(1945)

Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Vincent Price, Jeanne Crain, Ray Collins; dir: John Stahl

Sometimes you can’t help but feel sympathy for the devil. Gene Tierney’s Ellen is the bride whose unwanted interlopers are ruining her privacy. The poor woman can’t be alone with her new hubby (Cornel Wilde, in a thankless role) for a second. Scene after establishing scene of Leave Her To Heaven, which naturally revolve around her glowing presence, are never free of these third parties. It’s almost claustrophobic. We can clearly sense how much she feels this understandable desire for time alone with her new man. It’s hardly monstrous, so it's only natural she may say in exasperation: 'I want to kill these damn people'!

Being a movie of course, and one created during the incubator years for film noir, the script for Leave Her To Heaven soon goes where sane people never do. But allowing that film as narrative deals in hyper-reality (especially in a lush, soap-drenched drama like this), Leave Her To Heaven makes the most sense when seen allegorically, as the 'acting out' of Ellen’s reasonable frustrations. Her inhuman crimes are just that – not human; they’re jungle-level urges of the Id. That is the real Freudian message here, not the dime-store ‘Electra complex’ reading (Wilde as seamless replacement for her recently deceased father) in most received wisdom on this film. Such recognition is reinforced in the film’s iconic scene on the lake (which Martin Scorsese excerpted in his 1995 Personal Journey through American movies doco). Its key feature is that Ellen dons her sunnies right at the critical moment, thus removing two things: the victim from her gaze, and her understanding of fault from us, the audience.

A re-reading of Leave Her To Heaven is needed for the 21^st century that says this protagonist is within her rights. The film may be a text that needs a feminist re-think, along the lines of the re-evaluation the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk enjoyed. That would be apposite, for director John Stahl was a major seminal influence on Sirk, who remade the former’s Imitation of Life (1934, remade in 1959) and Magnificent Obsession (1935, remade in 1954). Those classic 50s melodramas carried forward this film’s extraordinary visual richness, like a vintage LIFE magazine come alive, and make Sirk’s earlier noirs like Sleep My Love (1948) and Shockproof (1949) look positively Gothic by comparison.

But film noir always takes things to extremes. Noir is guided less by any real world (ie daytime) system of values than by oneiric values: the truth of the dream. Making the right connections is more important to dream logic than gauging the appropriate punishment for some transgression. Quite the opposite applies in fact, as the disproportionate, punishing consequences for often trifling little missteps – like one night of infidelity leading to a character’s doom – are so much the norm in noir that the genre strongly evinces signs of a ‘moral panic’. But take a step back from pure verisimilitude into a more abstracted ‘reality’ and then (and only then) do the underlying rationales of what seem to be, superficially, bonkers dramas like Leave Her To Heaven start to emerge.

We get a clue early that nature here is occluded when we see the desert framed from within the house. It cues us that this is a refuge from nature, not a part of it, it’s something standing outside the natural, foreign and aloof. (But you’ve gotta love those interior stone fireplaces with exposed raw timber everywhere – 1940s Hollywood design cues for ‘roughing it’!)

Color design is one thing Leave Her To Heaven is rightly renowned for, with extraordinary attention to detail that extends to cars’ paintjobs, skies and clothing being visually linked. In this regard Tierney’s Ellen is firmly on a pedestal, with an astonishing array of wardrobe extravagances that leave all the other characters in the shade.

For a film like Leave Her To Heaven one is tempted to use the term ‘melodrama’. Certainly the horseback/ashes scene is operatic, thanks primarily to the brilliantly dramatic music (Oscar-nominated) of Alfred Newman, but there’s an unusually high degree of silences in the film. We are not swept along by characters’ stormy emotions, cued by swirling music, but actually spend more time in their heads.

The extremes that are film noir and lush soap opera are rarely mentioned in the same breath. But their pathways came together in this one extraordinary film, and their intersection makes Leave Her To Heaven not only unique but very special.

- Roger Westcombe