David Hast: Scott, have you seen Leave Her to Heaven?
Scott Vander Werf: I just saw Leave Her to Heaven and I really loved it, and I was surprised that I had never heard of this because I enjoy film noir so much and I've seen so many different types of film noir and I had never seen this and given that it's really the first, I'm assuming, color, not just color, but technicolor film noir.
DH: Yes, it is. Yeah, I would say it's the very first film noir that was shot in color. I mean, almost no movies that we call film noir are color. In fact, many people would say that's one of the basic requirements of a film noir, it has to be black and white. What do you think?
SVW: Well, yes, unless, you know, we understand about how the film noir in the classic sense ended in the 50s, in the 1950s,
the modern films that emulate film noir are in color.
DH: Yeah, Chinatown, movies like that, which are clearly film noir in every way except that they're contemporary and they're wider screen and they're color.
SVW: Yeah, so this would be the only film in terms of the historical context of the film noir genre that I've ever seen in color.
DH: I think it's the only one. There might be one or two others I've seen. actually looked this up and there was a list. I found a list ofmovies thatthe person who made the list considered to be classic film noirs of the40s and50s, but were color. There was literally only one other one in the 40s and there were only about 15 or 20 in the entire decade of the 50s. So, 15 or 20 total,I mean, out of hundreds and hundreds of film noirs that were made in those two decades. But this movie is, you know, we're referring to it as a noir because Leave Her to Heaven is a gripping, merciless crime drama like manyof the film noirs and it’s as shocking now as it might have been 80 years ago in some ways. It was also 20th Century Fox's top-grossing movie of the entire decade of the 1940s.
SVW: Oh wow, see now here's another example ofwhy didn't I hear about this film if it was so popular?
DH: Yeah, well it's iconic now but um sowhat it is, Leave Her to Heavenis the story of this young woman named Ellen played by Jean Tierney, who is persuasive, beautiful, and always gets what she wants. One of the characters says “she always wins.”And in the first scene, she meets a writer, Richard, played by Cornell Wilde, and she quickly decides to marry him. It's all her idea from the first kiss to the proposal to the whirlwind marriage like two days later after she kisses him. And he seems just too awed by her andto have much to say about it all. This is a classic noir uh trope, right? The femme fatale, you know, and then the sort of schlump that just goes along. She makes it clear that she expects everything in their lives to be under her control. She doesn't come across as like mean, but it's just she's intensely possessive, jealous. And you can see right from the start, I think you'll agree with me, you can tell something's going to go wrong.
SVW: Well, and I would say, though, from the characterofRichard,it's not apparent, I think, to him immediately. He doesn't seem to realize howcontrolling she is immediately.
DH: He never realizes until things go horribly wrong. But as viewers, you know, we've seen enough of these kind of thrillers uh that. We were like, oh, this is going to go wrong. But the fun end of this is trying to guess what bad things she's going to do next and how she's going to do it.
SVW: The other thing that you haven't mentioned is that she was actually engaged to a lawyer who's played by Vincent Price. She was engaged to get married to him. And she just abruptly decides that she's going to switch and marry this other guy. And, you know, it's like…It's just happened so quickly. It's like, well, this doesn't seem right.
DH: Right, right. She just does what seems like, you know, the thing to do at the time. But really, it is as we've talked about it being in technicolor, it's the look of this movie that in a way is the whole story because this is, it's not just technicolor. It's like eye popping, otherworldly kind of technicolor. Just the whole look of it is just, was…Leon Chamroy was the director of photography, won the Oscar for it.
SVW: And there's great exterior photography too, in terms of you see the out west and you see wonderful landscapes out west and then you see wonderful landscapes in Maine. And then you also see uh the Atlantic ocean front too.
DH: Well, that's the other thing too. I mean, this movie is like, it's like film noir in reverse. I mean, it's like flipped on its head because not only is it in color, but it's set rurally. It's all exteriors, almost all exteriors, brightly lit. There's almost no dark shadowy scenes in this movie, right? So it’s almost like the bright truth of sunlight has the same dark function,you know, that shadows and alleys have in most film noirs in cities. And you're right, it was actually shot, I mean, a lot of it's shot in studios, the interiors, but oh they shot on location in Arizona for the scenes that are supposed to be New Mexico, I think. And then they shot on location in the Sierras for the scenes that are supposed to be Maine, like on a lake in the mountains. But yeah, just the design, the look of it, the production design, the cinematography arejust...they’re what stands out as much as the performances and the story
SVW: The horrible things that are going on in the interior of this one character, the female leadJean Tierney's character has horrible things going on within her and even she recognizes it at different points in the types that she actually speaks it out loud at different point dramatic parts in the movie and realizes that she's not actually a normal person.
DH: No, she's, I mean, she really is mentally ill but she still,it doesn't stop her from doing…lying and doing incredibly terrible things.
SVW: In some ways it's not the same motivation, but it reminded me of the talented Mr. Ripley.
DH: Hmm, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, she's a kind of psychopathic character like the Ripley character. But when we're talking about the beauty of the movie, we have to talk about Gene Tierney. Gene Tierney…Daryl Zanuck, who was the 20th Century Fox producer who produced this movie and who discovered her and she's in several movies. She's in the great film noir Laura justright around the same time also with Vincent Price. It's a black and white film noir, but Jean Tierney…Daryl Zanuck considered her the most beautiful actress of all timeand although this character ranks with the coldest most diabolicalfemme fatales in all of film noir, and therefore in all of movie history, her beautyis almost part of it, right?The way she looks, I saw Martin Scorsese commentary, has that guy done commentary on like every movie in the world?
SVW: Probably.
DH: But he said, this is the quote, her face is a mask of perfect composure. And it's true, she always looks perfectly under control, perfectly glamorous. She shows very little emotion for most of the time. She wears this bright red lipstick. I mean, I rewatched and looked at this. There was only one shot, I think, or one scene in the entire movie where she isn't wearing bright red lipstick. And there's a reason for it there, but even that one, she's still got some lipstick, but it's almost like her face is a character all by itself.
