Movie chat

I wrote another film synopsis, this one based on a golden-age-of-Hollywood piece that was shown in my Intro English class. The fractured femme fatale is played by an oversexed forties starlet called Gene Tierney who's sort of a proto-Angelina Jolie. I can only assume that both are the product of some gene splicing experiment gone horribly wrong. At any rate, the two women have cornered the global supply of eyeball surface area and disproportionate bust.

In the 1945 Fox box office smash Leave Her To Heaven, Gene Tierney portrays the oppressively gorgeous Ellen Berent, a hystrionic harpy with an Electra complex the size of Vermont, who roams through life using her shrill beauty to bludgeon man and woman alike into accord with her capricious agenda. In our story, the recipient of her questionable attentions is a hack writer named Richard Harland who, navigating the rocky New Mexican coutryside terrain on a research trip for his next Zane Grey ripoff, accidentally trips and marries Gene Tierney.

Mr Harland and his psychopathic young bride whisk away to the glamour and excitement of rural Maine, where the marriage quickly begins to go sour. The viewer is inclined to discourage reconciliation, feeling that the couple have made a reasonable go of matrimony during the past 17 hours, but Harland digs deep and finds a way to completely ignore the fact that Ellen is an Annie Wilkes-like lunatic who wishes nothing more than to love him and squeeze him and hold him forever and ever, with admittance being refused to any family or friends who wish to witness the grotesque spectacle of their 'love'.

Richards takes exception to Ellen's Pat Buchanan-esque isolationism, and between this and Chill Wills' fireside Francis the Talking Mule singing, the stress drives Ellen to unbecoming social behaviour. In one such example she blows off some steam by drowning Richard's physically disabled brother, little Danny (or was it Bobby or Timmy?), possibly because his efforts at cuteness-based manipulation were beginning to overshadow her own.

Devastated by the apparently accidental loss of his all-American sibling, Richard finds his life bereft of golly gee whiz spirit, and decidedly less swell. Ellen's ovaries rise to challenge, however, and all memory of the hapless Danny is erased the second a fetus is conceived. Ebullient, Richard sketches a terrifying harlequin on the wall of the nursery in order to prepare the zygotic newcomer for life under the homicidal circus performer who carries it. No amount of spooky clown drawings, however, can make the tedium of pregnancy tolerable for Ellen, who swan dives down the staircase in an effort to give the baby an early start on swimming lessons, resulting in an aborted pregnancy.

As an American writer in the 1940's, Richard is no stranger to sexy women being portrayed as morally deficient, and he eventually figures out the true cause of both deaths, resulting in Ellen's swift dismissal from wiving duties. Having been given the pink slip by Richard, she decides it's really not her colour, and slips into a modest green satin number in time for her final picnic. Ellen puts away a corned beef sandwich seasoned with arsenic, and promptly croaks, but not before concocting an elborate ruse designed to ruin the life of her angelic cousin, Ruth. It's a bizarre kamikaze maneuver confirming for the viewer how completely batshit crazy is the late Mrs. Berent.

At this late stage of the film, it abruptly transmogrifies into a courtoom drama; apparently one set before the invention of the term “conflict of interest”. Ellen's jilted fiancé, the incomparably creepy Vincent Price, argues her case with more passionate vitriol than you'd expect from your average cuckolded district attorney, repeatedly attempting to extract an admission of the love between Richard and Ruth. The whole affair is reminiscent of a giggling grade school bully at recess, and the viewer half expects his closing comments to the jury to be something like “Richard and Ruth, sittin' in a tree/ K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”

In the climactic scene, Richard drops a bomb on the jury, tattling about how mean Ellen actually was, and everyone buys the story wholesale. As an accessory after the fact to Danny's drowning, he gets sent up to the big house for two years, and has to watch out for his “Back of the Moon” in the shower.

The film is visually arresting (shot on location in New Mexico and Maine), and spins a pretty absorbing yarn for the viewer, even as it closely adheres to safe, established noir norms of the day in most respects. One can't demur overly at the predictable femme fatale character, since it was par for the course in mid 40s Hollywood (and still is), but it bears noting that the depiction of females is fairly reprehensible. In this movie's weltanschauung, women are either sweet, wholesome madonnas who submit wordlessly to near endless abuse and domination, or unscrupulous, wildly jealous temptresses; not a pleasant dichotomy. Even so, it's a great film, once these mysogynistic roles are placed in their proper historical context, and still entertains and provokes 60 years after its theatrical release.