Leave Her to Heaven

The novelist Richard Harland meets a woman called Ellen on a train. She recognises him from the photograph on his book jacket and decides during that first conversation to leave her fiancé. They marry quickly. Ellen loves her husband, loves him too much: anyone who takes his attention is an obstacle. First his disabled brother, then the child on the way, then her own sister. The film begins as a colour melodrama and slides into noir, inverting the usual shape as it goes: the darkness here is not in night streets but on a sunlit lake, inside bright Technicolor. John M. Stahl directed. Gene Tierney plays Ellen and Cornel Wilde plays Richard, with Jeanne Crain and Vincent Price in support. It was shot in the summer of 1945 in California, Arizona and New Mexico. The drowning on the lake is its most quoted moment, with Tierney centred in frame behind sunglasses, doing nothing but watching. Cinematographer Leon Shamroy won the Academy Award for colour cinematography. The film grossed over eight million dollars and was Twentieth Century-Fox's biggest earner of the decade. Who it is for: anyone who likes classic Hollywood melodrama and films on the edge of noir. Who it is not for: anyone looking for restraint in the playing. The dialogue turns theatrical in places and the courtroom section is the weakest part.