JOHN M. Stahl’s masterful “Leave Her to Heaven” (1945) sounds like a contradiction in terms – a film noir in eye-popping Technicolor, with its most chilling scene taking place not in a dimly lit back alley but on a lake in Maine.
But make no mistake – the gorgeous Gene Tierney’s homicidally jealous Ellen Berent is the fatalestof femmes in this gorgeously restored classic, beginning a one-week run at Film Forum today.
Poor novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) meets Ellen while she is distributing her father’s ashes on horseback in New Mexico in another classic sequence.
He makes the mistake of introducing his new bride to his teenage younger brother (Darryl Hickman), who is afflicted with polio.
Ellen’s pathological desire to have Richard all to herself leads her to lure the brother into that lake, as she watches impassively in a rowboat behind a pair of sunglasses. Her subsequent pregnancy ends at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and things only get worse from there.
It all climaxes with a trial in which the district attorney – also Ellen’s ex-fiancé, played with seething menace by Vincent Price – grills poor Richard in perhaps the most stunning-looking courtroom in Hollywood history.
The sets, including mid-century New Mexico and Maine homes to die for, were nominated for an Academy Award. Leon Shamroy’s gleaming cinematography – providing a stark contrast to the dark themes – won an Oscar.
“Leave Her to Heaven” brought Tierney’s only Oscar nomination.
Best known for the title role in the noir classic “Laura” (1944), Tierney was plagued by mental illness after giving birth to a mentally handicapped daughter following exposure to rubella during an appearance at the Hollywood Canteen.
Stahl, nearing the end of a career that stretched back to silent films, is best known today for directing a trio of classic 1930s “women’s pictures” such as “Imitation of Life” that were remade in color in the 1950s by Douglas Sirk.
Stahl’s use of space and the performances in “Leave Her to Heaven,” his only color film and Fox’s most popular film of the 1940s, suggest he was at least the equal of the much-exalted Sirk as an artist of melodrama.
Film Forum is at Houston and Varick streets. Info: filmforum.org.