Leave Her to Heaven

Ellen is watching Danny drown and she turns to see Richard coming toward the lake house, which is some distance away.

However, when Richard jumps into the lake and begins swimming, Ellen and the boat are very nearby.

During Ruth's testimony at the trial, she changes how she holds Richard's book as the camera angle changes.

When Ellen and Richard are arguing in the bedroom shortly after Ellen's family has arrived for their surprise visit, a crew member's shadow moves over the pair on the bottom half of the screen.

The car that picks up Harland, the Berents, and Glen Robie at the railroad station in New Mexico also appears in the driveway at the hospital at Warm Springs parked right in front of Harland and Ellen.

Ellen's method of scattering her father's ashes (flinging the urn from side to side during a horseback ride through the desert) would leave both her and the horse covered in her father's remains.

Melodrama often gets a bad rap these days, but I would not trade the great Hollywood melodramas of the 30s, 40s, and 50s for anything, especially since the genre could contain stunning characterizations. Case in point, Gene Tierney's Ellen Berent.

It would be impossible to watch "Leave Her To Heaven" without being struck by some of the stark contrasts which it contains. Its very dark story is depicted in glorious Technicolor, its main character appears to be beautiful and sophisticated but is actually evil hearted and capable of great cruelty.

I have always enjoyed this movie. The technical and production values are very good.

She's wonderfully scary in this role, which I view as a sort of precursor to other "crazy chick" flicks like Play Misty for Me and Fatal Attraction. The primary difference is the crazy woman marries the man she's obsessed with--some could argue for no good reason, as Richard is a rather boring chap who happens to remind Ellen of her father.

The obsessively possessive psycho-woman leads the chosen man into marriage after only a few days of knowing, and then does her best to have him all to herself. She wants his attention twenty-four hours a day and, in order to separate him from all other people, she is ready and capable of anything, even the unthinkable.

John M. Stahl was a renowned Film Director of female centric pictures like Imitation of Life (1934), and Magnificent Obsession (1935).

"Leave Her To Heaven", viewed at the Seattle Film Noir festival, 2010, was a lavish 1946 Twentieth Century Fox Technicolor production starring the ethereally gaspingly beautiful Gene Tierney as the over-possessive wife of a wimpishly long-suffering Cornell Wilde, in which she adroitly murders his brother letting him drown while she looks the other way (shades of "A Place in the Sun"), "pre-murders" his un-born son in her belly by letting herself "trip" at the top of the stairs (in a marvelously acted and directed breath-taker of a scene), then finally "murders herself" with poison to get even with her beautiful sister (Jeanne Craine) by making it look like Jeanne, who has had dove eyes for Cornell all along, look like the culprit, thereby hoping to commit still another murder from beyond the Crypt! Never before in all of film history has one insanely murderous been so breathtakingly beautiful.

Gene Tierney stars here as a young east coast socialite who meets a writer by chance on a train ride through New Mexico. The two soon form a relationship, and quickly, a marriage--but her obsessive devotion to their love soon proves disastrous--and lethal--for those around them.

The title of this movie--LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN--is somewhat perplexing. It is not readily apparent to whom the "her" refers.