Intoxicating Gene Tierney (Laura) is the femme fatale par excellence in this astounding Technicolor noir classic, now beautifully restored, about a young novelist (Cornel Wilde) whose new bride’s extreme jealousy plunges their nuptial heaven into hellish depths of psychic disorder.“Movies like Stahl’s were not made for TV. Their purpose unfolds only on the big screen, where the blue-velvet skies and the lethally smooth waters of Leave Her to Heaven acquire the unquestioned clarity of a fever dream.”—Anthony Lane, New Yorker

Leave Her to Heaven refashions the melodrama for the noir-stained 1940s: it reveals the devoted wife and the femme fatale as two sides of the same character, the romantic dream as nightmare. Gene Tierney stars as Ellen, a woman who, in her mother’s words, “loves too much.” When Ellen tells her new husband (Cornel Wilde) “I’ll never let you go,” it’s both a promise and a threat. Leave Her to Heaven is a departure from the relatively plain visual style of Stahl’s 1930s melodramas, luxuriating in desert and lakeside settings where even the sky seems designed to match Tierney’s eyes. (Leon Shamroy won an Oscar for the Technicolor cinematography.) But the film’s lavish looks and hysterical plot are tempered by its curiously quiet pacing and Stahl’s fundamental reticence. As the camera observes Tierney gliding sharklike in a pool or floating impassively on a glassy lake, the real turbulence stays just below the surface.

—Juliet Clark