John M. Stahl
Leave Her to Heaven

Two strangers meet while traveling by train. An immediate attraction sparks, but also a dark scheme that the more disturbed of the two is determined to carry out at any cost.

It might seem like the synopsis of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, but it's also the beginning of Leave Her to Heaven—a cultured title inspired by Hamlet, and duly mangled by the Italian distribution, which transformed it into the atrocious Femmina folle.

The 1945 film belongs entirely to Gene Tierney, perhaps the most beautiful and underrated Hollywood actress of her generation. Here she is Ellen Berent, a young and extremely wealthy heiress with severe personality disorders. During a train journey to New Mexico, where she plans to scatter her beloved father's ashes at his favorite estate, she meets writer Richard Harland and is immediately captivated by him. Their relationship develops in a disturbing manner: Ellen's attraction is morbid from the start, but one must read between the lines to grasp, behind her statuesque beauty, an unsettling obsessive distortion.

Ellen has a cold relationship with her mother and cousin Ruth, who consider her strange, unpredictable, excessive. Despite some warning signs, Richard ends up marrying her after a very brief acquaintance. But the honeymoon is short-lived before Ellen reveals her pathological jealousy towards anyone who comes between her and her husband, including Danny, Richard's disabled brother.

The scene where Ellen takes Danny swimming in the lake remains one of the most chilling in cinema history for Ellen's impassive attitude as she watches the boy struggle and drown. Richard, devastated by his brother's death, does not yet suspect the nature of his wife. But the worst is yet to come.

The second part of the film takes on the contours of a pre-Gone Girl, but even more ruthless: Ellen, in a gesture that could horrify a society obsessed with the cult of motherhood, induces an abortion to eliminate a potential rival for Richard's affection. Then, when she senses her husband is getting too close to the reassuring Ruth, she even orchestrates her own death to frame him for murder.

Famous for being a color noir, Leave Her to Heaven is actually something more than a simple noir. The film overturns the classic dynamic between dark lady and male protagonist: Cornel Wilde, in the role of Richard, is almost colorless next to the stage power of Tierney, because Ellen is not simply a femme fatale, but a psychopathic predator.

To describe Ellen, even Greek tragedy has been invoked, both with the Electra complex—which would explain her unhealthy obsession with her father—and with the figure of the siren, whose enchanting song lures men to their doom. A particularly fitting interpretation, given Danny's fate.

The direction by John M. Stahl is elegant and glacial, for a film where beauty is deceptive and tragedy is around the corner. Stahl was one of the founders of the Academy, once a prestigious institution, which today seems to distribute Oscars at random.