Leave Her to Heaven

Martin Scorsese: And then eventually Leave Her to Heaven, in color. . . The use of the blues and the reds.
Richard Schickel: Oh, that film seems to me . . .
MS: Dazzling.
RS: I mean, that color is just . . .
MS: Lurid.
RS: Blinding. 

– Richard Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese¹

It’s traditional to refer to Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945) as a ‘Technicolor noir’ – even perhaps the supreme example from a set of films that inscribe murderous intent and other perfidious pulsions in radiant settings inhabited by visually vibrant, yet ethically dubious, characters. But it is perhaps useful, for this film at least, to unpack both aspects of this appellation – the chromatic ostentation and the implication of a story revolving around illicit desires and ambiguous morality.

Certainly, Leave Her to Heaven is often a luscious film in its dazzling Technicolor look. Technicolor was a dye-process that enabled rich colours full in their saturation, showing up in this film in multiple renditions from the warm browns of the many rustic interiors to the blends of cool blue and hot red in women’s outfits. Colours seem at times to pop off the screen. For instance, Gene Tierney’s eyes glow with intent, a motif given a deliberate ironic twist when Tierney’s character, Ellen, hides them in a horrific moment behind sunglasses that make murderous purpose all the icier.

Yet there is one aspect to the Technicolor in Leave Her to Heaven that can seem to betray the process’s proclivity for mesmerising visual display: to put it bluntly, Cornel Wilde (as protagonist Richard Harland) looks terrible in Technicolor, his skin a waxy yellow that makes him appear cadaverous. This sickly tone (very evident in his first flashback scene where he initially meets the irremediably fascinating Ellen on a train) is doubled by Wilde’s acting style, a bundle of fear and impression of entrapment, an awkwardness in line delivery and overall comportment. He comes off as the proverbial ‘deer in the headlights’ and his very, very dark irises, in contrast to Tierney’s vibrant ones, render him a figure void of life or liveliness.

Wilde/Harland’s passivity, emotional emptiness, and downright lack of personality can push us, then, to think about the extent to which this film fits some of the qualities we associate with film noir narratively. Noir has to do with illicit desires, pathways outside dominant social norms. Certainly, Ellen is driven by all-consuming passion but it is pressing to wonder just why she is so consumed by empty, dull, blundering Richard (as when, already told by Ellen that she hates surprises, he keeps from her that he and her sister Ruth [Jeanne Crain] have been remodeling her father’s laboratory as a nursery for the child Ellen is pregnant with). 

Ellen, responsible for three deaths, is obviously no paragon of virtue. But Richard is no paragon of perfection: he’s clumsy and sometimes buffoonish, he’s insensitive, he’s oblivious to the wants and needs of his own spouse. (Any writer knows that you don’t dedicate your first book, after marrying, to your wife’s sister rather than your wife! This is a defect in protocol, especially as it’s so obvious to everyone that Ellen is jealous of Ruth and seemingly has some reason to be, as Richard insensitively spends lots of time with her.)

Yes, Ellen murders, but the film makes Richard’s indiscretions no less painful to view. There are, for instance, few scenes as emotionally painful (not just in this film but in many) as the one in which Ellen endearingly coos over her sleeping husband and tries to arouse him from slumber by softly blowing air over his face, only to have him ignore her to talk eagerly through the bedroom’s thin walls with his brother Danny (Darryl Hickman) on the other side.

Given how vapid and cloyingly clueless Richard is, we might want to ask just what Ellen finds in him. Except that we’re given the answer to that in that first encounter on the train: Ellen somehow sees in him the spitting image of her late father whom she loved – to the point of morbidity or perversity.

There is a strand of postwar films – films noirs along with melodramas – in which characters are driven most of all by psychological syndromes. Take, for instance, Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950): femme fatale Laurie (Peggy Cummins) certainly loves Bart (John Dahl) but what she lusts after in him – and through him – is an erotics tied to the explosive violence of guns, a directly Freudian phallic passion. 

Significantly, though, Laurie also wants a life of comfort, so she turns to violence not only for the thrills it brings but also the quick paths to seeming success it can entail. Guns may be fun but they are useful as a way to bring in spoils that push one ahead of the pack. Gun Crazy may offer a psychological explanation (one that is excessively Freudian – at least in popular understandings at the time of Freudianism) for crime but it also proffers sociological reasons. The film is part of a subset of films noirs that some critics have even labeled ‘films gris’ (“grey film”), bleak and despairing chronicles of working-class people struggling to succeed within the norms of the American dream but resorting ultimately to crime when they realise how closed off the dream is to most citizens.

There’s little of grey sociology in Leave Her to Heaven. Films gris like Gun Crazy merit a bleak black-and-white, but Leave Her to Heaven’s rich chromatic tonality fits a world of material riches. This is a world of assurance. For instance, already a literary success as the narrative begins, Richard has little aspiration, and little need for aspiration, beyond spending time with his invalid brother at his wondrous lodge out in the woods. Ellen comes from patrician wealth and has no need to aspire to anything except keeping Richard to herself, just as she tried to keep her father for herself. The criminality she resorts to has no function other than to meet her perverse psychological wants.

Ironically, then, in the moment of the film’s production and release – just as America is emerging from war – the intensities of Ellen’s psychological fixations have their own sociological implications. Ellen may be driven by nothing but psychological impulses and impulsions, but to harbour nothing but those in a nation at war (the film is in production in 1944) is to engage in a societal scandal. There is certainly no mention of a world at war anywhere in Leave Her to Heaven, but it is possible to wonder why someone like Richard Harland wouldn’t have been called up for service, and it is quite likely that the extent to which Ellen desperately tries to keep her man at home rather than let him to go off to other duties would have resonated in a moment where official ideology was all about pushing men out the door to their national responsibility. (In Action in the North Atlantic [Lloyd Bacon, 1943], a naval officer is just beginning his honeymoon when Military Police knock at his door to announce that he’s wanted back at his ship. When he starts to desist, his wife proudly avers that “we can’t go around holding hands at a time like this” and sends him off to war.)

Yet even as Leave Her to Heaven pits a larger field of duty against private desires, it is hard to decide ultimately where the story’s preferences lie. It necessarily condemns killing but it also condemns a bland, normative life lived without passion, wallowing in banality. Interestingly, the film tries to enforce a proper and normative ending – Richard ends up, unlike many films noirs, making the right and redemptive choice of good woman over bad – but there is a lingering detail that itself insinuates impropriety into rightness and all-American righteousness. Specifically, where Ben Ames Williams’s long and lumbering novel inserts a protracted sequence wherein, just after Ellen’s suicide, Richard and Ruth realise they love each other, marry, and go on a honeymoon, the film cuts dramatically from Ellen’s dying to an attorney declaring “Murder!” In other words, the film’s version of events leaves out the seemingly proper marriage of Richard and Ruth. When the flashback structure of the film catches up to the present as Leave Her to Heaven concludes, we see Richard paddling up to his country lodge where Ruth, all in white, waits for him, and they embrace. Nothing, though, has told us they are a married couple. Romantic desire outruns norms – that of American society at the time, that of an American film industry under the sway of the moral strictures of censorship. Leave Her to Heaven shows personal lives in romantic combat (at an historical moment of real combat) but it never settles into a firm moral position.

Leave Her to Heaven (1945 USA 110 mins)

Prod Co: 20th Century Fox Prod: William A. Bacher Dir: John M. Stahl Scr: Jo Swerling Phot: Leon Shamroy Mus: Alfred Newman Ed: James B. Clark Art Dir: Maurice Ransford, Lyle Wheeler Cos Des: Kay Nelson

Cast: Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price, Mary Philips, Ray Collins, Gene Lockhart, Reed Hadley, Darryl Hickman, Chill Wills 

Endnotes