Themes: Treacherous Spouses, Miscarriage of Justice, Femmes Fatales
Main Cast: Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price, Mary Philips
Release Year: 1946
Country: US
Run Time: 111 minutes
Plot
Gene Tierney portrays a beautiful but unstable woman who marries successful novelist Cornel Wilde. Tierney wants to spend all her time with her new husband, but finds it impossible to do so thanks to his work and the frequent visits of family and friends. When Wilde's crippled younger brother (Darryl Hickman) comes to the couple's summer house to stay, Ms. Tierney indirectly causes the boy to drown. Later, upon discovering that she's pregnant, Tierney deliberately falls down the stairs, choosing to miscarry rather than share her husband's affections with an infant. When it becomes clear that family friend Jeanne Crain is attracted to her husband, Ms. Tierney commits suicide, making her death appear to be murder and framing Crain for the "crime." In court, Ms. Crain is mercilessly grilled by prosecuting attorney Vincent Price, who happens to be Tierney's ex-lover! Filmed in lush Technicolor, Leave Her to Heaven is based on the best-selling novel by Ben Ames Williams. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
A Technicolor melodrama infused with film noir pathology, John M. Stahl's Leave Her to Heaven (1945) combines vivid visuals with a coldly passionate performance from Gene Tierney to create a memorable femme fatale. Cornel Wilde's Richard is doomed the moment that Tierney's crimson-lipped Ellen fixes her ice blue stare at him and remarks on his likeness to her beloved, recently deceased father. Stahl suggests the force of that love in Ellen's expressionistic horseback ride to scatter her father's ashes, but the scene in which Ellen impassively puts on her sunglasses and watches Richard's crippled brother drown in an idyllic Maine lake most powerfully communicates her nature. Richard's placid Maine cabin and Ellen's well-appointed family residences may present a surface as beautiful as Tierney's face, but Stahl reveals the obsessive evil lurking beneath. The second-most popular film of 1945, Leave Her to Heaven earned Tierney her sole Best Actress Oscar nomination for her archetypal woman who loves far too much, while Leon Shamroy won the Oscar for his striking color photography of landscapes, deluxe homes and Tierney's red lipstick. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
A young novelist, Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde), meets beautiful Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney) on a train. They fall in love and are married. Harland soon finds his life blighted when tragedies take first his handicapped young brother, then his unborn son from him. Gradually, he realizes that his wife's insane jealousy, which turns her own family away from her, may be the cause of the tragedies in his life. Yet another shock awaits them all, as Ellen's emotions become uncontrollable.
Title
The title is a quote from William Shakespeare's Hamlet. In Act I, Scene V, the Ghost urges Hamlet not to seek vengeance against Queen Gertrude, but rather to "leave her to heaven, and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her."
