Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

The success of Leave Her to Heaven belongs foremost to Gene Tierney. She was much more than Hollywood’s most beautiful overbite. She had the preternatural ability to be alluring and icy at the same time; she could change emotional colors with magnificent yet subtle clarity. Wasn’t she sweet and warm a moment ago? Maybe, but now she’s ready to kill. She was at the top of her game in Leave Her to Heaven, and alongside Laura, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Heaven Can Wait, and The Razor’s Edge, she amassed a list of credits to stack against any others of the late 1940s.(…) Leave Her to Heaven was a huge smash at the box office, nearly topping the charts for 1945. Each of its Oscar nominations, including sound and art direction, were more than justified. Alfred Newman’s score, dominated by thumping kettle drums, was equally deserving of mention. Its sole win, for Leon Shamroy’s orgasmic color cinematography, is one of those just-right choices that too infrequently appear on the Academy honor roll. Leave Her to Heaven’s reputation has grown. The elegant, contained work of Stahl and Tierney ages well, avoiding the camp fate of another color experiment of the era, King Vidor’s weird nympho Western Duel in the Sun. Leave Her to Heaven shares a closer kinship to Michael Powell’s British-made Black Narcissus (1947), where color similarly acts as a breathing character amidst turgid, denied emotions of lust, covetousness, dislocation, and death. If it sparks a memory of Douglas Sirk’s lush dramas, there’s a reason. Stahl directed Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession in the 1930s. Sirk remade both in the 1950s. (…) To its credit, Leave Her to Heaven is an object lesson in the pitfalls of genre assignments. What exactly is it? If it’s a love story, it’s at least as twisted as Laura, in which Dana Andrews falls in love with Tierney’s portrait. Calling it film noir, as has occurred, is more problematic. The central character is a woman, not a private dick and public chump in the form of John Garfield, Richard Widmark, or Robert Ryan. There’s nary a gun in sight. And if classic noir is defined by its visuals as much as its character types, then Heaven must be catalogued elsewhere. It was shot in saturated, glorious Technicolor, with awful deeds committed in the countryside under the bright sun. Noir’s midnight inner-city back alleys are nowhere in sight. So perhaps Foucault was right — labels don’t clarify, they mystify. At least when they are used to limit our understanding of genuinely original works of art.
El éxito de Que el cielo la juzque pertenece sobre todo a Gene Tierney. Esta actriz era mucho más que una de las mayores bellezas de Hollywood: tenía una habilidad sobrenatural para ser seductora y gélida al mismo tiempo; podía cambiar de tonalidad emocional con claridad meridiana y al mismo tiempo sutil.(…) A su favor, Que el cielo la juzgue cuenta con el atributo no menor de ser una piedra del escándalo para la clasificación genérica. Si es una historia de amor, es al menos tan retorcida como Laura, en donde el personaje de Dana Andrews se enamora del retrato de Gene Tierney. Considerarla como cine negro -algo que por otra parte se intentó- es no menos problemático. La protagonista es una mujer, no un detective privado o un tonto con los rasgos de John Garfield, Richard Widmark, o Robert Ryan. No hay un solo revolver a la vista… Y si el cine negro se define por sus aspectos visuales tanto como por el carácter de sus personajes, Que el cielo la juzgue sin duda debe ser colocada en otro lado: este film fue rodado en glorioso technicolor, hay en él actos terribles que ocurren en pleno campo, bajo la luz del sol; los sórdidos callejones urbanos de medianoche brillan aquí por su ausencia. Así que quizás Foucault tenía razón: las etiquetas no clarifican, son engañosas. Al menos cuando se pretende usarlas para limitar nuestra comprensión de genuinas obras de arte.

Matthew Kennedy, Bright .../b>