Blog - Thursday, March 5, 2009 17:31 - 0 Comments

Looking for an Anti-Hero

By Dan Jackson

There’s nothing an audience loves more than a good dose of single-minded male romantic obsession. American films in particular have a tendency to celebrate and reward borderline- sociopathic male protagonists: picture Jimmy Stewart’s grizzled face in Vertigo, John Wayne’s sexual snarl in The Searchers, Robert DeNiro’s demented gaze in Taxi Driver. Though these movies criticize and condemn their main characters to varying degrees, this has not stopped these men from being viewed as celluloid icons, violent heroes with love in their hearts and passion in their veins. Feminine romantic obsession however, is often treated as a sort of psychosexual deficiency, a dangerous threat. Female characters with fanatical tendencies are rarely allowed to star in their own movies, are often cast as villains (a la Glen Close in Fatal Attraction), and their actions are filtered through the prism of an often dull male lead. Though the Greeks gave us Medea and her murderous desires, she was a woman scorned; this image is in no short supply. Films that glorify the perspective of a romantically obsessive feminine anti-hero remain somewhat elusive. John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven just might be the closest thing we’ve got.

Part melodrama, part noir, all Technicolor, and all completely nuts, Leave Her to Heaven tells the story of Harvard-educated novelist/dolt Richard Harland (or Dick) who meets the beautiful and enigmatic Helen (played by Gene Tierney) on a train. Helen gives Dick the alluring pick-up line, “I’m sorry I was staring at you. You look just like my father.” With this line the film’s Freudian subtext is underway and doesn’t let up until the final credits. Soon enough Helen and Dick find themselves married (Helen proposes, further emasculating wimpy Dick) and the two are whisked away to a romantic cabin where Dick attempts to finish another novel and Helen seeks only to show Dick how much she loves him by cooking, cleaning, and— one imagines and the film implies— screwing his brains out. At one point she tells Dick, “I don’t want anyone in the house but us,” foreshadowing the drastic measures she will take to achieve her goals.

The presence of Dick’s wheelchair bound and increasingly irritating younger brother Danny further complicates matters. It’s difficult to avoid the vague homoerotic undertones in Danny and Dick’s interactions, especially when Helen makes suggestive statements like, “I gave up my honeymoon so my husband could be with his brother.” Moments of code-era sexual repression and images of fertility fill the screen. In fact, Stahl injects just about every moment of the film with sexually and psychologically suggestive undertones. Like Douglas Sirk’s luscious melodramas, this is a film where the abundance of sub-text and the possibility of multiple interpretations almost engulfs the actual text, making it at times more fun to think about than to actually watch. However as Helen’s obsessive tendencies become more violent and vile— an exquisitely crafted drowning sequence and a joyfully overblown staircase-induced abortion are the highlights— the film takes on a perverse, nightmare-like intensity.

The dream-like tone is aided by some of the most vivid Technicolor images ever put to screen. The early sections of the film are overflowing with deep purples in contrast with bright, radiant yellow tones, giving even the interior shots an impressionistic glow. As the story becomes darker and morally troubling, Stahl and his cinematographer Leon Shamroy fill the frame with ominous shadows, visually conveying Helen’s sense of entrapment. The visual beauty, expert pacing, and devilish sense of fun in the film begin to waver once Helen’s reign of violence and jealousy comes to an end; the filmmakers make the almost fatal mistake of thinking we care about any of the other characters. The film ends with a rote and over-long courtroom sequence (though a hammy turn by Vincent Price as the jilted prosecuting attorney almost saves it) and a wrong-headed attempt at a happy ending. Tierney’s performance is the icy heart of the film and when she’s off screen it flat-lines.

Though the film has pulpy trappings and moments of pure kitsch, the title itself is taken from that beacon of high culture, The Bard himself, particularly Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Early in the play the Ghost of Hamlet’s father speaks of his wife, Gertrude, by saying, “Howsomever thou pursues this act, 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.” Given this literary allusion it should come as no surprise that Helen and Gertrude meet the same fate: death by poison. However it is a bit difficult to imagine a character like Helen enjoying the boring world of heaven very much; she would probably find the flames of hell far more fun.

Leave Her to Heaven will be playing at the Film Forum in New York from March 6th to the 12th.