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Sunday, Apr 27, 2008
6:00 pm
Leave Her to Heaven
Nothing I've seen in a cinema is more beautiful, more depthless, yet more impenetrable than the emerald eyes of Ellen Berent in Leave Her to Heaven. This damaged and dangerous woman is one of the most compelling characters of Hollywood's Golden Age. In an Oscar-nominated performance, gorgeous Gene Tierney, fresh from her captivating portrayal of the title character in Laura, embodies a femme fatale far more magnificent and malignant than film noir's garden variety. She is the personification of a distinctly feminine psychopathology. Successful novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde), a straight arrow about to be irreparably bent, meets Ellen on a train. She takes him home to the folks. They marry, despite hints that something isn't right with Ellen. “She loves too much,” her mother cryptically explains. In wedlock, Richard bridles under Ellen's smothering devotion. When his attention strays to his younger brother Danny (Darryl Hickman), or Ellen's sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain), there is, quite simply, hell to pay. Glossy and melodramatic on its soap-opera surface, this black-hearted film contains two of the most disturbing scenes of aberrant psychology ever displayed in a Hollywood film. And what a display! This extraordinary 35mm print, restored by the Academy Film Archive in cooperation with 20th Century Fox, with funding provided by the Film Foundation, features some of the most astounding Technicolor imagery you will ever see. Director of photography Leon Shamroy won a well-deserved Oscar for his work, which has an almost hallucinatory quality. Sauntering in her Cassini wardrobe through the grandeur of the New Mexico and Maine locations, Gene Tierney proves an equally spectacular, and doubly treacherous, force of nature.
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