Milestone’s only film noir is an organ­ic continuation of the visual qualities he had honed since the silent era. His signature pelting rain, low-key lighting, menacing urban skylines, and airless in­teriors are now in service to a script by Robert Rossen (his third collaboration with Milestone) that explores the theme of corruption through power.
Set in Iverstown, named after an in­dustrialist family, the film opens with a long and gothic prologue featuring three childhood friends. Martha, a neurotic Ivers, raised as an orphan by her tyranni­cal aunt; Walter, a middle-class conform­ist, under the shadow of his father’s belief that servile obedience to Ivers will secure his son’s success; and Sam, a skid row reb­el with dreams of escape. The trio grows up scarred by the psychological damage of that childhood, which informs the laby­rinthine narrative. Eighteen years later, they have become Barbara Stanwyck, a manipulative Queen bee who runs the town, married to Kirk Douglas’s Walter, making his debut as the pathetic, drunk­en district attorney, and Van Heflin’s Sam, a war veteran-turned-gambler who has gained moral compass by reading the only book available to him during his lonely stays in hotel rooms – the Gideon Bible. Enter Toni (played by Lizabeth Scott), Heflin’s new love interest, a for­mer shoplifter seeking redemption in the unredeemable Iverstown.
Sam’s return to town after two decades causes old emotions and fears to resur­face, blending into a mixture of lust, suspicion, and betrayal. What the film lacks, however, is a nuanced exploration of sexuality, something Milestone was never particularly adept at handling. Is Martha a victim of childhood trauma and subtle blackmail or a psychopathic femme fatale? This indecision somehow matches the winding plot that concludes with a lurid sequence, echoing the orig­inal title of the story upon which the film was based in which “love lies bleed­ing”… to death.

Ehsan Khoshbakht