The best film noir is probably not the movie you were expecting

Leave her in heaven The smartest chess move proves that the misanthropic core of film noir comes from atmosphere, mood, and intent. Like a slow thriller, the film seduces the viewer as much as its main character seduces her husband, and thus creates one of the most frightening femme fatales ever to grace the silver screen. Gene TierneyEllen Berent is not an overtly sexual minx who tempts the morally gray protagonist to evil. She is a devil in a carefully constructed human disguise, a boiling cauldron, always on the verge of boiling. However, Ellen’s characterization also destroys the basic idea of ​​the femme fatale archetype: in her opinion, everything she does is connected with the pursuit of love. And no action is prohibited.

“Leave Her in Heaven” Begins as a Seductive Riddle

Leave her in heaven unfolds like a real mystery: Richard Harlan (Cornel Wild) has just returned home after several years of imprisonment. Grim tension overshadows his reunion with friends. Someone mentions an unnamed “she”, but the meaning of this looming figure in Richard’s life is not explained. Recall the flashback (such a proper noir move!) years earlier when Richard meets the glowing Ellen Berent on a train ride. Richard is publishing and Ellen is reading one of his books. The couple’s eyes meet, and Ellen stares shamelessly at Richard, without blinking or breathing. Her face is as dangerous as broken stained glass, her fixed gaze is nothing but calculated admiration. Ellen then apologizes, explaining that Richard bears “a striking resemblance” to her recently deceased father; they were close. Richard, flattered and intrigued, flits about with Ellen’s reciprocity. They begin an impulsive romance that quickly leads to a wedding. Between their sultry chemistry and jaw-dropping New Mexico desert scenes backed by rising orchestral music, everything points to nothing but period-appropriate romance here.

Besides, with regard to Ellen’s extraordinary assertiveness. The screen adores Tierney, who has portrayed complex women throughout her career but went against type for Leave her in heaven to an impressive effect. The revelation that Ellen is the mastermind behind the manipulation unfolds as slowly as a poker game. Her single-minded goal is to isolate Richard and completely possess him. To this end, Tierney at first plays Ellen as calmly as a calm river. She is outgoing without being aggressive, and is enticingly hypnotic without resorting to overt seduction. Any hints of her venomous nature are a little splashy and demand the audience’s attention: she recounts minute details of Richard’s life from its author’s dust jacket; she hunts turkeys; her obsession with her father reads like an Electra complex. Her cousin RuthJeanne Crane) and her mother (Mary Philips) talk about Ellen with an awkward slip of the tongue bordering on contempt. Instead of relying on a brilliant and troubled detective and a twisted murder case, this mystery is born in the mind and suspense with the same disciplined edginess as Alfred Hitchcock later work. The bomb is about to explode, but when and who hit the fragments remains unknown.

At the same time, Tierney makes Ellen too disarming and radiant to doubt her as anything more than a unique woman. In the same way that traditional film noirs confront character pathologies through cynical monologues about a hopeless world, Heaven uses Richard and Ellen’s seemingly innocent conversations as ominous warnings.

Ellen is actually a monster in disguise

The truth about Ellen’s character begins to seep through her façade when her fiancé Russell Quinton (young Vincent Price, of all people) confronts Ellen over their broken engagement. Russell looks at her with anguished anguish; Ellen looks back with the determination of Antarctic ice. Her possessive declarations of love for Richard come across as ominous when her eyes are as blank as a black hole and her lipstick is as red as war paint. Despite the significant difference in height, Ellen metaphorically looked at the defeated Russell, like a triumphant, twisted goddess. This is Price and Tierney’s third film romance, and unlike Laura And dragonwyck, The fiend Tierney destroys his lover piece by piece.

Richard and his new fiancée move into a cozy Maine country house (breaking the unspoken rule that film noir requires a bleak urban setting). Everything seems like a blissful honeymoon period, and then everything goes to hell in a hand basket when Richard’s little brother DannyDarryl Hickman) moves in with the newlyweds. Ellen wants Richard to be hers alone, and nothing less will satisfy her. Danny violates their privacy, and Ellen’s inner disgust for his intrusion hums like a living thing. When the boy rejects Ellen’s offers to move elsewhere, she lets him drown in the lake.

Here it is: the most decisive and only moment of the film. The bomb goes off and it’s a shocking scene riddled with moral depravity and noir menace. As soon as Danny disappears underwater, Ellen puts on her sunglasses and sits as still as a rock, listening to his cries for help without flinching. Now we know the secret that Ellen has been hiding. Her mother claims that “she loves too much, she can’t help it” and also claims that Ellen’s so-called love destroyed everyone she knew. Danny’s presence threatens her world enough to commit a senseless murder, but problems keep piling up: she’s jealous of the time Richard spends writing books, jealous of his association with Ruth. This is not a traditionally “crazy” woman, but someone so devoid of love that her actions seem sociopathic. But she is still a spider who has caught her man in her web and wants to eat him alive.

Ellen played by Gene Tierney is a real femme fatale

Film noir is littered with phenomenal actresses as iconic femme fatales. — Barbara Stanwyck pass double refundJane Greer in From past, And Joan Bennett V Scarlet street. But during this scene by the lake, they have nothing on Tierney. The woman is terrible, and hiding her infamous emotionless eyes behind black sunglasses is a visual allegory almost too good to handle. Ellen’s ferocious cruelty, the malevolent satisfaction she derives from it, and her growing desperation to keep her claws on Richard takes the film into contemporary gothic horror territory. And that horror comes from the supposed housewife, not from some all-powerful mob boss. Film noir always focuses on characters of questionable morality, and questionable morality is the definition of a femme fatale. However, these women never become the wives of the protagonist. Heaven includes images of femme fatales with frighteningly brutal efficiency in a much more realistic setting. Accordingly, Tierney received her only Oscar nomination for her performance.

But Ellen is not entirely without sympathy. Her pregnancy makes her feel trapped and weakened, which is a drastic expression of how difficult pregnancy can be for some people, even if it comes from the mouth of the corrupt woman in the movie. Ellen knows that she is losing Richard’s love, but she cannot bear the child inside her, and that his birth will usurp her and Richard’s loneliness. The roles of housewife and mother are suffocating, and her silent rage drives her to terminate the pregnancy by throwing herself down the stairs of the house. Changing into a glamorous blue nightgown with matching heels and reapplying lipstick is reminiscent of a warrior preparing for battle. It is noteworthy that Heaven this moment passed the censors of the Hays Code.

‘Leave Her to Heaven’ changes style but retains substance

Speaking of the Hays Code: An immoral woman must always be punished, so when Ellen confesses her crimes in a failed attempt to get Richard to understand her motives, she poisons herself with arsenic and blames Ruth for her death. Richard doesn’t have that; as he says in the courtroom, Ellen is “now pulling out of her grave to destroy [Ruth]. Yes, she was such a monster.” Unlike some femme fatales who crave redemption, there are no extenuating circumstances to forgive Ellen’s transgressions. And yet, there is a twitch of empathy left for how trapped Ellen felt and how useless (vindictive) her search for love was. Leave her in heaven is one of the most stunning achievements of film noir because it transcends the genre’s stylistic expectations and exposes its main themes, only to place them in a calm, vibrant color palette. Its classic fatalistic mentality stems from the shameless inhumanity of our femme fatale rather than desperation for the world at large, resulting in a memorably dark masterpiece.