Martha Ivers: Now, Sam. Do it now. Set me free, set both of us free. He fell down the stairs and fractured his skull, that’s how he died. Everybody knows what a heavy drinker he was. Oh Sam, it can be so easy.
Although I tried to find as many different examples as I could from different actresses, I couldn’t resist including another film starring Barbara Stanwyck. The characters that she has played, especially in her Pre-Code era and film noir days, have always been an important part of my villainous descent into the throes of feminism.
Barbara Stanwyck is back, two years after Double Indemnity, to bring us another thrilling tale of how she tries to completely dismantle everyone’s life, but this time with two men flanking her instead of one. In The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, a man reunited with his friend from childhood, finds her married to someone she doesn’t love and uncovers a murder that ties them together.
One of the things that hindered Hollywood creatives during this era was the Hays Code. This was a collection of guidelines that motion pictures looking for theatrical release had to abide by, from 1934 to 1968 when the code was done away with. Along with other topics like banning interracial relationships on screen, the Hays Code was most concerned with the portrayal of sexual content on the screen (kissing, nudity, sexual implications, etc.). And this was a major problem because women in film noir were the pinnacle of female sexuality. As Janey Place describes in the Annenberg Learner’s American Cinema series, “You can see it in art and iconography throughout the ages, that’s a dangerous figure. A powerful, sexual female is a very dangerous figure.”
Even now in Hollywood, we don’t see this often. Film noir women (Femme Fatales) were extremely smart and powerful, and combined with that, she was very sexual. And she was given that power, mostly to pose a threat to the main character, but she was given it nevertheless. Barbara Stanwyck’s character still dies in this because a woman with that much power still cannot exist in a world like ours. But she has a hell of a time doing it, and she still wields power that I can’t say I’ve ever seen a man do in cinema.
I always wondered why these women couldn’t live. Why a woman with such intelligence, such power and confidence even more so than the men surrounding her couldn’t survive a simple story. Now noir isn’t about getting what you want, it’s about what life throws at you and how the cookie crumbles. But I have never seen women taken as seriously in any genre more than I have in film noir and it’s important to be taken seriously as women. To be recognized that we are whole already without men and that we are different, but that it is our strength. To be taken seriously is a threat, it’s dangerous to men who put themselves above us, and if believing that being taken seriously makes me evil and makes me a character that has no choice but to die because her world is made for men, then so be it. My villain story continues.
Next: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
