NFR Project: 'Leave Her to Heaven' (1945)

 

NFR Project: “Leave Her to Heaven”

Dir: John M. Stahl

Scr: Jo Swerling

Pho: Leon Shamroy

Ed: James B. Clark

Premiere: Dec. 20, 1945

110 min.

It’s just the most delicious of film noirs – and it happens in broad daylight.

This film launched a subset of “Technicolor noirs” that sprouted in mainstream cinema through 1959. It starts here, and this inaugural effort is unsurpassed. Drawn from the 1944 novel by Ben Ames Williams, Leave Her to Heaven inverts the usual role of the femme fatale in noir film. Usually, the female villain is after money, or other usually cynical and illegal means of escaping her circumstances. In this case, however, the villainess’s problem is that she “loves too much.”

The decision to shoot in color leads to a lurid sheen to the proceedings, a kind of unreality in reality that filmgoers would later see in Douglas Sirk movies. The heightened and intense color schemes in the film almost tell the story themselves, such is the judiciousness with which they are selected. Above all, the horrors we witness are shot in the harsh, plain light of day, as if unashamed of themselves.

The story is that of a writer (of course), Dick (Cornel Wilde in tormented hero mode). The femme in question is Ellen. Gene Tierney gets the role of her life and plays it expertly here. You see, Ellen is straight-up crazy – manipulative, obsessed, and dangerous. Lethal.

The dependable Ray Collins, as Dick’s lawyer, narrates the story. Dick meets Ellen on a train to New Mexico, where Ellen is going to spread the ashes of her father, or whom she was inordinately fond, to say the least. She is beautiful and rich. She immediately fixates on Dick, whom she and everyone else declare to be the spitting image of her father. Yikes! Daddy issues, anyone?

After a whirlwind courtship, the two decide to be married – but are confronted by attorney Russell Quinton (Vincent Price, who has several good scenes here), who was until moments ago Ellen’s fiancée. Quinton stalks out in anger.

We of course in the audience are let in to the witnessing of Ellen’s crimes, which are numerous. She is insanely jealous and controlling. She seeks to destroy anyone who comes between her and Dick. “I don’t want anyone else but me to do anything for you!” she exclaims to him.

Tierney’s performance nails Ellen’s uncanny nature. Everything she does that is normative is performative. Her love is false, smothering, insanely deified. Nothing but the incessant satisfaction of being madly in love and center of another’s life will suffice. Tierney, brilliantly, plays it cool and calm, so quiet and reasonable that you’d never guess she was a psycho. She lets her seemed sincerity and her good looks overcome the other person’s sneaking desire to kick her in the teeth when the truth is found out.

Unfortunately, Dick has a little brother Danny (Darryl Hickman), who is disabled with polio. Ellen does not want him around. “After all, he’s a cripple!” she says to a doctor, attempting to get him to recommend that Danny stay in rehab.

At Dick’s remote cabin in the woods, Ellen follows  Danny in a rowboat as he attempts to swim across the lake. He tires, then flounders. Ellen casually dons her sunglasses and stares at him, unhelping. Under a bright blue sky, in a beautiful natural setting, she watches him drown. It’s one of the most chilling sequences in movie history.

It gets worse. Ellen gets knocked up, thinking it will refocus Dick on her. Soon she finds out that she doesn’t want the child. Dick turns her father’s old laboratory into a children’s playroom, and Ellen freaks out. Ellen is terrified that Dick will love the baby more than he loves her. She stages a fall down the stairs, and voila! She loses the baby.

Eventually she confesses to Dick, who walks out on her. It gets worse. Ellen decides to kill herself and put the blame on Ruth (Jeanne Crain), her cousin, of whom of course she is jealous of because of her friendship with Dick. She successfully doses herself with poison, declaring to Dick on her deathbed, “I'll never let you go. Never, never, never.”

And on it goes. She plants incriminating evidence with her former boyfriend Quinton, who is now the D.A. Ruth goes on trial for her murder, and she and Dick are badgered without let or hinder by Price in a series of courtroom scenes that read more as lacerating exercises of the conscience than they do testimony in a murder trial. As can only happen in movies, the two realize that they love each other. On the witness stand.

Ruth is acquitted, but Dick gets two years as an accomplice in Danny’s death (!). Dick’s lawyer rounds out the tale as Dick comes home, and sails away in a canoe to reunite with Ruth. Lesson learned.

By the end of the film, the viewer feels completely beaten up. How could someone be so evil? Tierney’s Ellen is a model of monstrosity, quietly wreaking havoc wherever she goes. Her suicide is reminiscent of Madame Bovary’s, another terminally unhappy and destructive character. Like her, Ellen just loved too much.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: ‘A Walk in the Sun.’