Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

Directed by John M. Stahl. Starring Cornel Wilde, Gene Tierney, Jeanne Craine, Vincent Price, Mary Philips, Darryl Hickman, Ray Collins, Gene Lockhart, Reed Hadley, Olive Blakeney.

Noir-ish melodrama in ravishing Technicolor where novelist Wilde is drawn toward refined socialite Tierney, but after a whirlwind romance and wedding, he gradually learns that she’s prone to pathological deception and compulsive jealousy, perhaps even murder. The obsessions are presented in a brazen (even trashy) fashion, which results in a few inadvertent howlers, but at least it entertains. Wilde is a dashing dud as usual, and Price (as an attorney who’s also Tierney’s ex-fiancé) exhibits a bit of the hammy flamboyance that he’d soon bring to his iconic horror roles, but Tierney’s emblematic mannered dullness is actually employed well here—she’s as much a memorable femme fatale for the eerie composure of her detached hysteria as she is for the outrageous things she does (at least one of which must have tested the resolve of the censors). Glossy production values bring high-class to low-art. The title is taken from a line in Hamlet (“Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven, and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her”).

67/100