Kirk Douglas billed beneath the title, not yet a star. His first film role.
Posted on 06/07/2026 7:03:08 AM PDT by Twotone
The filming of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers happened when the Paramount lot was ringed by a picket line, part of the 1945 strike by motion picture set decorators that led to the infamous Black Friday riot outside the main gate at Warner Bros. The strike is a movie history footnote today, and though it gets aired out whenever the industry endures another labour dispute, it's hard to imagine pickets full of writers or actors today in a melee with studio security and police with "tear gas bombs, fire hoses, brass knuckles, clubs, brickbats, and beer bottles" as Variety described the two-hour battle.
The strike wasn't just a fight between labour and management but between two unions over who would represent the studios' skilled workers, pitting the established (and mob-connected) IATSE and the upstart, radical (and reputedly communist-infiltrated) Conference of Studio Unions (CSU). (Spoiler alert: IATSE ultimately won.) Cast and crew of pictures in production during the strike would stay at the studio to avoid being roughed up crossing picket lines, according to Dan Callahan in Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, his biography of the marquee star of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.
The film's director, Lewis Milestone, sympathized with the strikers (and the CSU) so when he refused to cross the picket, Byron Haskin (Treasure Island, War of the Worlds) took over for a few days. Callahan thinks that gave the film "a patchwork quality at times; there are some careless, abrupt cuts here and there, and even some dissolves which seem uncommonly rushed."
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
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Lost track of how many times I’ve seen that movie. She was a great actress.
Kirk Douglas billed beneath the title, not yet a star. His first film role.
She was one of the greatest.
Just love her.
bkmk
One small correction: though you’d never know it looking at the city today, at the time of the movie’s making Philadelphia had been a Republican-machine run city, not Democrat.
Hollywood glamour pose---the first and last time we'll ever see Stanwyck in a bathing suit.
Didn’t she play for the other team?
Barbara Stanwyck was married twice to fellow actors, and both ended in divorce.
She married the vaudeville and stage actor Frank Fay on August 26, 1928.
The couple adopted a son, Dion Anthony Fay, in 1932, but ultimately divorced in 1935.
She married Hollywood leading man Robert Taylor on May 14, 1939.
After a 12-year marriage, he left her for another woman, they divorced in 1952.
She never remarried.
She was essentially orphaned at the age of four and partially raised in foster homes. She did not attend high school. Starting at 14, she took a series of customer-service and secretarial positions. She made her debut on stage in the chorus as a Ziegfeld girl in 1923 at age 16, and within a few years was acting in plays. Her first lead role, which was in the hit Burlesque (1927), established her as a Broadway star. In 1929, she transitioned from the stage to the film industry, and began acting in talking pictures. Source: wikipedia
Here she is in 1924 at age 16-17 as a Ziegfeld girl:
Very tragic childhood! I’d never heard that before. :-(
I’d tap that but, she was a lesbian.
I’d tap that but, she was a lesbian.
“You know what? My grandma was Dutch-Irish, and my grandpa was lesbian, so that makes me a quarter-lesbian.” - Eric Cartman
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