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One of the most intriguing questions regarding Leave Her To Heaven (1945) is why it was Twentieth Century Fox's highest grossing film of the decade.
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This is not a film noir, and yet within it lurks the genes of the style not quite activated, but present as the underscored factual spiritual well from which draws a grabbing interest, between the snogs and high-class encounters. In the 1940s they did not have slacker movies, but they did have loafer movies, and this is one.
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It didn't take long, but shortly after World War 2 ended it became apparent that the liberators of Berlin and the nation which defeated the Nazis in Germany became the main enemy of the United States, and by association here, and everywhere, Canada.
It is in fact by all accounts the first feature film to dramatize and propagandise the new-fangled Cold War of the period, which could really be said to have run from 1947 until 1991, and seen the rise and development of film noir as one of its key cultural expressors.
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Attention spans alerted everyone this slider of a slow noir is another object lesson in the class of colon noirs which feel their way in a cinematic dark so much of the time and are managerially staid with a tragic inability to fill the vacant screen space created by colour-vision and wide screen tech. A double whammy of screen emptiness.
Come diving headlong into the murky waters of a slow burn noir flick that's as sluggish as a slug on a warm sidewalk. This one's a textbook case of those colour noirs that stumble in the shadows, groping blindly through the cinematic darkness, like a gumshoe with one too many shots of rum, yum. Yeah, it's got all the fancy-pants tech — living colour, widescreen — but it's like watching paint dry in a rainstorm. A double-barreled blast of cinematic emptiness that hits you square between the eyes.
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The premise of the story is that three men are fixated on the one woman, Laura Hunt, and as the story starts we visit one of those men — Waldo Lydecker, played by Clifton Webb — in the company of another of them, the young cop Mark McPherson, played by Dana Andrews.
The classic film noir flashback structure allows for a multitude of mystery and nonstandard storytelling, much of this confused by the fact that Waldo Lydecker is a brittle and caustic storyteller in himself — he is a famous columnist and aside from the power that he wields — typing his sometimes vitriolic and career-ending columns for his bathtub — he is in fact a weaver of tales himself and as such should not be trusted.
It does however subject the woman to the role of a pawn in a game of power between two competing schools of theories and therapeutic techniques: psychoanalysis and hypnotism.
The film opens with a promising scene in which Gene Tierney, playing the wife of a super-eminent psychoanalysis, is caught stealing a valuable broach from a store.
Clearly she is able to afford the item she steals, as she lives a massively affluent lifestyle, and so the premise is strong.
However, as we shall see, viewers never get to the bottom of why Gene Tierney's character Ann behaves like this. She is quickly branded a kleptomaniac, and any decent modern film or novel would proceed along the lines of discovering what is at the root of this.
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