THE STRANGE WOMAN is Hedy Lamarr, vamping up a storm of man-eating mischief as the title vixen. Dangerously beautiful Hedy’s most famous Holly-roles were as native temptress ‘Tondelayo’ in 1942’s White Cargo and the immortal Biblical beeyatch in 1949’s Samson And Delilah. Smack in the middle was schizoid ‘Jenny Hager’ in this 1946 melodrama. As one of her used & discarded conquests blubbers “She’s so rotten. She’s not even a human being!”  Left hanging is the question posed to the men in the audience “But would you sleep with her?” Duh.

Bangor, Maine. The story starts in the 1820’s with mean-streaked child Jenny Hager tormenting a little boy who’s afraid of the water and can’t swim, by dunking him in a stream. By the 1840’s Jenny has beguiled, seduced and ruined several men, two dying as a result, even while maintaining the facade of decency to the town at large.

“You cannot hide behind your beauty. Your beauty has made you evil and evil destroys itself. Your soul will become naked. The truth will be revealed. Confess now!”

Edgar G. Ulmer directed mostly B-movie schlock but he’s praised by auteur-extolling critics for his 1934 version of The Black Cat, the 1945 noir nugget Detour and 1948’s Ruthless. Given a larger budget and bigger canvas than usual, Ulmer took the reins here and along with Hunt Stromberg fashioned the screenplay that was credited to Herb Meadow (The Master Of Ballantrae). Stromberg was quite successful as a producer (The Thin Man, The Women, Northwest Passage); writing wasn’t his strong suit. Douglas Sirk did some uncredited directing on this as well. Lamarr, 31, went into this to try and match the calculating schemers played by Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh and Gene Tierney. She also was the Executive Producer, kicking in her own MGM-harvested money to the property, based on the 684-page novel by Ben Ames Williams, whose “Leave Her To Heaven” became the hit 1945 thriller with a similarly wicked femme fatale (played by Tierney). The book was much more expansive, with Jenny ruining twice as many men as it steamed from the War of 1812 up thru the Civil War; the kitchen sink even includes the Battle of Gettysburg. The movies limited budget (which overran a good deal anyway due to Lamarr getting ill) came to $1,500,000, thus cutting way down on scope and extra characters so as to fit into 100 minutes of running time. Public reaction was not bad, 41st for ’46, grossing as much as $6,000,000.

The main male victims are, in order, Gene Lockhart, 55, as older lumber baron ‘Isaiah Poster’, wealthy and cagey; Louis Hayward, 37, as his wimpier son ‘Ephraim’; and George Sanders, 40, as a logging supervisor ‘John Evered’, who replaces used-up Ephraim in the line of desire/ire. Lockhart is customarily fine as the most unsympathetic. Hayward is stuck with the weakling role. Sanders is halfhearted as the most supposedly sensible of the three: she seduces/conquers him in the woods, during a thunderstorm, with a lightning-zapped tree flaming in the background: incidentally,this surefire, “Okay, I give” situation, while dangerous, comes highly recommended. All of the high-calorie scenery chewing is backed by a florid music score from Carmen Dragon—gotta love that name!  *

Lamarr (never mind the lingering Austrian accent) eagerly goes full bodice Jezebel and the performance is both over-the-top and oddly effective. Lots of arched-eyebrow action, dramatic body posturing, come-hither gazes, secretive smiles, scornful outbursts. Fun stuff. As a fire & brimstone preacher (a grand bit from Ian Keith) lets fly with a quote from Proverbs 5:3  “The lips of a strange woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil. But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword!”

With Hillary Brooke (as ‘Meg Saladine’, loyal friend: Jenny steals John from her and Meg forgives it!), Moroni Olsen, June Storey (‘Lena Tempest’, town trollop that Jenny feels sorry for), Alan Napier, Ray Teal, Dennis Hoey (Jenny’s drunken father who whacks her with a belt and the creepy admonishment “There’s a devil in you, Jenny Hager. A devil straight from the bad place. And I’m going to whip him out of ya! This is one beating you’ll not like.”—what is it with small towns in Maine?), Alan Napier, Ray Teal, Rhys Williams, Jo Ann Marlowe (10, Jenny as a vicious little girl like…well, remember grade school?), Christopher Severn, Billy Gray (7, eight years before TV fame on Father Knows Best), Chief Yowlachie.

* Playing a cringing coward in this amusing meller, Hayward was usually cast as the lead in a batch of swashbuckler pictures. In real life he was more than up to raw, gutsy stuff: as a Marine in WW2 he won the Bronze Star for his in-the-thick-of-it command of a documentary unit filming the bloody Battle Of Tarawa: the short subject nabbed an Academy Award.