What did you watch? The 1945 psychological drama Leave Her To Heaven

What was the diagnosis? More therapy for everyone involved.

I was skimming through some Criterion channel related videos and saw “Vincent Price” and “Crime” and was fortunate therefore to find Leave Her To Heaven available to watch as a result. Vincent Price in horror? Almost standard. Vincent Price in a crime or noir film? Hell yeah. He’s more than a well spoken sinister presence in his later DECADES of film. In his earlier years, he appeared as a opportunistic grifter in Laura and a scheming psychiatrist in Shock. This movie was sandwiched in-between.

It’s an adaptation of a novel by the same name. And, like a lot of movie adaptations of salacious novels of this era, it’s likely very watered down. (I’ve not read the book, sorry.) It’s also of its time and it could be a prescient commentary on stereotypical gender roles in America. Or, hear me out, it’s a melodrama set against some incredibly unique American geographical backgrounds (in color! …technicolor.) with an unsympathetic lead that could have gone in several more interesting directions.

Writer Richard has a meetcute on a train with Ellen, and they just happen to be going to the same place in middle of nowhere Nevada. It looks more like Utah but whatever. Anyway, Ellen is there with her immediate family (her mother and adopted sister) to spread her father’s ashes. Richard and Ellen fall for each other. Ellen is engaged, but basically shrugs it off, just in time to commit to Richard and just in time for her boyfriend Russell to walk in to find out he should have taken a train to Dumpsville instead. (Population: him.) Russell has some warnings for her. Like, he is running for office and is going to make himself into a bigwig prosecutor some day, so she’ll regret this.

Well, Richard and Ellen get married the next day, as it happens back then, and they travel to his equally picturesque cabin in the northeast to reunite with his bedridden brother Danny. Danny struggles but has a can do attitude to walk with crutches, and even swim. He spends a lot of time with Ellen working on these things. The camaraderie between the menfolk in this area never seems to wear down for Richard, but it does for Ellen, who would like to spend more time with him wink wink, so Richard does what he thinks is best to balance this experience out for her: he sends for Ellen’s mother & sister to round out the group for a big merry extended family vacation.

Ellen has nothing but pent up rage, and lashes out in aggressively passive aggressive ways. She REALLY just wants to spend more time alone with Richard WINK WINK, and NO ONE seems to get this, especially Danny. She and Danny are on a boat and Danny wants to show off that he can make it from the middle of the lake to land, but before this, Ellen is like ‘Richard and I are going to have some alone time, you can hang with my family’ and Danny is like not getting it, ‘no that’s okay, I’ll spend more time with you and Richard.’ So, Danny gets in the water and gets really tired and starts going under, and Ellen watches him drown.

This is where the movie could take some drastically different directions in tone. We now have a sinister murderess. Did I mention I became aware of this movie with a clip of Vincent Price angrily accusing someone of murder? Like we now have a complicated procedural that develops? Or a dark comedy where Ellen starts killing off family & friends who get in her way to be with Richard, who is none the wiser? Or a film noir plot?

None of this happens. Instead, the grieving extended family buy whatever story Ellen tells them. This includes Richard. But hey, what can fill in the painful gap in their lives by replacing Danny with a baby? Ellen takes this direct suggestion and gets pregnant but quickly hates the idea of that as well, for several reasons, mostly because preparing for the baby means altering her father’s home including a LAB (Chekhov’s lab) and that she is less mobile since she’s pregnant, and thus watches from afar as her sister gets chummier with Richard as they run errands to help Ellen.

Guess where this goes? Ellen takes a fall to induce a miscarriage. This was a heavy plot point in 1945 and censors required better reasoning for such a drastic action before they could start filming (according to wikipedia). Well, as much as everyone wants to support Ellen, hooboy are they all suspicious. And she quickly lets everyone know that yeah, so what. They can’t prove any of it. Richard has enough of his heart breaking on account of one woman wrecking his life just because she’s paranoid about their relationship, so he says he’s going to leave her.

Ellen’s next step is pretty drastic. Her ex, Russell, has advanced to a powerful prosecutor position, so she sends him a letter that she thinks she’s been poisoned by her sister. Then, she goes to her father’s lab, and prepares some arsenic to put into her food and drink. Well, she gets sick, and she dies. And Russell charges her sister with MURDER. 

Wow! The drama doesn’t end! Is it NOIR? It’s something. Honestly, there’s a happy ending, but not without someone going to jail for a couple years for withholding that Ellen had killed Danny before anyone could pick up the pieces and move on for some kind of happiness.

Like, the movie might be of its time, and there might be a couple decades of repressed housewives who are like “Hell yeah, you go girl!” but the dramatic tone never matches this. Ellen does these things out of desperation but it’s cruel. The “I’ll show YOU, from the GRAVE!” plot frankly wouldn’t even get to that point, I think. It’s dramatic for Russell to bring charges and sternly accuse her sister and Richard for plotting to run off together after killing HIS (Russell’s) true love! But, uh, conflict of interest much? And, did they postmark mail back then? (a search says yes.) That could have been the story beat to save her sister. And that’s with the story going in this melodramatic direction, where Ellen is a killer throwing accusations at everyone whose crimes were just being oblivious to her needs that probably could have been resolved with talking it out. (take the hint, Danny and Richard. Jeez.)

There’s a couple movies we’ve covered, like Cause for Alarm and Secret Beyond The Door, where our hero is driven mad by their captor husband, or like The Strange Woman where the protagonist plots and goes through men who can’t feed her hunger for a better lifestyle before falling for someone who gets clued in before it’s too late. Here, Ellen resorts to cruelty, from taking an opportunity in the moment to let Danny drown, to a quick plan to throw herself down the stairs, to a complicated plan to blame her sister for Ellen’s suicide. (Did Ellen think that she’d maybe recover from her self-poisoning by the time the letter reached Russell?) This movie, at under 2 hours, lost me when she threw herself down the stairs, and felt like a waste of character from Vincent Price’s Russell. Any of these actions that involved him could have resulted in a plot point where Russell gets involved and ready to bring down the personalized hammer of justice only for Ellen to find out at the last minute that this plan backfires and she experiences some sort of comeuppance, but instead the movie is just about people’s lives ruined by Ellen before they get to kinda move on.

Was it good? I didn’t like it. There’s plenty to look at, there’s plenty to think about as far as allegories and its repression, but what’s the win here for Ellen? She still thinks she gets away with it. The denouement limps to Richard and her sister feeling like “well, she did a number on us, but we weathered through it.” 

The movie has some champions (it’s got a Criterion release, after all) and does have some great scenery. (It won an Academy Award for cinematography!) I was with it through Danny’s death but the painful events for these characters just are rushed through to its weak ending.

Ellen is played by Gene Tierney, the title character in the wonderful Laura (1944) and by the by, she is gorgeous in this film. I mentioned Vincent Price as the hard sell for my viewing (also in Laura!). Their costars, Cornel Wilde and Jeanne Crain, had long careers in film & television. Ray Collins plays Richard’s legal counsel, we’ve seen him before but we all know him from Perry Mason. Danny is played by Darryl Hickman, who also had a long career, including a role in the campy William Castle shlock The Tingler, which co-starred Vincent Price.