Leave her to Heaven is a 1945 movie of the genre, now discredited, of the "women's picture." The director John Stahl specialized his melodramas targeted toward female viewers and his films from the early sound era are much esteemed, although almost impossible to see. Since even modern women don't want to see a "women's picture", the new Criterion edition of the film is marketed as a rare example of technicolor film noir. Film noir are currently fashionable with cinema-history academics (David Bordwell has just published an important book on the topic) and these movies, currently, have critical cachet. Leave her to Heaven isn't a film noir under any definition of that genre that I know. It's rather, a curiosity that fits within no known genre, a cruel and misogynistic character study on the theme that love is a battleground, the sort of nasty picture that Fassbinder would later specialize in. The film is about the psychopathology of a jealousy so extreme that it ends up literally suicidal.
An author of potboiler novels, John Harland meets an extravagantly beautiful woman Ellen played by Gene Tierney) on a train traveling toward Santa Fe in New Mexico. The train compartment is lavishly appointed -- it's like a cocktail lounge at the Algonquin Hotel. The novelist, although he doesn't know it, is traveling to the same destination, Ellen's stepfather's summer cabin in the high red rock desert, a place like Georgia O'Keefe's Ghost Ranch north of Abiquiu. At the lavish ranch, the novelist becomes infatuated with Ellen and she brashly proposes to him, kissing him so violently that he has no choice but to accept her offer. Ellen's previous fiancee, a snarling if Byronically handsome prosecutor (played by Vincent Price) appears and there's an ugly scene -- he stalks out saying that he will always love her. Ellen claims she is a niece raised like one of the children of the wealthy family who occupy the spectacular ranch. She has returned to the West to "bury her father" -- by this she means scattering his ashes on the red-rock mountain ridge overlooking the oasis where the ranch house, a bit like a Frank Lloyd Wright structure, has been built. The ritual on the mountain top, observed by Harland, is more than a little disquieting: Ellen on horse-back gallops around the rim of a deep ravine, impassively shaking the urn back and forth -- she looks like a combination of an Apache warrior and a Valkyrie and her half-sister, the dead man's actual daughter, and his widow look on from the mounts a few dozen yards away. This is an unsettling scene, shot on location and scored to barbaric-sounding tympani drums scored by Alfred Newman, and, when Ellen is done with the rite, she hurls the urn like a discus from horseback into the ravine. Everyone comments on how close she was to her stepfather and, at least in this scene, she seems both feral and half-crazed.
Needless to say the marriage isn't a happy one. Harland is very close to his little brother Danny who seems to have polio and is recuperating at Warm Springs, the same sanitarium where Franklin Roosevelt convalesced. Danny is irritating both to the film's audience and Ellen. Although Ellen seems voraciously sexual, Harland is pretty much celibate, preferring the company of the chirpy, perky Danny to his wife. This distresses Ellen and so she encourages the kid to swim across an icy lake in Maine where the poor lad gets a cramp and drowns without the woman, who is nearby in a rowboat and has been shown to be strong swimmer, so much as lifting a finger. (This is a famous sequence similar to the drowning of Shelley Winters in An American Tragedy, a signature set-piece for Leave her to Heaven.) The mourning Harland adjourns to another family resort, a lavish home at Bar Harbor, Maine. Ellen is pregnant at this time, but not happy. She doesn't like the fetus' effect on her lithe figure and is afraid the child will come between her and her increasingly remote husband. So she hurls herself down a flight of steps to induce a miscarriage. Harland, who is a dim bulb, begins to figure out that his wife is totally psycho. He has finished a new novel and dedicated the book to his attractive and reasonably sane and normal sister-in-law Ruth (played by Jeanne Crain who looks like Gene Tierney but on a human-scale: she's an ordinary human being compared to Tierney's bitch-goddess.) Ellen, needless to say doesn't take well to the book's dedication and devises a bizarre plot to assure herself of (posthumous) revenge. She commits suicide but makes the act look like a murder committed by her half-sister, Ruth. Then, reaching from beyond the grave through a letter, she deputizes her former lover, the hapless DA played by Vincent Price, to prosecute the case. There's a big, grossly implausible, trial scene, highly stylized and idiotic. Both Ruth and Harland admit their love for one another; Ellen's crimes and misdemeanors are exposed and, remarkably, Ruth is acquitted but, somehow, Harland is convicted of being an accessory to Ruth's murder (by negligence) of Danny. None of this makes any sense. However, released from his two-year prison term, Harland canoes across the lake in Maine to his cabin, a place called Back of the Moon, where Ruth is waiting for him. (The film is devised with a frame-story, also implausible, involving the family lawyer, a trusts and estate man, who somehow defends the hero against the charges lodged against him by Vincent Price's character. The defense isn't too vigorous -- the lawyer doesn't ask a single question, probably in the interest of keeping the trial scene clipping along. The lawyer claims to know, the full truth, although he can't possibly be privy to most of the details that the film shows us. In the opening scene, Harland's return from prison, Cornel Wilde who plays the novelist, deftly hops into a canoe with breathtaking grace and confidence -- it's like seeing Joel McCrea in old westerns leap up onto a horse and ride away without a moment's hesitation. The gesture is athletic and beautiful at the same time.)
Cornel Wilde is good as the dim-witted novelist with more libido for his brother than his stunning wife. Wilde as a young man is bland and looks a little like Victor Mature without the drooping eyelids. But the picture is about Gene Tierney and, in fact, her implacable, impassive Kabuki-like mask of a face. She is all face -- you can't see her figure in much of the film -- and her beauty is exotic and, even, a bit repellent. Her skull is a little too well-defined, although, of course, it's got beautiful bones and her eyes are too metallic for comfort. (She's a typical heroine in a woman's picture -- I think most men would find her appalling. Her perfect features are the kind that women admire but that I don't find attractive at all.) She gives a great performance that seems, like Robert Mitchum's best work, to be doing nothing at all.
I can't warm to this movie. It's ice-cold notwithstanding the spectacular scenery and lavishly appointed interiors. The art decoration is stunning -- the ranch, the cabin in Maine, and the Bar Harbor house with its backdrop of pounding surf are all majestic sets. There's a swimming lagoon location with bottle-green water cradled in the living rock in New Mexico that is a great vision in and of itself -- particularly when Tierney rises from the water in her bathing suit like Aphrodite in the desert. The trial scene is ludicrous for any number of reasons -- for instance, the DA is wont to testify from his own personal experience about Ellen and clearly has an ax to grind against Harland who has taken his woman. The happy ending is unconvincing. But the film is as crazy as one of Fassbinder's concoctions and, if anything, even colder and more misanthropic. (The Criterion disk has a commentary film essay featuring Imogene Sara Smith that is very informative and helpful -- this is the woman whose commentary on Desert Fury was notable for the subway train interfering with the soundtrack every eight to ten minutes. She's fantastically beautiful herself and looks a bit like Tierney.)
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