Category: John M. Stahl

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

By Marc S. Sanders

Martin Scorsese declared that Gene Tierney is one of the most underrated actresses of all time.  It’s likely her femme fatale performance in Leave Her To Heaven supports that argument.  Miguel mistakenly left his Criterion copy at my house and on a whim, I popped it into the machine.  With no knowledge of what the film was about, I gradually found myself stunned as the story initially unfolds as a meet-cute encounter between a charming novelist and a stunning, pleasant woman who get caught up in a whirlwind romance that turns questionably eerie.

The author is Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde).  He meets the voluptuous Ellen (Tierny) sitting cross from him on a passenger train car.  She just happens to be reading his latest best seller, and she takes to him at first sight because he looks strikingly familiar to her deceased father.  It’s also convenient to know they have the same destination at a retreat ranch in New Mexico.  Ellen’s mother, Margaret (Mary Philips), and her adopted sister (or maybe not?), Ruth (Jeanne Crain) are also staying there.  The ladies are actually going to spread father’s ashes high up on a mountain top nearby.

Richard is captivated with Ellen but respects her boundaries when he learns that she’s engaged to marry Russell Quinton (Vincent Price), an imposing man who is running for district attorney in Boston, Massachusetts.  That changes very quickly upon Russell’s surprise visit one night, where Ellen announces in front of everyone, including Richard, that she is now engaged to the writer.  Richard may be caught off guard, but he’s thrilled to spend his future with this alluring woman.  

Everything seems idyllic.  Ellen caters to his every whim without even be asked. She cooks and cleans for him and insists on not hiring a housekeeper to do such chores.

Richard is also quite fond of Ruth and Margaret, and he’s certain that Ellen will take kindly to his younger brother Danny (Darryl Hickman).  Danny resides at physical therapy home in Georgia.  He’s unable to walk but hoping to soon.  That doesn’t hinder his enthusiasm for his new sister in law and more time with his brother.

Everything seems perfect, and yet there are expressions and random observations about Ellen that leave all but Danny and Richard with trepidation.  Ruth and Margaret are kind people, but they seem to have reservations about Ellen’s intentions.  Who should Richard be cautious of though?  

Leave Her To Heaven relies upon a diabolical personality hiding in plain sight.  It begins with a lawyer telling some folks the story of Richard’s time with Ellen.  Richard arrives at a lakeside dock in Maine, and then he is on his way by canoe to visit a woman at a getaway cottage on the other side of the lake.  He’s been through some kind of ordeal.  It’s not clear what woman he’s going to see and why, nor what he’s recently endured.  The lawyer’s story has much to spell out.

Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, this film noir feels like it carries influence towards more modern classics like Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, and even the recent sleeper hit of 2025, The Housemaid with Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried (which I highly recommend). Especially effective is how trustworthy John M Stahl’s scenes of exposition seem.  At any point his film, adapted from the novel by Ben Ames Williams, could have steered in the direction of glowing optimism and promising possibilities.  Having not known where the story was going to take me enhanced my experience with the picture.  Gene Tierney’s lovely and later disturbing composition kept me alert and when later moments occur that leave no doubt of what her goals are, the suspense held on to a haunting pinnacle.  

The third act relies heavily on Vincent Price’s contributions, and he is a superb antagonist.  He’s far from the eerie B-fest persona that made him famous, but he is largely intimidating.  Still, his material is written to be extremely contrived as the screenplay resorts to lopsided courtroom drama.  Leave Her To Heaven is fully aware it’s not following legitimate protocol in a standard trial.  The courtroom setting operates more like a conduit to tie up loose ends and ensure all the pertinent characters get on the same page.  With Vincent Price driving the narrative, the thrills remain upheld.

The Technicolor on the Criterion edition deserves praise. For a film noir from 1945, this restoration looks entirely modern and and with the exception of the courtroom scenes, never feels outdated. When you’ve run out of Alfred Hitchcock material to bite your nails on, Leave Her To Heaven is a very good and solid alternative.  

Best advice, be careful when you fall in love at first sight.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945)

DIRECTOR: John M. Stahl
CAST: Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 85% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A writer falls in love with a young socialite, and they quickly marry, but her obsessive love for him threatens to be the undoing of them both as well as everyone around them.


Leave Her to Heaven is one of the earliest examples in my movie collection of what I call a “head-fake” movie.  There is a tiny bit of foreshadowing in its opening moments, but after that, it appears to fall into the traditional pattern of an old-fashioned, melodramatic potboiler, with a spurned fiancé, lovers in a whirlwind romance, and glorious three-strip Technicolor production design and cinematography that makes everything feel like a Douglas Sirk soap opera.  When it makes its left turn into unanticipated territory, I was on tenterhooks.

Author Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) has a classic, almost clichéd meet-cute with the ravishing Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney, who has never looked more beautiful) during a train trip to New Mexico.  He’s visiting friends, she’s there for a funeral, and their circles of friends unexpectedly mesh.  He winds up staying with her family at their ranch house.  She and her family remark how much Richard resembles Ellen’s late father.  He notices her engagement ring, but a few days later he also notices its absence along with her declaration that she’s removed it “forever.”  (I’m REALLY condensing here to get to the point…)

Her fiancé, Russell Quinton (a very young Vincent Price), arrives upon hearing she’s broken off their engagement.  He leaves after a brief conversation, and a few minutes later she literally proposes to Richard.  They marry and enjoy a few scenes of wedded bliss (in separate beds, of course, this is the ‘40s), during which Ellen makes some red-flag-raising statements to the effect of, “I’ll never let you go” and “I want you all to myself.”

During all of this, the filmmakers exhibit terrific restraint.  In some high-tension scenes, there is a notable lack of background score, which is a bit unusual for these kinds of pictures.  You usually get ominous for tension, or pastoral for outdoor scenes, etc.  But Stahl seems determined not to cue the audience for what they’re supposed to feel at any given moment, with one or two exceptions.  This method contributes greatly to not giving away what’s coming.  Ellen’s own words do that all by themselves.

There are other plot developments I could mention: Richard’s brother, Danny, who is disabled and comes to live with them for a while…Ellen’s fixation on how much time Richard spends with her sister, Ruth…Ellen’s attempt to get Danny’s doctor to prescribe more bedrest…these and other signal markers start to twist this apparent soap opera into something else entirely.  It reminded me of the great head-fakery in Woody Allen’s ingenious Match Point [2005], which also started out in soap opera territory and wound up somewhere altogether more sinister.

Much is made of the film’s Oscar-winning cinematography, and rightly so.  In an era when color films were an extravagance for a movie studio, they made the right choice here.  Cinematographer Leon Shamroy and production designer/art director Lyle R. Wheeler create picture-postcard images of a bygone era, lending an air of “vintageness” to the rooms, wardrobe, and makeup of the actors.  Look at Gene Tierney’s marvelous red lips, or the gaudy red of her swimsuit, worn at a time in the film when she probably shouldn’t have been so extravagant.

But I particularly love the music choices, or rather the choices to NOT use music during key sequences.  One in particular stands out.  If you’ve never seen Leave Her to Heaven, I won’t spoil it for you.  It’s the scene with a rowboat and one character’s attempt to swim across a lake.  In many other films of the time, there would almost certainly have been tense strings, low cellos and brass in the background.  For some reason, my mind goes to Miklós Rózsa’s magnificent score for Double Indemnity [1944].  That’s the kind of music normally heard in scenes like this.  But the filmmakers made the canny decision to let us merely listen to the actors and watch as Ellen makes a crucial decision.  That dread silence fairly SCREAMS as the scene progresses.

It’s tempting to look at this movie as a kind of Fatal Attraction [1987] prototype, but that’s not giving either movie its due.  Fatal Attraction is a straight up thriller, and it’s about an unfaithful husband getting what he deserves.  Leave Her to Heaven is also a cautionary tale, but not because the husband did anything wrong, aside from choosing to ignore a lot of red flags in Ellen’s behavior until it was far too late.  It might also be possible to interpret the film as a warning to men against women who think for themselves too much, who are too “take charge”, or would be considered such in the 1940s.  But I would disagree with that interpretation, too.

Look at Leave Her to Heaven as a whole, and I think it most closely resembles Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat [1981], or vice versa.  Both feature femme fatales who are not shy about doing what’s necessary to get their way.  The film’s ending even seems about to resemble Body Heat’s ending, but it veers away at the last second from the later film’s bleakness, providing an ending that seems just a little too pat.  I have a sneaking suspicion the filmmakers had a different ending in mind, but were forced to make changes to please the censors.  If there’s anyone out there who knows how the book on which the film is based ends, sing out.

Leave Her to Heaven is a singular experience.  I even knew about the famous boat scene, and I was still on the edge of my seat.  I simply couldn’t believe she was going to go through with it.  That’s the sign of a great film: you know what’s coming, it’s inevitable, but instead of feeling predestined, there is real suspense, a desire to know why this is happening, and what’s going to happen next.