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 before you can utter the words ‘femme fatale’ she ditches him and persuades Richard to marry her .
Not that Ellen is a conventional femme fatale, given that she is independently wealthy and that she has no plan to get Richard to break the law. But she does spell Trouble.
Perhaps Richard should have worried about her weirdly obsessive love for her dead father who Richard resembles in looks. And he should definitely be concerned about her very strong and possessive love for him once they do marry.
This includes Richard’s disabled younger brother Danny, which leads to the film’s easily most memorable scene in which Ellen watches Danny 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. In a scene I found hard to watch she throws herself down a flight of stairs in order to have a miscarriage.
If this is unhinged behaviour (spoiler alert: it is) than that’s nothing compared with what Ellen does next. She takes the extreme step of committing suicide by taking arsenic but she does it in a way so as to frame Ruth for murder, Ruth being Ellen’s adopted sister who gets along with Richard very well, so well indeed that Ellen is 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 are meant for each other and 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 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 merely a psychological melodrama, to me it clearly falls in the latter camp. As a bonus the film includes plenty of allusions to Greek mythology if that's your thing.
The whole thing could have been more suspenseful, and Ellen could have been made a lot more sinister. Ellen's mother hovers in the background, and one or two dramatic scenes between the two of them wouldn't have gone amiss. In particular I wanted to know more about the death of Ellen's father's since there are some references to it which are intriguing but which don't lead anywhere.
So it's an entertaining film but no classic.
RATING: ✓ Cheers
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