Leave Her to Heaven ***** (1945, Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price, Darryl Hickman) – Classic Movie Review 663

Oscar-nominated Gene Tierney is enthralling as a crazy young socialite called Ellen Berent in John M Stahl’s film noir thriller Leave Her to Heaven (1945).

Capturing the eye and the emotions at the height of her beauty in 1945, Oscar-nominated Gene Tierney is enthrallingly superb as a psychotically crazy, all-consuming solipsistic young socialite called Ellen Berent.

Her obsessive, raging passion for her new writer husband Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) turns into a death wish when she lets her handicapped teenaged brother Danny (Darryl Hickman) die in the water, prompts her own miscarriage and sets her adopted sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain) up for murder.

Vincent Price makes his viciously camp mark as Tierney’s ex-fiancé, lawyer-politician Russell Quinton, who is understandably much put out when Tierney comes home from New Mexico with the new man (Wilde) she has met on a train.

This famous film noir thriller is all-stops-out melodrama at its most wonderfully colourful. It is lit up by marvellous work from a thoroughly professional team.

What more can you ask for when there is such classy playing from a delicious ensemble of performers, a sparkling screenplay by Jo Swerling (adapting Ben Ames Williams’s 1944 novel), stylish direction by John M Stahl and (perhaps best of all) astounding-looking Oscar-winning Technicolor cinematography by Leon Shamroy? How much is Shamroy so obviously relishing filming on superb Arizona, Maine, Georgia, California, and New Mexico backgrounds!

Above all, Gene Tierney’s Ellen Berent indelibly etches her mark as one of cinema’s greatest femme fatales in a movie often described as the first film noir to be shot in colour.

Loni Anderson starred in Tierney’s role in a 1988 TV remake called Too Good to be True.

Leave Her to Heaven premiered in the US on 20 December 1945 at the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles. It was a box-office hit, grossing $8.2 million worldwide, 20th Century-Fox’s highest-grossing film of the decade.

It was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Actress, Best Art Direction – Color (Lyle R Wheeler, Maurice Ransford, Thomas Little), Best Cinematography – Color, and Best Sound, and it won for Best Cinematography – Color.

It was restored by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.

It was selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2018 as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

The title comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when the Ghost asks Hamlet not to seek vengeance on Queen Gertrude but to ‘leave her to heaven, and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her.’ The film is noted for its references to figures in Greek mythology, notably Ellen Berent’s Electra complex, an obsession over her dead father.

Darryl Hickman teamed again with Price in The Tingler (1959). Hickman married actress Pamela Lincoln, whom he met on the film’s set.

The cast are Gene Tierney as Ellen Berent Harland, Cornel Wilde as Richard Harland, Jeanne Crain as Ruth Berent, Vincent Price as Russell Quinton, Mary Philips as Mrs Berent, Ray Collins as Glen Robie, Gene Lockhart as Dr Saunders, Reed Hadley as Dr Mason. Darryl Hickman as Danny Harland, Chill Wills as Leick Thome, Olive Blakeney as Mrs Louise Robie, Jim Farley as Train Conductor, Grant Mitchell as Carlson, Earl Schenck as Norton, Addison Richards as Bedford, Paul Everton, Harry Depp, Grant Mitchell, and Milton Parsons.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 663

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