Review of Leave Her to Heaven (1945) by Mark S — 16 Sep 2009

"Leave Her to Heaven" is hysterical, misogynistic melodrama of the highest caliber. Though its lurid tale of sexual obsession, emasculation, and murder is complete trash, the film is mesmerizing from the moment Gene Tierney and her adorable overbite enter the picture to steal away the brittle heart of novelist Cornel Wilde. Her magnetic screen presence is aided immensely by austere, impossibly breathtaking Technicolor cinematography. All the usual scenes of whirlwind courtship and domestic bliss are set against deep focus outdoor vistas, and it's clear that a ton of 20th Century Fox's money went into making every frame an Honest to God visual masterpiece. Since the three-strip color cameras were impossibly huge and difficult to move, the compositions are rigid, painterly setups. John Stahl's style is reminiscent of Douglas Sirk with a dash of Ozu's visual sense. He almost raises the pulpy script to the level of art.

Really, the story is terrible and makes no sense from a psychological standpoint. Tierney's villainous vixen suffers from some extreme Electra Complex combined with Borderline Disorder. She's also a psychopath, of course, driven to succeed even if her goals are ridiculous. Whatever's bugging the girl doesn't matter, because she's determined to reduce Wilde's wholesome WASP family to a charred wreckage of its former happy self, and is all too willing to inflict ghastly harm upon herself if it means her survivors will suffer more than her. Ellen in "Leave Her to Heaven" is a truly wretched literary creation, existing as little more than a vortex dragging all surrounding life into an inescapable void, reducing all around her to coldness and despair. Ben Ames Williams, the gent who wrote the source novel, doubtless had a mother who did not give the poor lad enough attention, or married a crazy woman. His loss, our gain.

Where else could this insanity end but in a blistering courtroom sequence, with none other than future horror icon Vincent Price hashing out the events of the preceding 90 minutes in exacting detail? How else to drain the almost overwhelming tension than with an inexplicable deus-ex morality shift on behalf of a jury that consists entirely of white males? "Leave Her to Heaven" sure is a strange prestige picture, and its moral may be repulsive to boot, but it works, and does so with grace. See it for the brilliant, Hitchcockian rowboat sequence, stay for the hilarious happy ending.