Owning It: Dashiell Hammett, Martha Ivers, and the Poisonous Noir City. (original) (raw)

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946) emerged during a period of radical filmmaking before the McCarthyist crackdown on left-wing elements in Hollywood. This film noir melodrama exposes the murderous political, legal, and economic foundation of (the fictional) Iverstown, Pennsylvania, said to be ‘America’s Fastest Growing Industrial City.’ The power nexus is an arranged marriage between the city’s industrial heiress and an alcoholic District Attorney. Sam Masterson, a war veteran and drifter, is the unwitting catalyst for the self-destruction of this corrupt political order. This paper examines the foundational influence of Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled urban vision on the archetypal ‘poisonous noir city’, of which Iverstown is an outstanding example. Hammett’s novel Red Harvest (1929) is set in the mining town of Personville or Poisonville (based on Butte, Montana) following the defeat of a worker revolt organised by the Industrial Workers of the World. The physical spaces of Personville are mapped as we follow the Continental Op’s malicious interference with the fluxing alliances of political and criminal power. In its employme nt of what Dennis Broe calls the ‘outside–the–law fugitive protagonist’, Martha Ivers maps the postwar urban landscape of Iverstown through Sam’s attempts to negotiate with the city’s corrupt power nexus. If Red Harvest dramatizes a brief moment of criminal anarchy in the aftermath of the violent suppression of a workers’ revolt, Martha Ivers updates the poisonous noir city to an era of capitalist triumph. Taken together, the novel and film present a grim chronology of workers’ fortunes under twentieth century industrial progress.