Leave Her To Heaven (1945)

I guess you will like When Tomorrow Comes and of course his Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession. I love his Imitation...

Leave Her To Heaven was delicious. And quite perverse. I don't know how the deliberate miscarriage scene made it past The Production Code.

I owe my mother for exposing me to all of these great melodrama movies from when she was a young wife ..... when we got our first VCR in the mid 80s, she made sure we rented all of these .........or I'd buy them for her on VHS for her birthday or holidays.

I still have most of them now that Mom is gone.

that is nice but a little bit sad. can't you get new restored dvds - rentals? netflick? public library?

LOVE that movie!

I like to compare it to "Vertigo". Both are glossy, colorful, romantic-looking films from the era of maximal studio prissiness, and are about sick, twisted, perverse relationships. One wonders how they got made, considering.

[quote]Leave Her To Heaven was delicious. And quite perverse. I don't know how the deliberate miscarriage scene made it past The Production Code.

Agree, not to mention killing a disabled kid! Her character is one of the most evil female characters I've seen in film and Gene Tierney is fantastic.

The beginning scene where Cornel Wilde and Gene Tierney size each other up on the train is very sexy.

My favorite thing about Leave Her to Heaven is that you just can't help identifying with her in the beginning that she can;t have Cornel Wilde to herself for even a minute. It really is deeply annoying Wilde's handicapped brother and his friend can't even leave her and Wilde alone on their fucking [italic]honeymoon,[/italic] but have to come uninvited. And the brother insists on sharing the bedroom right next door to the newlyweds so they can't even have sex!

My favorite thing about "Leave Her to Heaven" is the Oscar winning décor, especially the place in New Mexico, Interiors and exteriors.

20th Century Fox had a long run of buying and adapting sensational and scandalous best sellers and plays.

"Leave Her to Heaven"

"Forever Amber"

"The Moon is Blue."

"Peyton Place"

"The Best of Everything"

...and the zenith (or nadir) depending on your standards

"Valley of the Dolls"

If I ran a revival cinema, I'd have a festival of these.

I used to have discussions with some of my co-workers at a former job about such weighty topics as which of our favorite movie villainesses would win in a showdown. Our contenders were Rhoda Penmark, Veda Pierce and Ellen from this movie. We unanimously declared Ellen the most likely winner as she was absolutely the most calculating and would go to lengths that Rhoda or Veda would never even dream of.

By the way, these co-workers were STRAIGHT males!

Back of the Moon.

Gene Tierney was sooooo evil and twisted in this. It's not like any other movie from that time period. She was also incredibly beautiful in it as well.

R10 Agree with you and your co-workers. One of the lines from the movie, "Ellen always wins." Also when Ellen beat the child swimming, she even declared herself, "The winner!"

I'm part of a film buff Facebook group that is going through the history of film, handing out our own awards; we just finished 1945, and Leave Her to Heaven won Best Cinematography and Best Scene/Moment (Ellen calmly watches her brother-in-law drown); it was nominated for Best Picture (lost to Brief Encounter), Best Actress (Tierney lost to Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter), Best Costume Design (lost to Children of Paradise), and Best Original Score (lost to Children of Paradise).

Tell us about some of your group's other awards, R13. sounds like fun!

[quote]By the way, these co-workers were STRAIGHT males!

Not in a million years do I believe that.

R14, here are our previous awards.

[quote]I guess you will like When Tomorrow Comes and of course his Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession. I love his Imitation...

Thanks for the recommendations. I saw When Tomorrow Comes and Magnificent Obsession today. Both amazing. I absolutely love the Sirk remake of the latter and wasn't expecting to like the original so much, but I thought it was wonderful. I find Robert Taylor much more believable as a spoiled jerk than Rock Hudson. Imitation of Life next (again, I love the Sirk film, but have never seen the original)...

I get all hot and bothered down there in that scene where Gene is tickling Cornel Wilde and won't stop.

Interesting, R2. Why "perverse"?

I think this film is excellent. I also feel for Gene's character from the beginning. I just don't think Wilde is worthy of killing so many. By the way watching someone drown, and not helping them, is not illegal.

The scene where Gene is riding on the horse spreading the ashes as her big breasts swing back and forth is to die for.

Swim, Danny!

"Her character is one of the most evil female characters I've seen in film and Gene Tierney is fantastic."

The thing is, she is both evil, and not evil. She's incredibly destructive, she causes deaths and ruins lives and does her damndest to ruin more... yet she doing it for reasons that are out of her control. She's not working some sort of horrible larger agenda, she's not destroying people because she's cruel or likes watching people suffer, she's in the grip of overwhelming emotions, her feelings are so intense and destructive that they destroy her along with her victims.

Which makes her both a monster who will be a danger to others as long as she lives, and oddly sympathetic in a way. We aren't watching a calculating bitch do whatever she needs to do to conquer the world or get a Dalmatian fur coat by any means necessary, she's being torn apart by her inner turmoil as she tears others apart. She's very complex and fascinating, full of horror and contradictions. It really is too bad the film kept going after her exit!

She'd be doing the Lord's work if she could take out Madison Cawthorn in similar fashion.

R24 Don’t you ever get bored of politics?

Gene absolutely ROCKS those sunglasses.

Best sunglasses in the history of film!

That scene was so beautifully shot, the lovely natural setting, the brilliant sunlight sparkling on the lake, her vivid technicolor-red lips, the monstrous event taking place amidst all this beauty and bright light... that's what top filmmaking is all about!

Did she get Oscar-nominated for that film? She should have.

Was that Dobie Gillis going for The Last Swim?

Dobie’s brother.

Leave Her to Heaven is a great film. Beautifully shot and Tierney is fantastic in it.

It's pretty bold for a film from 1945, which is why it holds up.

There have been so many obsessive lover/partner films in the aftermath of Fatal Attraction but there are no nuances or layers to the characters.

I remember I didn’t understand the trial at the end (saw it long ago). Vincent Price was the prosecutor but he was a lawyer in Boston and the trial took place in Maine?

Newman’s music score was finally released on CD, but may be out of print now. Check Amazon and Ebay.

Curiously, I’ve always thought those first insistent four notes sound exactly like the very end of Kurt Weil’s “Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny.”