Saturday, October 31, 2015

Ten Days of Terror!: Leave Her to Heaven

Film: Leave Her to Heaven
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

For the last two years, I’ve focused on traditional horror movies in the last 10 days of October. I do this because I like horror movies in general, love great horror movies, and because I tend to be so focused on Oscar movies that I don’t leave a lot of room for the scary stuff. There are times when I’ll slide more into thriller territory during these horror binges, but most of the time, I stick with the movies that would be classified by almost everyone as horror. Leave Her to Heaven is my biggest deviation from that typical late-October film. This is sort of a film noir despite being in glorious Technicolor. Rather than a traditional noir, though, this is the story of the coldest femme fatale in cinematic history.

Leave Her to Heaven is a film that’s told almost entirely in flashback, but it’s also a film that we forget is told in flashback almost immediately. As it opens, we’re introduced to Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde), a novelist who has just been released from a two-year stint in prison and has returned to live on a remote island where he did his writing. A few of the locals gawk, and the story of the last few years is revealed by his friend and attorney Glen Robie (Ray Collins).

One day on a train, Richard sees a woman named Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney) reading his latest novel. He is captivated by her (and one look at Tierney would suggest why), and she by him. She admits to staring at him not because she recognizes him from his picture on the back of the book, but because he looks surprisingly like her father, who has recently died. Romance slowly blossoms despite a few factors. First, Ellen is already engaged to a politically ambitions lawyer named Russell Quinton (Vincent Price before he became a horror icon). Second, there is the constant presence of Ellen’s cousin/adopted sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain). Third, there are a number of disturbing indicators that Ellen is possessive, jealous, and obsessive beyond all normal limits.

Regardless, Richard and Ellen are soon married—at her insistence and almost immediately after she breaks off her engagement with Russell Quinton. Slowly and inexorably, Ellen begins to demonstrate exactly how possessive she really is. While there are early hints, we get our first really look with her behavior regarding Richard’s crippled younger brother Danny (Darryl Hickman). Released from the hospital, Danny moves in with Richard and Ellen despite Ellen’s fervent pleas to his doctor to keep him in the hospital. Upset by the attention that Richard gives to his brother, she allows Danny to drown in the lake, coldly watching him struggle in the water until she sees that others might be observing her. Shortly after this Ellen becomes pregnant. Realizing that a child will also put a wedge between her and her husband, she engineers a fall down a flight of stairs to force a termination of the pregnancy.

I’ll leave the plot summary there. What makes Leave Her to Heaven work as well as it does is the slow build from the Ellen we first meet, an exotic beauty, to the Ellen we know by the final act of the film, an obsessed woman unable to be happy if anyone in the world is paying attention to the object of her obsession. While this is not strictly a horror movie, this is certainly a film from which plenty of horror movies have copped some ideas. Ellen’s psychology is central to that of plenty of thriller and horror movie villains.

Truly, the only objection I have to Leave Her to Heaven is the title, which doesn’t really indicate the sort of story we’re lining up for. I had this recorded on the DVR and didn’t really consider it until I read the short synopsis. Based on the title, I assumed this would end up being a sappy romance and not a particularly gripping tale of deadly love and possessiveness.

The only Oscar nomination Leave Her to Heaven managed was for Gene Tierney, and I’ll not be the one to say she didn’t earn it. Her portrayal of Ellen is done with ice water running through her veins. She is a perfect cinematic combination of staggering beauty (seriously, her first appearance on screen is as stunning as any few moments of any actress of the era) and cold, calculating evil. In fact, calling her relationship with Richard “love” does a disservice to the word. As the film moves, we slowly realize the depths of her insanity made all the more awful by its Oedipal overtones.

Leave Her to Heaven is not quite a traditional film noir. It’s in color for starters, and the ending doesn’t fit with the way a noir should end. Think of it instead as the purest character study of what a femme fatale should be. In that light, it casts a huge shadow over any film that uses obsessive, crushing love as a way to move the plot forward. It’s chilling not because of any deaths or gore, but because it feels like it could well be real; it’s Misery without the car accident and the hobbling scene.

Why to watch Leave Her to Heaven: Gene Tierney might be the coldest femme fatale ever conceived.
Why not to watch: The title doesn’t fit.

16 comments:

  1. I saw this a few weeks ago and I was mesmerized. Gene Tierney is amazing. I really wish that the movie was as good as Gene Tierney is. Cornell Wilde is kind of flat and the ending (the trial) is kind of stupid. (I felt bad for Vincent Price for being in a role that was mostly very stupid.)

    But there is much to enjoy in Gene Tierney's performance and it's about 75% a great movie. She is so cold! Geez Louise! It occurred to me that this is really a Bette Davis movie with a twist: the actress playing the beautiful lead role is actually a beautiful woman. (And I say that with all due respect to Bette Davis, my favorite actress. Except for maybe Louise Brooks and Meiko Kaji.)

    I can actually feel a little sympathy for Ellen. She has a point. She gave up her honeymoon so stupid Cornell Wilde could hang out with his kid brother being treated for polio at Warm Springs. Then when he's better, stupid Cornel Wilde takes his whole posse to that island, so she shares her honeymoon with not just her husband but also with the kid brother and a handyman who sounds like Francis the Talking Mule. So she never really got any time alone with her husband.

    Admittedly she shouldn't have started killing people. I'm surprised the death toll wasn't higher.

    Did you notice that she was also jealous of stupid Cornel Wilde's book? I'm surprised she didn't try to drown that too.

    I liked I a lot, despite my ribbing. But it's got a few flaws that keep it from being a classic like Laura.

    If you're interested in seeing more classic Gene Tierney films, check out Whirlpool. I saw it a few weeks ago and I was surprised I've never heard of it. It's a fun little nasty noir romp that should be better known.

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    1. If you saw this a couple of weeks ago, you probably watched it when I recorded it from TCM.

      I didn't really talk about Cornel Wilde above, but I mainly agree. His role could've been easily handled by anyone who looked good on camera. It's all about Gene Tierney and a little about Jeanne Crain. I don't know if many other people could have pulled off Tierney's role as well. It needed that perfect combination of great physical beauty and skill. Rita Hayworth, maybe? Maybe. But a good call on Bette Davis. Had this been produced 10-15 years earlier, Davis would have been perfect.

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    2. I did watch it on TCM. My mother mentioned it to me when we were talking about Gene Tierney. I had been under the impression that Leave Her to Heaven was a standard-issue weepie (like Dark Victory) and I'd always avoided it. But my mom's description made me curious and I got lucky because it was on TCM just a few days after we talked about it.

      My mother is a committed film buff of long standing. Her working mom sent her and her sisters off to the movies (this is in New Castle, Indiana, which has a very famous old theater that's still running) to see whatever was on and they saw everything. You should hear her talk about seeing Sunset Boulevard on the big screen when it opened. She was nine!

      I gotta go! It's Halloween and I'm planning on watching Isle of the Dead (with Boris Karloff) and The Thing with Two Heads (with Ray Milland) while passing out candy to neighborhood vandals, er, children.

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  2. I agree that Tierney did a hell of a job and that scene where she watches the boy drown definitely leaves an impression.

    Just tossing this out to see what you think - in regards to her daddy issues I got the impression that she might have offed him, perhaps as revenge for rejecting her, so when she meets the guy on the train it's almost as if her father has forgiven her and come back to her, from her warped perspective.

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    1. Possible, but it's mentioned in the film that she simply smothered him and was a huge wedge between him and her mother.

      Still, it's an interesting idea.

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  3. Tierney is iffy for me but she nailed this particular role and deserved her Oscar nomination. And can the woman wear clothes! She is stunning in her husband's designs.

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    1. I don't have a huge opinion on Tierney other than her obvious beauty, but I agree that she was great in this. This is the sort of role that could easily make me a Tierney fan, though.

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  4. Gene is terrific in this playing a remarkably dark woman, Ellen was this twisted in the book it's just surprising that the studio didn't insist on her being softened. The part plays to her strengths, the volcano beneath the placid, icy exterior that was mined so effectively again a few years later in Razor's Edge.

    The rest of the picture though leaves something to be desired. I didn't mind Cornel Wilde's rather flat work, a stronger more charismatic actor like Henry Fonda or Gregory Peck, would have pulled the focus from Tierney which would have thrown the dynamic of the film off. He's an extremely handsome if somewhat empty ideal for Gene to pour her obsession into too. Vincent Price is fine at first but he really goes over the top in the courtroom.

    Then there is Jeanne Crain an actress I find singularly unimpressive. She had a certain amount of warmth that keeps me from downright disliking her but she's so mechanical in her films, there isn't a time when you can't see the wheels turning. She was a Zanuck favorite and for whatever reason he was determined to make her a superstar and it was only her almost constant state of pregnancy, she had seven children, that kept her from marring A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Carrie, With a Song in My Heart and I'd Climb the Highest Mountain (both of which went to the more vivid Susan Hayward) as well as You're My Everything and most of all All About Eve (both of which went to Anne Baxter) She just didn't have the stuff to make Eve the pit viper necessary for the script to work. I don't think even Mankiewicz could have made it work, he'd directed her the previous year in A Letter to Three Wives and she and Jeffrey Lynn's segment is the weakest. Even when she's with the other wives both Ann Sothern and Linda Darnell blow her off the screen.

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    1. Aside from her being completely miscast in the role, I rather liked Jeanne Crain in Pinky and thought she handled it well. That's my main exposure to her before this film, and she's not in this enough to really detract from the film for me. I don't really have an issue with her at all.

      And there is some truth to the idea that a truly charismatic male lead might detract from what is really Tierney's film. This plays to Tierney's strengths certainly. Vincent Price is also not in the film enough for me to have a firm opinion on him here, although I agree that is courtroom theatrics don't really add to the overall film. As for Cornel Wilde, I've never had much of an opinion on him outside of The Naked Prey.

      Sometimes, the studios make the right choice. Softening Ellen for this would have been a massive mistake.

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    2. Absolutely softening Ellen would have made the whole story more or less moot. I think a debt is owed to the success of Double Indemnity and Stanwyck's soulless Phyllis Dietrichson the previous year for the retention of Ellen's villainy. That and the factor that Ellen's self punishment satisfied the censors rule that crime must pay.

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    3. Double Indemnity is a great call-out, as is Stanwyck's character. You'd think someone who loves Stanwyck the way I do would have made that connection more easily.

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  5. "She admits to staring at him not because she recognizes him from his picture on the back of the book, but because he looks surprisingly like her father, who has recently died. Romance slowly blossoms..."

    Now, that's creepy.

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    1. Yeah, and it's played up pretty significantly in the film. It's heavily implied throughout that she becomes obsessed with him specifically because he looks like her dead father.

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  6. As much as I love Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity," Linda Fiorentino is the coldest in my book for "The Last Seduction." Barbara can't be the coldest ever after getting her man, not once, but twice when she set her mind to it in the first film I saw her in, "The Lady Eve." So, old Fred really can't really be blamed for falling for her beauty later in "Double Indemnity."

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    1. I love The Last Seduction, and Linda Fiorentino is dry ice cold in that. But I do love me some Babs.

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  7. Wait, I take that back. Turning her back on her real-life son does makes Babs pretty damn cold, but it doesn't change the fact that she was one hell of a great actress that lived one hell of a hard life. I just wish there was a definitive biography of her that encompasses all the highs and lows of her storied life.

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