LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN at Film Forum
Leave Her to Heaven (1945) — one of the best (and brightest) of all film noirs — will be screened at New York City’s Film Forum from March 6-12.
I’ve already written about Leave Her to Heaven when it was screened in Los Angeles a couple of years ago, so I’ll just add here that this psychological thriller-melodrama should be watched on the big screen and that the stunningly beautiful Gene Tierney — as a woman who loved too (pathologically) much — was a much better actress than people give her credit for.
Call it a "woman’s film" if you wish, but in its own trash-novel style Leave Her to Heaven is cooler, tougher, and more disturbing than The Maltese Falcon, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, or any other tough-guy Humphrey Bogart movie I’ve seen.
Directed by John M. Stahl, who’d been around since the mid-1910s and who was better known as a director of weepies (Back Street, Only Yesterday, Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession), Leave Her to Heaven also features Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price, Ray Collins, and Darryl Hickman. Screenplay by Jo Swerling from Ben Ames Williams‘ novel. Superb Technicolor cinematography by Leon Shamroy. Music by Alfred Newman.
Restored by the Academy Film Archive in cooperation with Twentieth Century Fox, with funding provided by The Film Foundation. Approx. 110 min.
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Thank you for posting this.
Gene Tierney was an excellent actress. She should have been nominated for LAURA in 1944 and she should have won for THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR in 1947. She was certainly better than Loretta Young in THE FARMER’S DAUGHTER.
I love that moment on the staircase.
Jeanne Crain is also very good in this movie. Not a showy role, but she’s good.