Is The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) public domain?
The copyright record for this film, written out in full so you can check it.
Public domain in the United States
What is usually said
Public domain, never renewed.
The finding, and the working behind it
Public domain in the United States: registered LP131 in 1946 for Hal Wallis Productions, and absent from the 1973 and 1974 volumes in which other Wallis films were renewed.
Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin star, and it is Kirk Douglas’s first film.
Neither “martha ivers” nor “strange love” appears in the 1973 or 1974 motion picture volumes.
Emka was renewing the Wallis library in exactly that window, filing Love Letters and The Searching Wind, so this is an absence from a library somebody was working through.
Two sources give slightly different registration dates — the 1940–1949 cumulative says 7 March 1946 and the OCR of the 1946 annual volume reads 3-17-46 — which does not change the renewal window either way.
The register, as it stands
- Original registration
- LP131, (C) Hal Wallis Productions, Inc., March 1946
- Renewal fell due
- 1973–1974
- Renewal found
- none
- Wallis titles renewed in the same window
- Love Letters (R543363) and The Searching Wind (R555113), both by Emka
- Searched
- 2026-09-19
How to check this yourself
Everything above is drawn from public records. None of it requires our word:
- The Catalog of Copyright Entries, the Copyright Office’s printed registration and renewal volumes, scanned and searchable at the Internet Archive and at the Online Books Page. Registration numbers beginning LP or MP are film entries.
- The Copyright Office online records at copyright.gov, which are complete from 1978 and therefore decisive for any renewal that fell due from then on.
- The NFPF Field Guide to Sponsored Films, for the industrial and educational titles, which records copyright status entry by entry.
Where these numbers came from
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, cumulative Motion Pictures 1940–1949 and the 1946 annual volume, for LP131.
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures 1973 and 1974, read for the renewal sections.
What this does and does not mean
This is a finding about United States copyright, made in good faith from the public record. Copyright terms differ by country, and a film in the public domain here may still be protected elsewhere.
A negative search proves that no record was found, which is not identical to proving that no record exists. The Copyright Office says as much about its own catalogs. Where a search could not be decisive we say so above rather than rounding it up to certainty.
This is a record of research and not legal advice. If you hold a right in this film, or you think we have read the record wrong, write to [email protected] with what we missed and we will correct it here.
Why we did this research
Establishing what may be published is the first step before restoring a film and writing an audio description for it. That is what this site is for, and we do the same work on commission — audio description and captioning, with published rates.