The Strange Love of Martha Ivers1946

You can never go home.  Kirk Douglas arrives on the screen and electrifies this film. It is so incredible to me that someone’s very first on-screen performance could be so good and so pivotal to a film and especially as strong and interesting of a film as this.  This truly is a tragedy. How people can be crushed, changed, and destroyed by the overreaching control of those whose only job should be to care for them. These are people who are molded into strange and awful facsimiles of a human being, clinging to whatever they feel can give them their humanity back.  Constantly, Martha talks about “if Sam had stayed.” And yet the simple truth is that most likely nothing would have changed. Even destroying the most oppressive force in her life did not free her from the shackles of wealth and responsibility. And killing her aunt was probably the worst thing she ever could have done, as it made her a colder, crueler, more inhuman person.  Martha and Walter are victims, true, but it is a cycle, and they propagate and perpetuate the very same control that they were victims to. And it has made them paranoid and fearful.  They would never be free, and there was truly only ever one way out. And they took it.  Each time I hold someone new My arms grow cold thinking of you No one can take your place Darling, in my embrace I'll never be free