Leave Her to Heaven December 22, 2006
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1940s , trackback
Humans are so easily seduced by beauty that we often associate it with positive qualities such as virtue, innocence and goodness. Regardless of how much we know about beautiful things, we want to think the best of them and often demonstrate an unearned sense of trust as though they’re somehow above normal fallibility. Children are taught at a young age to think of villainous characters as ugly, beastly creatures through fairy tales and other stories. Movies and television shows frequently show us dark, grimy streets as synonymous to dangerous areas where crime always threatens. By contrast, the wilderness, instead of being a lonely, isolated locale, is thought of as serene, calm and pure. Sunny suburbia with its green lawns and abundant flowers has come to symbolize a happy safety which, aside from subversive films such as Blue Velvet, has continued the positive reinforcement of beauty as a wholesome quality.
The filmmaker Douglas Sirk dared to peel back this apparent beauty (well over forty years before Best Picture winner American Beauty shoved the tagline “look closer” down audiences’ throats) and show its ugly underside with his forays into the subversive melodrama of films such as All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life. The latter two of these had actually been filmed roughly twenty years before Sirk’s versions by director John M. Stahl. Stahl’s major contribution to showing beauty as a deceptive tool to achieving horrifically evil outcomes is the 1945 film Leave Her to Heaven
On the surface, Leave Her to Heaven looks like one of the most beautifully gorgeous movies of its era. The rich Technicolor is put to great use in the many outdoor scenes. We see vivid blue skies, rippling water, and rugged mountains. Then we have Gene Tierney, certainly one of the most luminous presences to ever appear onscreen. Just one year prior, Dana Andrews was so taken with her in Laura that he fell in love with her picture despite thinking she was dead. By being so closely associated with her attractive looks, Tierney was the perfect choice for the role of Ellen in Leave Her to Heaven. It continued the misleading aesthetic of plastering beauty on the screen despite the film’s inherent nastiness and parallels to film noir.
In the film, Ellen meets Richard Harland (the bland Cornel Wilde) on a train when she drops a book, of which he happens to be the author, in front of him. This is the type of first encounter perfectly suited for a romantic comedy, yet Leave Her to Heaven is neither of these. That’s not apparent throughout most of the first half, however, as we see the couple fall for each other, culminating in Ellen breaking her engagement to a fledgling district attorney (Vincent Price) via telegram and quickly marrying Richard. This all happens just days after spreading her father’s ashes on horseback, which we see in a scene that’s memorable for both its cinematography and as a testament to Ellen’s peculiar feelings for her father.
Things begin to go awry shortly after the marriage, when Ellen feels Richard’s brother Danny (a “cripple,” as Ellen describes him) is infringing on her time with her new husband. Hints of sexual frustration run rampant as Ellen’s morning approach into Richard’s bed is interrupted by Danny pecking on the thin walls right behind them. The younger brother’s chilling fate is sealed, but Ellen’s jealousy and paranoia (hints of which are shown in the stories she tells about the time she spent with her father) will continue until she’s no longer capable of such emotions. Her idea to substitute a new baby for the loss of Danny is a momentary solution until she realizes how much attention a child would divert from her. By the time her jealousy reaches its zenith, as she suspects Richard has fallen for her adopted sister Ruth, Ellen decides to get back at both of them regardless of the personal consequences.
Tierney’s performance is best appreciated on a second viewing, I think, after the viewer already knows the lengths in which her character goes to keep her husband to herself and, then, punish him for his perceived neglect. Being aware of Ellen’s future actions makes Tierney all the more chilling early on, especially when she describes her future husband’s physical resemblance to her recently deceased father. The seemingly innocent suggestion, met with uncertain glances by the rest of her family, becomes a warning sign for Ellen’s future actions. Likewise the unexpected engagement thrust on the couple from Ellen’s seemingly impulsive rationale to dump her fiance serves as an ominous foreshadowing of things to come. Tierney’s sunny demeanor in these first several scenes, along with the idea that she’s acting just as an audience would expect from a lead actress in a Technicolor melodrama, make for a greater jolt of an impact once she puts on those dark sunglasses and transforms into an icy murderess.
The courtroom scenes at the end, as well as the ridiculous bookends of Richard returning from two years in prison, are by far the film’s weakest segments. By no coincidence, those happen to be the only times when Gene Tierney isn’t on the screen and they make you realize how important her presence is to elevate Leave Her to Heaven above the corny and dated melodrama of other similar movies. Vincent Price hammily questioning witnesses is just not as captivating as Gene Tierney doing pretty much anything. It’s a small complaint, but I also couldn’t help but be frustrated by the completely moronic behavior of the defense attorney both in court and as the opening storyteller at the beginning. As a lawyer, it’s most likely not a good idea to tell a total stranger that you were probably responsible for a client’s two-year prison term.
Until it descends into a laughable courtroom drama (blatant disregard for the rules of hearsay in film makes me cringe!), Leave Her to Heaven is an interesting spin on both melodrama and film noir, as though the two sub-genres gave birth to a beautifully disturbed slice of cinema. The focus on a jealously paranoid (and beautiful) murderer as a heroine makes the film much more compelling than it would have been if she were a peripheral character. It twists the preconceived notions the audience has about main characters in movies, as well as about beauty, by offering up a lead actress who ably transforms herself into the opposite of what we’ve come to expect from movies of the 1940s and earlier. She’s the well-liked gunfighter with the white hat who carries himself like a sheriff, but then shoots an unarmed man in the back. Just as we don’t often see such activity in westerns, it’s rare to find a movie that so willfully turns assumptions upside down as Leave Her to Heaven.
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