Classic Movie Obsession: Leave Her to Heaven

[Note:This article contains SPOILERS. I love Leave Her to Heaven, but I was spoiled for one of its biggest scenes. Ideally you should watch it first, then come back and we’ll peel the face off the Technicolor mask.]

By Jennifer Baldwin. Is there a better movie about romantic obsession than Leave Her to Heaven? Is there another movie as disturbing and unflinching in its portrayal of a woman obsessed as this film, this nightmare vision in Technicolor? To see the film only once is to remember it forever. It’s no wonder, then, that I’ve been obsessed with Leave Her to Heaven for over a decade. It’s a movie not only about obsession, but one that invites obsession on the part of the audience. We are invited to obsess over the colors, the beauty, the horribly evil acts committed by Gene Tierney’s Elle Berent. That Ellen is a deadly enigma only makes it more fascinating to obsess over her.

I blame Martin Scorsese. One night, many years ago, I stumbled onto his documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies playing on TCM. Three movie clips from the documentary stayed with me long past that night, haunting me, nagging at my mind: clips from Cat People, Scarlet Street, and Leave Her to Heaven. As time went by, it became a kind of quest to track these movies down. First came Cat People and I was spooked by the shadows and the dreaded suggestion of horror. Next came Scarlett Street and I was shocked by the brutal violence and even more brutal cynicism.

When I finally saw Leave Her to Heaven it was almost too overwhelming to describe. The colors, the murders, the pounding tympani, Gene Tierney’s eyes – all the lurid perversity of it burned forever into my brain. I loved it. It was the most delirious melodrama I had ever seen. It still is. It’s woman’s melodrama with a black soul. It pulls the mask back on the notion of romantic, all-consuming love and gives us the horror underneath. And yet, it is achingly beautiful to look at, the beauty and the horror intertwined so that it becomes more than just the story of a monstrous, murderous woman – it becomes a tragedy. Fitting that the title should be a line from Hamlet.

Leave Her to Heaven is essentially two things: Leon Shamroy’s color cinematography and Gene Tierney’s lead performance. Bringing these two essentials together, of course, is the underrated director, John M. Stahl. It is Stahl, in an act of alchemical wizardry, who is able to fuse Tierney’s subtle, disturbing performance with Shamroy’s wild, unrestrained use of Technicolor (all with a handy assist from the set design, art department, and costuming).

Stahl’s film is popular art at its best, a finely balanced creation that melds melodramatic, expressionist visuals with naturalistic, subdued, almost mannequin-like acting styles, so that the effect is a kind of hallucinatory hyper-reality that nevertheless remains remote and mysterious. We never quite know what to make of Ellen’s character.

Why does Ellen act the way she does? Why is her love so ruinously obsessive? Is she evil? Is she merely insane? Is it possible to feel sympathy for her even as she scares the hell out of us? What about her love? Was her love completely rotten and selfish to the core or was there some small piece of it that was true and human and only later became twisted?

Gene Tierney doesn’t get enough credit either as an actress or as a movie star. As far as Leave Her to Heaven is concerned, she is the whole movie. The film loses something – some spark, some energy – when her character dies and Tierney has left the screen. Only Vincent Price’s theatrical courtroom shouting saves the last quarter of the film from collapsing into anticlimax.

And lest anyone doubt Tierney’s performance or her star quality, answer this:  what was 20th Century Fox’s highest grossing movie of the 1940s? Leave Her to Heaven. You don’t deliver the studio’s highest grossing picture of the decade if you’re not a star. And who was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in 1945? Gene Tierney. It’s a shame that she is not more well known today.

Leon Shamroy’s cinematography won the Oscar that year, deservedly so. But it really should have been a double win for Shamroy and Tierney at the Academy Awards of 1945, because Shamroy’s cinematography is merely an extension of Tierney’s performance and vice versa. No one can fault the Academy for giving Joan Crawford an Oscar for Mildred Pierce, but I think in a perfect world it would have been Tierney.

I’m fascinated by the decision to shoot the film in color. Most color films in the mid 1940s were musicals or big budget Westerns. A melodrama like Leave Her to Heaven would ordinarily be a black and white affair. Except Leave Her to Heaven was based on a bestselling novel by Ben Ames Williams – a novel that was wildly popular with audiences, resulting in one of the most highly anticipated film adaptations of the day. It was the kind of prestige picture – and potential moneymaker – that could justify the extra cost to shoot in Technicolor.

What Stahl and Shamroy did with that color is nothing short of breathtaking – not just in the look of the color, but in the way color was used. I’m hard-pressed to think of another movie that depends so much on the use of color to affect mood, theme, and character. It’s been said that the color cinematography in Leave Her to Heaven is so powerful that it’s almost a character in its own right. I think a better way to put it is that the color cinematography isn’t a separate character so much as an extension of one character, the central character of the story: Gene Tierney’s Ellen Berent.

Gene Tierney was one of Hollywood’s greatest beauties, but one thing I’ve heard is that the camera didn’t quite capture how beautiful she was. Part of this had to do with the fact that she made a lot of black and white films and those films weren’t able to display one of her greatest features: her blue-green eyes.

No such problem in Leave Her to Heaven. In fact, the color scheme of the film – dominated by blues, greens, reds, and pinks (along with an eerie amber glow that hovers over most of the film) – is primarily dictated by Tierney’s appearance. Her blue-green eyes and striking red lipstick are used as a template to color almost every frame of the picture. Everywhere there is blue, green, and red. Just as Ellen promises Richard (Cornel Wilde) that she’ll never let him go, so too do Ellen’s “colors” never let the film go– they dominate to such a degree that her presence is felt in almost every frame, even when she’s not there.

I have to confess: As monstrous as Ellen is, I can’t totally hate her. Part of this is due to Tierney’s performance (more on that later) and part of it is due to the duality inherent in Ellen’s character.

Also, part of it is due to the fact that she can’t seem to get any “alone time” with her husband — and Richard is particularly obtuse in this respect, continually inviting people over to visit. Girl just wants some morning sex with her husband without some annoying kid brother butting in!

The duality of woman is a common theme in the woman’s melodrama and Leave Her to Heaven might be one of the boldest examples. What’s fascinating about Ellen is that she has all the makings of the perfect woman and wife: she’s beautiful, intelligent, and charming; she wants to do all the cooking and cleaning for her husband; and her entire character is defined by the love she has for a man. But this love and devotion is what ultimately leads to murder and destruction. This is the great perversity of Leave Her to Heaven.

Ellen’s great beauty, her love for Richard, her obsession with him is symbolized by the color of Tierney’s eyes: the color blue (which sometimes shades into a greenish blue, perhaps suggestive of the green of jealousy).

Meanwhile, her hateful possessiveness, her murderous nature is symbolized by the color of her lipstick: the color red (which is sometimes softened into pink, perhaps to show that Ellen’s dark desires haven’t manifested but are still bubbling below the surface).

For a woman with famous blue-green eyes, it makes sense that Stahl and Shamroy would emphasize the blues and greens of the palate in coloring the film. Ellen is the dominant character; hers is the personality that looms over everyone in the film. So it’s only natural that blues and greens should loom over every frame. Even after Ellen is dead, the blue-green color dominates the frame.

Notice that both the meet-cute scene between Richard and Ellen at the beginning of the picture and the courtroom scene at the end of the picture are filled with the same greenish-blue.

Notice, also, how Stahl inserts flashes of red throughout the film, as a reminder perhaps that Ellen’s dark nature is not far off.

Red is also the central color in the frame in Ellen’s two big murder scenes: the justly famous boat scene …

… and the even more chilling abortion scene. Notice that blue and red coexist in the frame — Ellen’s dual nature cannot be separated into “good girl” and “bad girl”; she is all things at once, not an either/or.

(As an aside: This is one of the few on-screen abortion scenes that got past the Production Code censors of the time. It’s quite remarkable how much Stahl is able to get away with in Leave Her to Heaven.)

One last color motif related to Ellen is the color white. She is often swathed in white clothing or surrounded by white objects. What’s curious is that she can be seen in white both when she is acting “normal” and when she is engaged in her more psychotic actions.

Perhaps the white is a reference to the “Heaven” of the title and to her future death:  she must be left to Heaven, to her eternal fate, because she is too inscrutable and irrevocably damaged to be dealt with in this earthly life. It might also be an ironic comment on her domestic nature, her perfect wifeliness, betrayed by her murderous actions. Consider all the horrible deeds she does while wearing white.

One of the few times when there is neither blue, red, nor white in the frame is during a scene at the airport when Richard has finally decided to leave Ellen.

Also notice that at the very end of the film — when Ellen is dead, Richard has gotten out of jail, and he and Ruth (Jeanne Crain) can finally be together — there is very little color in the frame at all, only shadow and gray. Ellen’s grip on Richard has at last evaporated, but so too has the color and life of the film. It’s a rather bleak visual for what is supposed to be a happy ending.

There is no doubt that Tierney’s performance is enhanced thanks to the use of color. But I don’t want to leave the impression that it’s only her lipstick doing all the acting. Tierney’s performance is subtle and understated, but I think some critics and audiences wrongly interpret that as a “non performance.” It’s not that Tierney is not acting, only that her acting style in the film is minimalist. In fact, because of the understated, subtle nature of her performance, she must convey more through less.

If she had acted in a more exaggerated, obvious manner, the film would have collapsed into camp – a combination of exaggerated color cinematography with exaggerated, melodramatic acting would have been too much for the film to handle. Stahl is wise to have his actors underplay their scenes, and Tierney’s performance as Ellen walks the difficult tightrope of acting without seeming to act. This is key to making Ellen a sympathetic, though ultimately “evil” character. She acts in monstrous ways without becoming some caricatured monster herself. Even speaking her last chilling line – “I’ll never let you go. Never. Never.” – there’s both terror and sadness in her character. She’s positively psychotic and yet there’s a kind of tragedy to her madness.

I’m always struck by the way Tierney’s eyes convey her thoughts with only the slightest flicker and movement of muscles. Her facial expressions change in only the slightest ways and yet we see the emotion and confusion underneath. She gives us a sense of Ellen’s contradictory thoughts without actually telegraphing exactly what Ellen is thinking and feeling. Fear, shock, hate, love, madness – all of these swell beneath the surface and yet we can never be sure when Ellen is acting a part or being sincere. In fact, Ellen herself might not even know.

This is the power of Tierney’s performance. And it’s worth obsessing over.

Posted on August 29th, 2010 at 10:40am.