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This woman’s strangeness isn’t stereotypically eccentric; her aberrations are her opportunism and capacity for cruelty. In The Strange Woman (1946), Hedy Lamarr, giving one of her best performances, plays Jenny, a woman from small-town Maine who spends the movie, if to put it simply, ruthlessly social climbing. Using her beauty to manipulate men — her primary tool for ascension — nothing is out of bounds for Jenny, whether it be stealing the husband of her supposed best friend (Hillary Brooke) or orchestrating the death of a man she considers an obstacle. Her essence is arguably best encapsulated in a prologue where she’s a little girl, pushing a boy she’d been taunting for being unable to swim into a river and then taking credit for his rescue. She’ll move through a life where her lies tend to be believed, her looks and her skill for manipulation doing wonders.

The Strange Woman feels like a relative of movies like Baby Face (1933) and especially, with its shared suggestions of lead-character sociopathy, Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Their throughline is their centering of women characters who, ever aware of how much their financial and societal comfort is contingent on their relationships with men, are far craftier when trying to get ahead than simply marrying into the right family. Though the parts offered by Baby Face and Leave Her to Heaven gave its respective actresses, Barbara Stanwyck and Gene Tierney, ferocious, meaty roles to chew on, they were still fairly one-dimensional. That goes likewise for Jenny, though the movie, inevitably for an era with measures in place to ensure pat ideas of moral correctness got the final word, makes her at the 11th hour feel some guilt for what she’s done, second thoughts ignited by a priest she feels is talking to just her even when he’s generalizing to an entire congregation.

The Strange Woman would, of course, be a better movie if it did not go the moralistic route, which makes sure that our heroine is not merely punished for what she’s done, but made to seem like a unicorn of wickedness rather than the byproduct of a patriarchal society that might make women like her take desperate measures to attain a life they wouldn’t have access to without cutting some corners. Lamarr gives a scary, intense performance; she’s easy to root for in a luridly interesting way. You want to see how far she can get before she’s inexorably made to pay for things a movie released in 1946 would not allow to be done scot-free.

It’s a dark pleasure to see Lamarr, so celebrated for her extraordinary beauty, in a part where she gets to weaponize her allure as if it were a vial of poison able to be discreetly slipped into a drink. In a career where she was so often relegated to parts where the way she looked was prized above everything else, it’s bracing to see her in a movie where her character is so aware of those looks and efficient at repurposing them in the name of status and protection. 

The Strange Woman was the first of three movies Lamarr produced; though none was a major financial success, each afforded her opportunities to do some of her most vivid, exciting work as an actress, mirroring, with funhouse broadness, Jenny’s way of taking matters into her own hands to see through the opportunities she knows she won’t get passively.