The Strange Woman

Hedy Lamarr plays Jenny Hager, one of the cruelest women ever put on film, in Edgar Ulmer’s euphemistically titled The Strange Woman, set in Bangor, Maine, in 1824, when America was still a baby and traveling revival meetings warned of eternal damnation. In the mid-forties, Ulmer was delighting in female malice, and if Vera from his noir classic Detour (1945) was a sociopath, then Jenny Hager is unquestionably a psychopath. While the femme fatale in most noir films is an external threat to the protagonist, Ulmer mercilessly subverts this expectation here and tells the story from Jenny’s warped perspective. Her nonstop acts of cruelty — each satisfying her obvious sadomasochistic urges — are almost exhausting to behold: trying to drown a boy, seducing her son-in-law, driving a man to patricide, driving a man to suicide, and the list goes on. In a sexually twisted scene, Jenny flirts with the town’s richest old man by revealing her fresh cuts and bruises from her father’s beatings while staring into his eyes with ravenous sexual desire. She’s not kidding when she tells her second husband, “There’s hell opening under our feet.” The Strange Woman is a wild mash-up of noir and melodrama (enhanced by Carmen Dragon’s score) in which a gang of drunken lumberjacks raping and pillaging their way through town somehow feels perfectly normal.