'LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN'.....OUR SUNNY, FUNNY VALENTINE.....FROM HELL.

Leave Her To Heaven (1945) we would best describe as the "Fatal Attraction", "Basic Instinct" and "Gone Girl" of its day.  Based on a bestseller by Ben Ames Williams, a popular and prolific novelist of the period, the movie made its mark with its unique contradiction of warring styles......a dark, twisted noir-ish tale like this would normally beg for black-and-white.....instead, it was photographed by master cameraman Leon Shamroy in glorious, gift-shop postcard Technicolor.  Even though drenched in Shamroy's Oscar-winning hues, the movie still earned its well-deserved place in Film Noir reference books. In fact, the overripe Technicolor helped to put an extra lurid melodramatic sheen on a film that only employed functional actors giving ordinary performances. (With one exception, which we'll get to later....)

              The primal plot (still in use decades later) has an amiable novelist (Cornel Wilde) besotted by an upperclass stunner. (Gene Tierney, whose immobile, geometrically perfect beauty made her look like a full size live-action porcelain doll.) Tierney's only momentarily engaged to a humorless lawyer running for District Attorny (a young, toweringly tall Vincent Price)......she quickly dumps Price and homes in on Wilde like a heat-seeking missile. Once married, the audience clearly gets the hint that Tierney's an obsessive sociopath and woe to any poor sucker who thwarts her quality time with Wilde.

             (You might want to skip the next few paragraphs if you haven't seen the movie yet.....)

              And the first poor sucker in her sights......Wilde's gentle-hearted, polio-stricken teenage brother (Darryl Hickman, so sweet and huggable, the only thing missing on him is a huge "I'm Gonna Die Horribly Real Soon" sign hanging around his neck.) Which brings us to the movie's signature sequence, the one it's most remembered for.   At Wilde's sumptuous lakeside Maine cabin (lushly photographed by Shamroy), Tierney sits in a rowboat, supervising Hickman's swimming, waiting for the lovable little fellow to develop a cramp.  She coolly stares at the kid, as he sinks to the bottom faster than Donald Trump's poll numbers,  watching her victim through sunglasses as impenetrable as her heart.

             Tierney's merely warming up in her campaign to totally possess Wilde, now emotionally crushed by the 'accidental'  death of his brother.  She gets pregnant for no other reason than to cheer him up, but then realizes a baby would just be another pesky rival for his attention.  A quick thinker, Tierney opts for a  pre-Roe Vs. Wade abortion by hurling herself down the stairs.  Whoopsie.  All this melodrama drives Wilde into the loving arms of Tierney's girl-next-door cousin (Jeanne Crain)....but Tierney's not puttin' up with any of that. In her Grand Finale looniest move, Tierney poisons herself with arsenic and leaves enough evidence around to frame Crain for murder.

             Now we come to the film's monumentally daft Act III with Crain's murder trial.....under judicial rules from another planet altogether. The prosecutor?  Who else but newly elected DA Vincent Price, all charged up to hysterically badger witnesses until he avenges his murdered ex-fiance. The judge here turns a blind eye to Price's participation in this trial as well as Price's hectoring, howling cross-examinations of Crain and Wilde. (To be fair and honest, we admit it's the most fun part of the movie.....Wilde, Tierney and Crain do nothing above moderate acting, while Price works himself into a frenzy like Torquemada chairing the Inquisition.)

            We'll only say that the suitably outlandish conclusion to both the trial and the movie serves the same function as a huge glob of whipped cream on a Film Noir Sundae....with a cherry on top. And that's why BQ deems "Leave Her To Heaven"  our penultimate Valentine's Day treat.....where you always hurt the one you love....and love never means having to say you're sorry....especially if you've killed a few people.  We give 4 bouquets of stars (****)