Vivid color and a sunny country setting serve as an effective foil in Leave Her to Heaven, a film noir about deceptive exteriors. Gene Tierney plays the enigmatic central figure whose statuesque tranquility is an artful cover for a pathological desire to possess her husband (Cornel Wilde) and extinguish the presence of other people in his life. As the film develops, the opposition between her outward stability and inner disturbance is like day and night. An entry in Film Noir: An Encyclopedia of American Style notes, “Contemporary audiences found it necessary to condemn (the Tierney character) as an evil person and ignore the admonition of the title.... In fact, mental illness was first referred to as alienism, and psychologists as alienists. This corresponds to director John Stahl's unusual conception of his heroines as super-real, emotionally alive individuals frustrated by their dull surroundings and unimaginative men.... When one of them happens to be a murderess, he is completely unrestrained and makes the extreme contrast between her and her surroundings even more wild, hinting at inner tension and complexity that the other characters in the film could never suspect.”