(Wrong Like Right)

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Leave Her To Heaven (1945)

Leave Her to Heaven is less a film noir and more a film contradiction. It begins as a romance and blossoms (wilts?) into a noir drama. Rather than hiding in black and white shadows and crooked angles, this film casts open the shades and lets the light in, with beautiful technicolor photography. As the movie’s femme fatale, Gene Tierney gives a brilliant performance, even better here than the more well known and pioneering noir Laura. As her jealousy begins to take a stronger hold on her, her actions become destructive and then self-destructive, but the movie never casts her in darkness; the beautiful color and exceptional lighting creates a disturbing disparity and makes her initial appearances (especially a heart racing scene where Tierney dumps her dead fathers ashes on a mountain while riding a horse) all the more thrilling and attractive, and makes her descent into self-destruction have a ring of tragedy that’s missing from most noir fatale’s. 

And even then, once Tierney’s blistering jealousy sets in, the film shifts gears once again, becoming a courtroom drama showcase for no less than Vincent Price. Some might find Prince’s performance over the top, but you have to realize where his character is coming from. As a former lover of Tierney’s Ellen, Price’s prosecutor sees this as the chance to not only get revenge against her surprise fiance novelist Richard (Cornel Wilde) but also to prove himself to Ellen from beyond the grave. This goes beyond courtroom performance for Price’s character; it’s a chance to prove himself to the universe. If that’s not a sign to slip into theatrics, I don’t know what is. And I find Price to be utterly fantastic in these scenes, believably drilling people about a questionable crime. The sad truth is that when it comes down to it, Price isn’t a villain but just another of Ellen’s victims. In his case, he was never intimate with Ellen enough to learn about her true nature. And even in the end, Richard and Ellen’s family doesn’t understand the truth about Ellen either. Her jealousy made her do monstrous things, but the film’s sympathetic, beautiful treatment of her paints her jealousy as a thousand times more fascinating than the simple greed expressed by most fatale’s in most noirs. She’s not after financial gain, after all. She has that all ready. All she wants is to be loved the most and to be the center of attention. That’s something we might not relate to, but we can certainly understand it. 

Photo courtesy of amazonaws.com