Leave Her to Heaven: A possessive love affair that creates a storm

Everyone wants to feel loved and appreciated at some point or the other in their life. Being loved is one of the needs of being human and in a sense it completes us and becomes our crowning glory. But when that love becomes obsessive and stifles everything we do it becomes a problem. A possessive love can cause suffocation in a relationship and lead to problems such as the ones presented in the 1945 film Leave Her to Heaven which was directed by John Stahl.

Richard Harland is an accomplished novelist taking a train journey to New Mexico for a vacation at a lodge. On the train, he meets a socialite by the name of Ellen Berent who is also to stay at the same lodge along with her mother and sister. The Berent’s used to visit the lodge frequently and have returned to scatter the ashes of their recently deceased patriarch, a job which Ellen takes up as her own because of her extreme attachment to him. Ellen soon realises that Richard has many resemblances of her deceased father and is immediately infatuated with him. Richard and Ellen fall in love gradually and she abruptly calls an end to her engagement with politician Russell Quinton while immediately announcing her engagement to Richard. They are soon married but not to live happily ever after as Ellen’s increasingly possessive love for Richard wrecks their married life and causes problems for them, Richard’s brother Danny, Ellen’s sister Ruth and the couples unborn child.

Leave Her to Heaven tells the story of a woman who is entirely obsessed with her father to the point of his death. After he passes, she imposes the same love on a man who resembles him in image and likeness to the point where she stifles his freedom by trying to keep him all to herself. It is hailed as a classic which is clear from the use of colour in an early period of film, scenic locations which play an important part of the plot and the course of the plot which lead to the gradual unnerving of a particular character which in turn leads to never before seen circumstances. It also creates a clear distinction of class and then breaks it down which it manages by creating a setting of high society families and eventually leads to their destruction down to a common point of criminal law.

The use of colour and long shots of scenic locations lend to the appeal of the film. While it begins seemingly as a romance, it eventually ends up being much more as it drifts into the throngs of drama-slash-thriller and has often been claimed to be film noir. Gene Tierney plays the role of the deranged Ellen Berent quite crisply as she leads the audience into her charms before unleashing a string of horrors upon the characters in the plot.

A rare to see colour classic in film noir, Leave Her to Heaven peaks as its characters fall deeper into their miseries. It has a charm which leads its audience in before gently shocking them, just as Ellen Berent does to her family and friends.