmer ("The Black Cat," "Girls in Chains," "Ruthless;" all amusing) wasn't quite up to his best here, even though he was a native German speaker working with a… native German speaker. Even so, Lamarr (surely one of the most beautiful women in film history) is fairly interesting here, even if she remains insufficiently histrionic to pull this off as believably as might have been the case had Stanwyck, Davis or Crawford taken the part. I love to –look- at her, but Lamarr seemed to be unable to allow her characters to really inhabit her at any point in her career.Best dialogue: Lamarr: "But, the rain! You know what happens in the rain. The roads get very dangerous." Sanders: "Yes; they get very… muddy." Ask any male who's ever fallen into the snakepit with a dissociated borderline / adult-molested-as-a-child what -that's- about. The worth of watching this one is largely in the first 20 minutes… and perhaps for Hayward's rendition of the used up, discarded tool on her way up in a world of (disgusting, easily manipulated) –men-. (I know plenty of guys who've been –there-.) But I (personally) related more to Sanders obsession with playing with fire even though he knew better. Some of you will, too. Hahahahahaha.