Expected more

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Based on a 1941 novel by Ben Ames Williams, whose 'Leave Her to Heaven' had just provided the 40's Hollywood melodrama with one of its most memorably manipulative female psychos in the form of Gene Tierney as Ellen Berent. Hedy Lamarr chose this as her first independent production and cannily selected Edgar Ulmer to direct, who makes the most of the opportunities provided by unaccustomedly decent production values and a solid supporting cast, while giving Ms Lamarr her head to create a memorable femme fatale. In early 19th Century Maine, Hedy learns as a child how to manipulate boys for her own spiteful ends. So far, so promising - particularly as portrayed as a worldly, spiteful little vixen by Jo Ann Marlowe - but one apprehensively suspects she will inevitably prove less enjoyably sociopathic when she grows up to be Hedy Lamarr.Hedy herself as a young woman initially shows promise, wearing lots of lipstick and making eloquent use of her eyes while otherwise cultivating an intriguing stillness as she twists men round her little finger and declares "I don't want the youngest. I want the richest!". Learning to cultivate her feminine wiles in the face of brutal patriarchy in the person of her drunken and violent father (played by Inspector Lestrade, Denis Hoey), she promises to become a more alluringly damaged adult than she ultimately proves to be. SPOILER COMING: Ms Lamarr - whose accent increasingly slips as the film approaches its conclusion - loses her nerve towards the end of the film, when she falls victim to true love and dies misguided rather than Bad.The title is taken from Proverbs 5:3 and doesn't really fit Ms Lamarr; but 'The Wicked Lady' was already taken, although she doesn't prove that wicked either.

This turgid hodge podge of a movie features some good performances along the way, but Hedys'character is too often unfathomable. Could prove OK for lovers of over ripe potboilers in the Mills and Boon category.Most actors do well with their over baked rolls, and even though George Sanders is cast a little against type, he handles it well. The Kids, during the somewhat cruel opening scenes try hard, but the script is a little over the top.It's all quite lurid for its day, with B grade specialist Edgar Ulmer, giving it some dark moodiness. There's a good traveling Preacher segment with a fiery sermon waking up some guilt in Hedys'twisted persona.Offers some odd interest, especially as a comment on the dangerous levels of lawlessness in backwoods towns in the mid 1800s. But the overall effect, is one in need of better handling.

Jenny (Heddy Lamarr) marries the local wealthy businessman Isaiah (Gene Lockhart) purely for money and a position of power. She plots his downfall, his son Ephraim's (Louis Hayward) downfall and that of her friend Meg (Hillary Brooke) by stealing her boyfriend John (George Sanders). She is bad news. No-one wins in this story.The cast do a good job in this film which starts well. However, the pace slows down before picking up again with the introduction of John just over half-way through. Geeorge Sanders just about gets away with portraying a tough lumberjack type despite his accent, and Hedy Lamarr's accent strikes an occasional odd chord. However, she is good in the lead role and is both funny and convincing as a wicked woman, eg, the scene where she arrives at Isaiah's house after getting a beating from her father which she seems to have enjoyed. Watch how she pulls down the back of her dress to reveal her bruising to the housekeeper whilst looking seductively over her bare shoulder at Isaiah in order to gain his interest sexually.The film has some stand-out funny moments that centre around Jenny's behaviour but I felt let-down by the ending. It's too convenient. Still, the film is worth keeping on to despite the occasional slow sections.

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.