‘Leave Her to Heaven‘ or — Sympathy for the Devil?
Of all the stills from films I’ve never seen the one I’ve found the most beguiling, the most intriguing and alluring is the shot of Gene Tierney wearing sunglasses in John M. Stahl’s ‘Leave Her to Heaven’ (1945), and it was more than just the striking nature of the image that filled me with a desperate desire to watch it. What was she thinking? What was she seeing or choosing not to see? I had no idea but was fascinated and now, after viewing the movie last night, I finally know the answer… I think I’m still recovering from the immensity of the shock.
It’s all there in that look she, Ellen (Tierney), gives Richard (Cornel Wilde) on the train at the start. He notices she’s reading a book he wrote and so uses that fact to flirt with her, but the way she returns his gaze is too intense, too severe, so immediately our alarm bells are ringing, even if (or possibly because?) we can’t look away from her.
It turns out Richard reminds Ellen of her father, a father she has only recently lost and so is travelling to New Mexico to scatter his ashes and it transpires that she and Richard will be staying at the home of some mutual friends. This proximity means it’s not long before the two are soon married and living at Richard’s lakeside lodge, even if his new bride’s mother warns him that her daughter was obsessed with her father because she “loves too much”. This has resulted in a pathologically possessive personality which manifests as Ellen’s inability to share Richard with anyone else, something that’s soon put to the test when Richard’s polio stricken brother followed by Ellen’s entire family come to stay and the extreme effects of unresolved trauma soon rears its head.
So what we’re dealing with here are the consequences of unprocessed grief combined with a rampant Electra complex, something best represented in one of the most astonishingly Freudian shots in the history of cinema as we observe Ellen riding on horseback as she scatters her father’s ashes, her bosom rising and falling as dramatically as the vast undulating landscape behind her whilst music blasts away, the colours of nature permanently searing themselves into our cranial cavities and an emotional weight as dense as those eternal rocks smashes against us. It’s an extraordinary image and one I’m still reeling from this morning but, then again, the entire film is visually (and sonically) staggering.
It’s not just the dazzling Technicolor, the remarkable set design (you could analyse this movie for hours on its use of wallpaper and fabric alone) or spectacular scenery but more Stahl and cinematographer Leon Shamroy’s mind-blowing use of space and movement. There’s a scene when Ellen and Richard’s brother are out on the lake and the way the camera follows Ellen in the boat as she trails the young lad in the water is one of the most exceptional moments of tension ever created (it’s like watching ‘Jaws’ but it’s the shark that’s the one in the boat). And when the blow of realisation hits us it does so with a devastating force. So THAT’S what she was looking at all this time! This film is absolutely brutal!
Yet, unbelievably, we never fully lose sympathy for Ellen, even after she has the most revolting outburst in her doctor’s surgery before then managing to perform the most hateful and sick “Fuck you!” to both her husband and sister that had me wondering if this wasn’t a horror movie I was watching. Wow!
‘Leave Her to Heaven’ is gobsmacking on every single conceivable level and Stahl’s direction boggles belief with its immaculate skill. It also helps you understand why Douglas Sirk was drawn to remaking Stahl’s films yet despite their similarities in handling melodrama what’s most striking are the differences because there are things Stahl does that Sirk would never do and vice versa (a double-bill of this with, say, Sirk’s ‘Written on the Wind’ would be a transfixing comparison).
So after years of looking at that image of Tierney in her sunglasses with an unfathomable curiosity I now understand and bloody hell, it’s an experience I’m never going to forget. Put the film on and, like Ellen gazing at Richard from over the top of his book, you won’t be able to look away for a single flabbergasting second.
