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A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

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..

It's a very pleasant surprise to find that not only could Lamarr act but that she could handle a role of some complexity. Jenny, like Scarlett, is a villainess that I am inclined to root for even as she puts her evil plots into play - and that she could pull that off is really down to the acting. If Jenny behaves badly, Ulmer makes is clear that she certainly has her reasons; abandoned by a feckless mother and beaten and abused by a drunken father, and condemned to eke out her existence in poverty on the wrong side of the tracks as her betters look down on her. As a female with no opportunity to improve her lot, the best escape on offer is to serve in the kitchens of the wealthy - she's not good enough to attend school with her childhood girlfriend - and the worst to land a job as serving girl/prostitute in one of the local saloons. In the early scene at the creek, Ulmer established character and motivation for the balance of the film. The young Jenny despises both options, and as she rejects the questionable and condescending generosity of the Judge and torments her future lover, she demonstrates her both her anger at the inequity of her lot and her determination to bootstrap herself out of a life of poverty and humiliation. In effect, she has "spirit", that singular quality that moviegoers so admire in their heroes, good or bad.Instinctively, as a young girl she knows her only ticket out in this man's world will be her beauty. But while she recognizes this truth with a brutal honesty, she neither accepts it nor takes it for granted in the fashion of a typical Hollywood femme fatale. In fact, it's clear that she intends to punish men for their weakness and susceptibility to her charms as well as their hypocrisy and need for control. Ulmer is at pains throughout to make us aware of these elements. The scene where the town fathers presume to decide how to dispose of Lamarr after her father's death in a way that will meet with the requirements of propriety is quite pointed. Incredibly, their solution is to marry her off to a man old enough to be her father, and the combination of salacious satisfaction and priggishness that Ulmer puts across here is delicious. Again in the church scene we see upstanding citizens content to complain about the depravities of the town's wilder elements but unwilling to apply their pocketbooks to the problem. Only after Lamarr stands up to volunteer a fair chunk of her husband's income and calls upon other women to do likewise do purse strings begin to loosen - indicating that there are other things on her agenda besides accumulating wealth and exacting revenge. Unlike many upstart type characters, she remembers where she came from and she means to do something about the condition of those she left behind. Not that her good deed gains her more than dismissive annoyance and a sexualized comment about her lips, but she is hardly surprised by this reaction - actually she seems amused. She's helped those she feels more akin too and screwed over the self righteous both within the same piece of business - it's been a good day. And then there's that wonderful scene with Sanders, where she bares all and shows him just how deliberately dishonest his efforts to quash his suspicions about her have been.Just as she punishes men, spends their money, plays with their affections and even incites them to murder, Lamarr is seen to consistently champion the cause of downtrodden women. Not the kind of behavior one would expect from a sociopathic femme fatale. There is a more complex individual here and yet one that also seems to stand for both feminine anger and as well as sisterly compassion. Brooke is the exception to the rule, but she is arguably rich enough and complacent enough to fall into the enemy camp. Lamarr's charitable works on behalf of impoverished women and children is not a ruse to gain respectability any more than her aid and staunch defense of her barmaid friend. Unlike Scarlett, she doesn't seem to care at all for propriety. In fact, she seems to despise it, recognizing that its standards are applied far more stringently to women and most often by men. Not for nothing does Ulmer show us even her true love Sanders arguing to chuck her friend Lena out into the street for the sake of propriety.However, this wouldn't be a Hayes code film if the message didn't get muddled by the very same false propriety that's being attacked here and it does gets very much muddled in the third act. Lamarr inexplicably falls for a miscast Sanders, who is not an appreciable improvement on any of the other men in town. He's just as dishonest, self interested and priggish and decidedly lacking in the charisma needed to explain how he manages to find the chink in her armor. Not a terrible plot turn in itself - she is human after all - except that we see it setting the stage for the inevitable crime doesn't pay comeuppance and contrition finale.In spite of the spoiled ending it's a well turned out film. The photography is good, the pacing quite good - it moves right along with very little that needed trimming. Having not read the original book I found Ulmer's feminist take on it refreshing and enjoyable especially considering the era it was made and it was fun to see Lamarr get an opportunity to trot out her acting talent.

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".

Imagine my shock when I popped this into the DVD player. The beautiful Hedy LaMarr acting instead of standing still,etc. It is a period piece and it requires Hedy to play a part reminiscent of Scarlett O'Hara, complete with the multiple husbands and moral expedience.This must be arguably her best performance. There is lots of storyline here and she is ably supported by veterans George Sanders and the underrated Louis Hayward,who play it straight minus their signature smirks.Dennis Hoey (Insp. LeStrade from the Holmes series) plays her father but for most of his time on screen he is in a drunken stupor. Well worth seeing, this is a very good film. I don't know if it was an A or a B in its time but it qualifies as an A.It is a shame it is in Black in White - Miss LaMarr should only be seen in Color.