The Strange Woman (1946)

Lack of good storyline.

best movie i've ever seen.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I recently bought a Noir Collector Set(Dark Film Mysteries) with 12 movies, and The Strange Woman was included which was one film I had never seen before. Many other reviews will give you the story line, and spoilers which I always hate to read before watching, so I tend to watch first and read reviews later to see if I agree with the opinions or not. If you like Hedy Lamar I think this is the movie for you. Except for the first 10 minutes where they show her character growing up, she appears in just about every scene. She is at her sultry, sexy and evil best in this one. This is strictly a 19th Century, small New England town melodrama, with very little action, but that's not bad here. The director here, Edgar Ulmer, directs the noir classic "Detour" also included in the set. Strange Woman is not as tough edged as Detour, but some scenes do excel, and even with her evil manipulations she can still get you to feel sympathetic towards her. Hedy shows great range in a few scenes, representing the character, Jenny's emotional complexities well. Also, a well cast supporting actor group that do a good job helping the plot move along. Hedy makes for a great femme fatale.

Clearly hampered to some extent by the Hays Code, this is still a pretty eventful melodrama starring Hedy Lamarr as a scheming little vixen, ever, it seems on the look out for a more handsome or more wealthy gentleman. Gene Lockhart is excellent as her older first husband but George sanders seems all wrong just doing his thing as her final beau. Much twisting and turning here as Hedy's character breaks all the local rules yet still manages to acquire power and influence. Begins as if it is set to be a simple tragic tale as the daughter of a drunk seeks some rich guy to see her safe and then becomes more of a trail of vengeance on polite society before buckling under the code restrictions and pulling itself back from what might have been a delirious ending.

In one of those strangely odd coincidences that manage to surprise me somewhat frequently, the last movie I watched and reviewed happened to be "Blazing Saddles". Harvey Korman portrays a character in that film named Hedley Lamarr, and spends a good portion of his time correcting virtually everyone who calls him Hedy. This morning, as I'm about to select a film to watch from my Mill Creek Entertainment Mystery box set, the very first disc I pull at random offers this entry featuring the real Hedy Lamarr. Decision made.This was actually my first time seeing Lamarr in a picture, and though she wasn't that impressively good looking following that rippled water effect, her beauty continued to emerge and intensify throughout the story. Ironically, her character was the kind of person you could love to hate, but at the same time, had a vulnerable quality that made you feel sorry for her at the same time. In that regard, her performance was undeniably effective as a conflicted and troubled woman who immediately set her sights on a new conquest no sooner than she had secured her latest victim. And yet she always manages to make it seem so innocently believable. Her explanation to Meg Saladine (Hillary Brooke) for stealing her fiancée is classic - "The storm, and the excitement, and then lightning struck"! Lightning indeed.I'm really not willing to buy Jenny's first marriage to old Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockhart), even if it set up a convenient path to wealth and security. Isaiah seemed to have that Ebenezer Scrooge thing going for him, which got it's comeuppance in that strange church scene where the minister managed to embarrass the citizenry into funding his church expansion. It seemed to me that Jenny could have been a little more patient and waited things out until she met some attractive young lawyer fresh from Boston, but then we wouldn't have had this story.By 1946, the idea of a film's leading lady dying at the finale wasn't entirely novel. Bette Davis had theater goers in tears at the end of 1939's "Dark Victory", but hers was a much more sympathetic character. A clue to Jenny's inevitable demise is offered earlier in the story by the traveling Bible thumper Lincoln Pittridge - "Your beauty has made you evil, and evil destroys itself".

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.