LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

This was to me an obscure film from 1944 made by an obscure director, John M Stahl.  But Scorsese rates it very highly and Gene Tierney, the lead actress, got an Oscar nomination out of it, so I gave it a go.

It’s one of those films where the bulk of the story is told in flashback. In this case this is done to set up a mystery (why was Cornel Wilde’s character sentenced to two years in prison?) which helps to keep us interested during the early scenes which are, it’s fair to say, undramatic to the point of being dull.

Wilde plays a successful author, Richard, who meets and immediately falls in love with Ellen,   played by Tierney.  Studio boss Darryl F Zanuck is quoted in Wikipedia as saying that she was “unquestionably, the most beautiful woman in movie history“.  No doubt there was a certain amount of self interest in this statement about a star of his studio but when we and Richard first set eyes on her one can see where Zanuck was coming from even if her looks are not really to my taste. 

Ellen is engaged to the politically ambitious Russell (Vincent Price in the days before he specialised in horror) but she ditches him and persuades Richard to marry her before you can utter the words ‘femme fatale’.

Not that Ellen is a conventional femme fatale; she is independently wealthy and has no plan to get Richard to break the law.  But she does spell Trouble.

Perhaps Richard should have worried about her weirdly strong love for her dead father who Richard resembles in looks.  And now that she has married Richard she feels a very strong possessive love for him.

Being very possessive she can’t abide Richard lavishing any attention on anyone else.  This includes Richard’s disabled younger brother Danny and this leads to the film’s most memorable scene in which Ellen watches Danny to drown when she could easily come to his rescue.

Later on Ellen becomes pregnant which would seem to be good news until she becomes jealous of her unborn child.  This leads to a scene which I found hard to watch, in which she throws herself down a flight of stairs in order to have a miscarriage.

If this is extreme behaviour that’s nothing compared with what Ellen does next.  She commits suicide by taking arsenic but does it in a way to frame Ruth for murder.

Ruth is Ellen’s adopted sister who gets along with Richard very well, so well indeed that Ellen becomes intensely jealous of her.  In a way she is right to be because to the viewer it is obvious right from the off that Richard and Ruth would be very happy together. 

The final section of the film concerns Ruth’s trial, where the prosecutor is none other than Russell, who because of his feelings for Ellen has a more than professional interest in getting a guilty verdict (conflict of interest, anyone?).  Cue some very hostile cross-examination of both Richard and Ruth, which eventually leads Ruth to admit her love for Richard, but Richard saves the day when very reluctantly he reveals that Ellen had confessed to him that she had killed Danny.

This is enough to acquit Ruth, but rather unfairly I felt Richard gets two years as an accessory to Danny's murder.

Anyway, the film ends happily with Richard and Ruth reunited.

Although critics have had a field day debating whether this is a film noir or is it a psychological melodrama, although to me it clearly falls in the latter camp.  Apparently there are plenty of allusions to Greek mythology if that's your thing.

It's a decent film but there's not enough suspense and Ellen could have been made a lot more sinister.  In particular I wanted to know more about her father's death since there are some references to it which are intriguing but which don't lead anywhere.  Ellen's mother is a character who hovers in the background, and one or two dramatic scenes between the two of them wouldn't have gone amiss.