The Strange Woman (1946) - film review

Bangor, Maine, in the early 19th Century.  When her drunken father takes to beating her, Jenny Hager turns to her neighbours for help.  The only man who can offer her shelter is Isaiah Poster, a successful lumber baron, but he is a single man, twenty years her senior.  To avoid a scandal, Isaiah decides that he and Jenny should marry.  Despite the difference in their ages, Jenny has no objection, and welcomes the sudden elevation in her social standing.  But she soon grows tired of her husband and begins to flirt with his son, Ephraim, when he returns from college.  Knowing that he has fallen in love with her, Jenny tells Ephraim that she is prepared to marry him, if his father were to die.  During a canoe trip down river, Ephraim inadvertently causes the death of his father, but when he returns to Jenny she refuses to see him.  She has now switched her attention to John Evered, one of Isaiah’s employees, and the fiancé of her best friend.  Will Evered succumb to Jenny’s charms like all the others, or will he realise her true nature...?

One of cinema’s darker and more disturbing explorations of sociopathy and sexuality, The Strange Woman is unusual in that it is a period melodrama made in the style of a classic film noir thriller.  It was one of a handful of films made by Edgar G. Ulmer that contributed to the director’s belated reappraisal by the French film critics of the 1960s.   Ulmer spent most of his career turning out ultra-low budget productions for the poverty row studios in Hollywood, but occasionally he was given the opportunity, as here, to make a more substantial film.  If Ulmer had had the good fortune to pursue a career with the major studios (rather than be shunned after he stole the wife of Carl Laemmle’s nephew), he could plausibly have been one of Hollywood’s leading lights, rather than a relatively obscure incidental player, making nondescript films on a shoestring. 

Ulmer’s approach to The Strange Woman is both revealing and distinctive.  The film noir style feels highly appropriate for the film, even though it is a period drama.  The high contrast photography serves to emphasise the dual nature in every human being, but in particular the schizoid character of the heroine, a full-blooded femme fatale played magnificently by Hedy Lamarr.  Neither truly good nor truly evil, Jenny is a complex character who seems incapable of mastering the impulses that compel her to perform acts of shocking cruelty one moment and selfless generosity the next.  Her entire life appears to be an act of rebellion against the societal constraints of her time, constraints which prevent women of her social milieu from expressing themselves honestly and achieving any real fulfilment in their lives.  The film can be interpreted as an early salvo for women’s rights, with Jenny Hager representing the modern woman, a free spirit who seeks not to perpetrate evil but merely to acquire the same status and independence that the male sex take for granted.  Seen in that light, the film’s title appears to be both fitting and highly ironic.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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