DVD: Leave Her to Heaven

Five million dollars: in the 1940s that was enough profit to make this Technicolor melodrama 20^th Century Fox’s biggest box-office hit of the decade. Reaching cinemas in January 1946 on the heels of World War Two, John M. Stahl’s film didn’t offer audiences the conventional home comforts.

Derived from a best-selling novel by Ben Ames Williams, Leave Her to Heaven tells a crazed story of obsessive jealousy, of a family and marriage wracked by sudden death, a violent abortion, and arsenic poisoning, all perpetrated by its scheming heroine – a beautiful shoulder-padded basilisk played with chilly poise by Gene Tierney. If the film had been visually punchier, and in black-and-white, we’d justifiably call it a classic film noir. As it is, it’s something rarer: a melodrama that crawls through its eyebrow-raising story with stately delirium and gorgeous hues.

For once the story features a woman not as the perpetrator of nastiness, not as its victim. That's a welcome novelty, though some shine is removed by the limited skills of the top actors. Vincent Price is spunky enough as the heroine’s cast-off flame who reappears in the final reels as a pummelling prosecuting attorney. But his is a subsidiary role. Most of the time we’re looking at the fashion-plate heroine Ellen Berent Harland, the increasingly psychotic woman determined to own her husband body and soul, tooth and nail, in a string of desirable properties in New Mexico, Massachusetts and Maine.

The film never becomes unpleasant to watch if you focus on the photography

Gorgeously lovely except for protruding upper teeth, Tierney easily gives Ellen the surface behaviour of an evil and manipulative woman, but never discovers the character's inner life. Cornel Wilde, as her husband Richard Harland, writer of thick middle-brow novels, perennially looks wooden, even when doing something as simple as walking out of a shot. As Ellen's "good" sister, Jeanne Crain takes care of the triangle's third corner in typical Crain style: wholesome, pleasant and superficial.:

Having two leads who seem more mannequin figures than human beings seriously restricts chances for emotional identification. Newly married and adoring, Tierney shows perhaps understandable pique when the couple’s log-cabin love nest becomes crowded out with her mother, sister, and Wilde’s crippled kid brother. But once she puts on those evil dark glasses and in cruel long takes allows the plucky polio victim to drown in the local lake, sympathy is withdrawn, never to return. Leave her to hell, I’d say.

Yet the film, with its increasingly unpleasant story, never becomes unpleasant to watch if you focus on the photography. Nature and studio artifice combine in a luscious symphony of subtle hues, so different from the brash displays in Fox’s other Technicolor films of the time. No wonder Leon Shamroy’s photography won an Oscar. Alfred Newman’s music, romantic and ominous, isn’t bad either.

Fashions and décor also keep the eyes busy, almost from first frame to last. Actors seem to be modelling for magazine advertisements for chic Forties dresses, lipstick, skin cream, and, especially, chintz furnishings, though the lovely parade breaks down at one point when Tierney gives her hubbie a writer’s snack. "This is about the tastiest sandwich I’ve ever eaten!" Wilde exclaims.  White bread; no salad garnishing. It looks awful.   

Director Stahl, an old Hollywood hand with credits stretching back to 1914, plays his own part in sustaining this loopy film’s artificial atmosphere. If they consider Stahl at all, critics usually label him as a sensitive realist, certainly in comparison with the visually flamboyant films Douglas Sirk made in the 1950s from properties like Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life, "women’s pictures" filmed by Stahl in the 1930s.

Stahl’s way of directing is certainly quieter: a few nicely chiselled compositions here and there, but no camera pirouettes, no bold visual symbols, or implied social critiques. Leave It to Heaven is scarcely a realist film, or a particularly sensitive one. Instead it exists in its own weird bubble as a glacial, dream-like story of mad love and psychosis, performed by puppets, designed and photographed by artists. Just thing to watch propped up on cushions on a rainy day.

Watch the trailer to Leave Her to Heaven