Leave Her to Heaven Review
By Paul Brenner
Leave Her to Heaven stakes out its territory in the form of a flashback, as novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) returns to a small lakeside town that has now become tainted with the aftertaste of murder. Homespun lawyer Glen Robie (Ray Collins) relates the sorry tale of how things came to such a pass and the film-length flashback begins -- noir fatalism in the blinding daylight. We are taken back to the genesis of all this misery, the ravishing but deadly Ellen Berent (played to evil perfection by Gene Tierney, in an iconic film noir role), who meets Harland on a train and quickly latches onto the poor sap, and soon her berserk compulsion for him drags the innocent Harland and his loved ones down into the dark waters of tormented possessiveness.
The most stunning scene in the film occurs on a beautiful and quiet lake. Tierney is out in a rowboat on the lake with Harland's crippled brother Danny (Daryl Hickman) and encourages him to swim out to the far shore, her intent being to get rid of Danny so that Ellen and Harland can spent some time alone. As Danny starts to get weak, swimming in the water, Ellen drops the oars and quickly dons black sunglasses, staring impassively ahead as Danny goes down for the third time.
In the film a character remarks, "Everything is beautiful here." Everything is beautiful in Leave Her to Heaven. In fact, too beautiful. Scorsese at the screening called Leave Her to Heaven a "film noir in color." And in this disturbing film of psychotic obsession director John Stahl and cinematographer Leon Shamroy, depict a noir world in the shining sun, not in the standard low budget studio style of dark shadows and Expressionist lighting, but in a lush Technicolor splendor. The bright desert skies, the verdant green vegetation at a lakeside retreat, the sumptuous palette of food and flowers, Tierney's feral jade eyes are all too lovely and over-ripe, the black noir ooze ready to rot the luxuriant surface just as Ellen's toxic jealousy is ready to destroy everything around her. As Ray Collins remarks in the film, "Ellen always wins."
Ellen always wins but film history doesn't. For every Leave Her to Heaven rescued from oblivion there are countless pieces of time moldering into dust because funds are not available to save cinematographic history. What lives and what dies is always subjective --notoriously, at one of the initial meetings of The Film Foundation, Woody Allen remarked about film preservation, "Just don't save Porky's." Ideally, everything should be saved, whatever the perceived quality. But it is highly unlikely that such an apocalyptic moment will ever arrive where funds will suddenly before available to save everything. So in this censorious world of film tastes it is comforting to have Scorsese as a film preservation Torquemada.
Reviewed at the 2007 New York Film Festival.
Leave her to L'Oreal.
Facts and Figures
Year: 1945
Production compaines: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Reviews
Contactmusic.com: 4.5 / 5
Cast & Crew
Director: John M. Stahl
Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck, William A. Bacher
Screenwriter: Jo Swerling
Starring: Gene Tierney as Ellen Berent Harland, Cornel Wilde as Richard Harland, Jeanne Crain as Ruth Berent, Vincent Price as Russell Quinton, Mary Philips as Mrs. Berent, Ray Collins as Glen Robie, Gene Lockhart as Dr. Saunders, Reed Hadley as Dr. Mason, Darryl Hickman as Danny Harland, Chill Wills as Leick Thome, Mae Marsh as Fisherwoman (uncredited), Grant Mitchell as Carlson (uncredited), Ruth Clifford as Telephone Operator (uncredited)
Also starring: Jo Swerling