The website Chiaroscuro is a highly idiosyncratic collection of commentaries, critical quotes, stills, and posters for about 100 films. The site's owner is obviously a cinephile, and so one finds titles of films from American, European, and Asian traditions, including both famous (2001: A Space Odyssey) and not so well-known or early films of a variety of directors. (Caution, though: The site owner's own commentaries are usually in German.)
On the page for The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), we find this critical comment embedded in a longer quotation from Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's book Film Noir. An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (1992):
Much the same could be said of Rozsa's better known underscores for Double Indemnity and Spellbound. As an alternate to the two-film compare/contrast paper discussed in the first writing Interlude (HtM, 125) or in connection with the critical essays discussed in the second writing Interlude (HtM, 234), it might be a productive exercise for a student to compare Silver and Ward's evaluation with the glowing assessments of Christopher Palmer (who was Rozsa's assistant during the composer's last years), Royal Brown, Lawrence MacDonald, or Fred Karlin.Miklós Rózsa wrote the music for The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, and it illustrates the conventional Hollywood leitmotif technique of film scoring. This technique associates a musical theme with each character, setting, or situation, thus heightening the dramatic flux and the audience’s unconscious understanding and expectation of the film’s story. It should be pointed out that the popular song "Strange Love" represents the sweetness of Toni and the happy ending, not the hardness of Martha. Rózsa over scores to the point that nonmusical moments in his films amount to negative emphasis. (267-268)
