Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
The mingling of film noir and melodrama can yield strange but beautiful fruit, as it does most memorably in 1945’s Leave Her to Heaven, adapted by Jo Swerling from the 1944 novel by Ben Ames Williams and directed by John M. Stahl. Gene Tierney, always exquisite and usually cast in more sympathetic roles, transforms her radiance into a death ray as the obsessive anti-heroine Ellen Berent, whose love destroys the objects of her adoration and everyone else around them. The film features an outstanding cast, including Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price, Ray Collins, and Darryl Hickman, but the picture belongs heart and soul to Tierney and her mesmerizing performance, which brought the star her only Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. If you want a noir film that plunges deep into the psyche of its central femme fatale, then Leave Her to Heaven is a perfect choice, as hypnotically luminous and seductive as Ellen herself.
We aren’t introduced to Tierney’s character right away, a move that builds our curiosity while also warning us that this love story won’t go well for its participants. Instead, we start at the end, with writer Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) returning home to his lakeside cabin after a stretch in prison. His friend and lawyer, Glen Robie (Ray Collins), then unfolds the tragic tale for us, taking us back to the first meeting of Ellen and Richard on a train some years before. Ellen, still grieving the death of her beloved father, quickly attaches herself to Richard and breaks off her engagement with the ambitious lawyer Russell Quinton (Vincent Price). Richard hurries into marriage to a woman he barely knows, but he seems happy, and he forms bonds with Ellen’s mother (Mary Philips) and adopted sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain). Richard hopes that Ellen will also love his younger brother, Danny (Darryl Hickman), a sweet teen struggling to recover from polio, but he eventually learns that Ellen’s heart only has room for one, and she will permit nothing to come between her and the one she loves.
Tierney’s beauty, enhanced by Technicolor cinematography, provides a perfect mask for the corruption that lurks beneath Ellen’s superficial sweetness. She is a femme fatale of grand, classical proportions, a fact suggested by the film’s title, which comes from a line in Hamlet, although Ellen might have more in common with Lady Macbeth than Queen Gertrude. Not content, however, with Shakespearean scale, the story imagines Ellen at a mythological level. There’s a reason we often refer to a seductive female character as a siren – a role sometimes conveyed by presenting the femme fatale as a singer – but the connection can also be made through the siren’s association with water. The classical siren of myth tempts men with her beautiful voice and appearance, but beneath the surface lurks a monster bent on destruction. It’s no accident that Ellen’s most iconic and terrible scene presents her on the water, luring the unsuspecting Danny to his doom by encouraging him to swim beyond his endurance. The film underscores the importance of that central moment by opening and closing on the same lake, where we first see Richard returning home and then, finally, see the resolution of all the grief he has endured.
While many dangerous female characters in film noir are presented as sirens of one kind or another, Ellen is also as much a victim of obsession as she is its source. Her first idol was her own father, and she is initially drawn to Richard because of his resemblance to the late Mr. Berent. Early on, her mother offers a kindly – and tragically erroneous – assessment by saying, “There’s nothing wrong with Ellen. It’s just that she loves too much.” Ellen’s love is not cast widely and thus softened; instead, she loves one object only and to excess. The attitudes of her mother and adopted sister make it clear that Ellen has never loved either of them. Her father absorbed all of the intense radiation of her devotion, perhaps leading to his own destruction. When Richard becomes her new obsession, she wants to be everything to him because he has become everything to her. There is no room in her world for her family, for Danny, or even for the baby she conceives and then abhors as a competitor for Richard’s love. Her actions are shocking and terrible, but she seems unable to consider other people as human beings at all, only as obstacles that threaten to come between her and her beloved. She is quite literally willing to die to keep Richard focused on her alone. Ellen’s role as a victim of her own obsessive nature brings us back to the Shakespearean advice of the title; we must leave her to heaven to judge because her madness puts her beyond the scope of mortal justice.
Obsessive women are the subjects of several iconic films, including Fatal Attraction (1987) and Misery (1990), but obsessive men are far more common. For more classic movies on the subject see Rebecca (1940), The Letter (1940), and Possessed (1947). Gene Tierney and Vincent Price both appear in Laura (1944), which is also about obsession, and in the Gothic supernatural tale, Dragonwyck (1946), which I love for its cast and spooky atmosphere. Cornel Wilde also stars in Road House (1947), The Big Combo (1955), and The Naked Prey (1965), the last of which Wilde directed, as well. Darryl Hickman, who started out as a child star, had a long career that included roles in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), The Tingler (1959), and Network (1976). He died on May 22, 2024, at the age of 92.
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— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub
Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.
Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.
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