The Hollywood Studio Era excelled in the production of the film noir, creating about 745 of them from 1940 through 1959 according to the Internet Movie Database. Some of these such as Double Indemnity (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950) are exceptional classics – others not so much. In any case, the noir often proved to be popular at the box office and added spice to the resumes of such silver screen luminaries as Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Alan Ladd, Joan Bennett, Robert Mitchum, Gene Tierney, and Ava Gardner among many others.
Whether or not film noir is considered to be a genre or a style is still cause for lively debate. In any event, noir is the haven of pessimism and menace, of cynical, disillusioned male characters (often portrayed as detectives or writers) and the femme fatale which consists of amoral, treacherous females who use their charms to lead these men down the path of destruction. Noir also has a distinctive look where black & white cinematography flourishes.
The majority of these films were hardboiled crime dramas characterized by the liberal use of shadowy cinematography, stark lighting contrasts, and various tilted camera angles to convey the nightmarish, skewed world of the harried male protagonist. The world of noir is almost exclusively urban, typified by seedy alleyways, creepy dockyards, dilapidated tenements, cheap boardinghouses, sleazy barrooms, blaring neon signs, garish nightclubs, dreary police stations, and so forth.
The noir tendency is to have a twisted, complicated plot structure with the main character acting as the narrator of his own path to doom. These characters are well known for their jaded world view, where flashbacks and murky dream sequences are often used to further depict the impending destruction of the protagonist. Considering all of the above, Leave Her To Heaven is an odd standout, quite untypical of film noir in appearance, style, and narrative. Yet, it is classified as one the best of that type. The story is a deft blend of film noir, psychological thriller, and melodrama.
Perhaps what is most beguiling about Leave Her To Heaven are the gorgeous locales utilized for the story. The unforgettable beauty of the Sedona and Prescott regions of Arizona and the pristine Bass Lake area of the Sierra Nevada range in California are worlds away from the typical noir settings. The vibrant Technicolor scheme of the lush rural settings enhance the pleasure of watching the characters move through the story – deceptively tranquil settings which become tainted with tragedy.
What is also outstanding with Leave Her To Heaven is Gene Tierney’s flair for melodrama – the deft blending of melodrama with noir without becoming overwrought took a skilled actress to navigate that balance successfully. Critics today generally consider her to have been an underrated performer during that era with many well-acted roles to her credit. Leave Her To Heaven is about the twisted marriage of a socialite Ellen (Tierney) and a popular novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde). As they begin life together it would seem blessed and idyllic, but of course this satisfactory state of affairs is bound to take a nasty turn at some point!
Before too long, the cliched “green-eyed monster” rears its ugly head, poisons the well and the stage is set for catastrophe as Ellen’s (Tierney) smothering possessiveness of Richard (Wilde) destroys his family relationships, friendships, and career – leaving madness, mayhem, and murder in it’s wake. Ellen’s extreme personality type is what we would now call a fatal attraction. While there have been so many film characters of this type that have followed over the years, Leave Her To Heaven serves as a satisfactory prototype of what would come along (think of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction from 1987 as a primary example). The highly successful film was adapted from the Ben Ames Williams novel of the same title. He was also well-known as a prolific writer of short stories for other publications like the Saturday Evening Post.
It’s intriguing how the novel and the film incorporated references from Greek mythology – which we know is ripe with all kinds of divine gods and heroes who were nonetheless seriously flawed. Among those undesirable qualities were the all too human ones such as envy, jealously, and rancor which are all displayed to sensational effect in Leave Her To Heaven. Film noir is chock full of psychologically disordered characters and this story is an entertaining, memorable, and thoughtful creation of several filmic styles and can serve as a cautionary tale, what red flags to heed before falling into the clutches of a psychotic.
