TOYS IN THE ATTIC 1963

Toys in the Attic (idiom): Euphemism for insanity. Diminished mental capacity. To think or behave in an immature, foolish, or unreasonable manner [See: Bats in the Belfry]. 

In the tradition of all good Southern Gothics, that genus of deep-fried melodrama made popular by Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and William Inge; Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic is a title from which several meanings can be extracted. Idiomatic (mental illness figures into the storyline); literal (a dysfunctional family’s childhood toys have not been discarded, but remain stored in the attic of their dilapidated home); symbolic (the attic: a place of hidden secrets and childhood preserved. The toys: repressed longings and delicate illusions one is fearful of having shattered); and metaphoric (to avoid reality by means of repression, self-delusion, and clinging possessively to things/illusions of the past).

Hellman’s semi-autobiographical Toys in the Attic was the author/playwright’s last original play following such Broadway successes as The Children’s Hour, The Little Foxes, and Candide. Toys in the Attic was produced on Broadway in 1960 starring Jason Robards, Maureen Stapleton, Anne Revere, and Irene Worth; all nominated for Tony Awards, the show itself, was nominated for Best Play. 

In this abbreviated, somewhat de-fanged screen version directed by George Roy Hill (Best Director Oscar-winner for The Sting - 1973) and adapted by screenwriter James Poe (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Hot Spell, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) Hellman’s dark references to incest, mental illness, racism, and sexual impotence have been softened or eliminated to such an extent, Toys in the Attic could just as well be merely another way of saying "Skeletons in the Closet."

Luckily for me, Lillian Hellman wrote her play with swamps, sweet tea, and sweltering sex to spare, so even Production Code-mandated alterations leave Toys in the Attic with plenty of what one hopes to find in a Southern Gothic: sexual repression, heated histrionics, inconsistent Southern accents, neurosis, brass beds, rumpled sheets, electric fans, and loads of family secrets--still in abundant supply. 

Dean Martin as Julian Berniers

Geraldine Page as Carrie Berniers

Wendy Hiller as Anna Berniers

Gene Tierney as Albertine Prine

Yvette Mimieux as Lily Prine-Berniers

Frank Silvera as Henry Simpson

Charming, ne’er-do-well Julian Berniers (Martin) has been the doted-on focus of his two spinster sisters his entire life. While Julian chased dream after dream of making a fortune via all manner of half-baked schemes, failed businesses, and gambling binges; practical Anna (Heller) and possessive Carrie (Page) have remained in their hometown of New Orleans, living lives of austere sacrifice, working and maintaining the rundown Victorian home where they all grew up (which, incidentally, none of them ever liked).

Devoid of children, suitors, or even friends, Carrie and Anna are each other’s sole companionship and company, their lives a routine of hollow rituals of false intimacy (weekly, each buys the other an unwished-for gift), buoyed by the twin deferred dreams of selling the house and taking a long-talked-about trip to Europe. 

When Julian arrives from Chicago, overflowing with gifts and boisterous brio, his childlike bride Lily (Mimieux) in tow; Carrie and Anna regard his prodigal return as merely the latest temporary windfall in Julian’s long, revolving-door history of fleeting financial ascensions followed by quick and inevitable (hoped for?) downfalls. No matter how far the journey or how many businesses lost, Julian has always been able to come back to his family home where his sisters would pamper him like a child & lover, tend to his wounded ego, bolster his confidence, and readily subsidize (by way of that phantom trip to Europe fund) his next fly-by-night venture.

But this time things are different. And the difference shatters the very foundation of dysfunction and delusion upon which the Berniers household has been built.

Toys in the Attic (along with that other 1963 release, William Inge’s The Stripper) came at the tail end of Hollywood’s love affair with Midwest melodrama and sweaty tales of the oversexed South. If 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire represented the apogee of the genre’s popularity, it’s safe to say that twelve years hence, the tropes and clichés of Southern psychodrama had begun to wear thin. Toys in the Attic enjoyed success on Broadway, but by the time it reached the screen, foreign films had so surpassed American films in both frankness and realism, the mannered theatrically and compound coyness of Southern Gothic was beginning to feel a little passé. 

In adapting the play to the screen, Lillian Hellman purists may have balked at the subplots and characterizations sacrificed to screenwriter James Poe whittling Hellman’s 2-hour-plus play down to a taut 90-minutes; but given the over-familiarity of the play’s by-now well-traveled themes of sex, eccentricity, and decay, I’m not certain the film could easily have supported a longer running time.

Wealthy society widow Albertine Prine scandalizes the locals by having her handsome Black chauffeur as her lover. That she cares so little about the opinions of others has resulted in her being branded "crazy" by the Berniers sisters.

By 1963, censorship had relaxed enough so that Toys in the Attic didn’t have to completely commit to the kind of avoidance games that neutered 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—for example, the word “incestuous” is never referred to in regard to Carrie's unhealthy preoccupation with her brother, but the euphemistic term “sleep with” is bandied about freely. Poe’s adaptation updates the play from the Depression Era to modern-day New Orleans, and in doing so minimizes the significance of Tierney’s perceptive character; eliminates all mention of Julian’s bouts of sexual impotence; erases hints of Anna’s latent incestuous feelings for her sister; does the best as it can with an interracial romance (proximity within the frame has to substitute for physical intimacy), and changes the character of Lily from being developmentally challenged (giving credence to her fears that her mother [Tierney] paid Julian to marry her) to being merely emotionally immature.

From early trade paper reports attaching the names William Wyler, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, and Olivia de Havilland to the film, there’s a sense that Toys in the Attic went through a lot of changes before reaching the screen. Likely, some of them budgetary. For a time, it was believed serious dramas should be filmed in black and white, the color adaptions of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke (1961) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962)—both starring Geraldine Page—flying in the face of that tradition. By 1963 fewer films were being made in black and white, so it’s not clear if the beautiful black and white cinematography of Toys in the Attic (by Joseph F. Biroc) was inspired by aesthetics or budget. What is known is that television-trained director George Roy Hill (making his second film, his first being the [rare]Tennessee Williams comedy Period of Adjustment in 1962) was used to working fast, cheap, and in black and white. 

Toys in the Attic's sole Oscar nomination was for Bill Thomas' costume designs.
Thomas won the Oscar in 1961 for Spartacus

If the final cast chosen for the film lacked the marquee allure of Wyler’s involvement, they certainly didn’t lack for prestige. Toys in the Attic marked Oscar and Tony nominee Geraldine Page’s third foray into Southern Gothic; Tony-nominated and Oscar-winning British actress Wendy Hiller (for Separate Tables) made an ideal match to play Page’s circumspect sister, and Gene Tierney (Oscar-nominee for Leave Her To Heaven, and whose real-life struggles with mental illness brought about her premature retirement in 1955) was in the midst of a welcome comeback following her appearance in Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent (1962).

But from the time casting was first announced to the film’s release in the summer of 1963, the biggest topic of conversation and critical bone of contention surrounding Toys in the Attic was the casting of actor/entertainer Dean Martin in the role that had won Jason Robards a Tony nomination. Martin was no stranger to movies, having appeared in more than 20 features by the time he was cast opposite such theatrical veterans as Page and Hiller. It was simply that few had confidence that the lightweight, notoriously easygoing half of the Martin & Lewis comedy team had the range and dramatic chops to tackle this, the most substantial of his rare dramatic screen appearances. 

Toys in the Attic was not a success, in fact, it was a resounding flop. Critics, citing battle fatigue over the whole clutch-the-pearls-while-I-fan-myself genre, called it a minor Southern Gothic and complained that James Poe’s adaptation undercut the complexity of Heller’s characters and supplanted the play’s pessimistic conclusion with a provisionally “happy” ending. Even George Roy Hill was dissatisfied with the result, calling the film the least successful of his works. And while Page and Hiller emerged with their reputations intact, critical response to Martin’s performance was so harsh he never tackled so sizable a dramatic role again.

Such Devoted Sisters

Personally, I place myself in the opposite camp, entirely. I've enjoyed Toys in the Attic since I first saw it as a teen when it popped up occasionally on television on The Late Show. I'm not aware of whether or not it ever had a VHS release, but it's one of those films that never seems to show up on cable, and now appears to be out of print after having been released on DVD in 2010.

I recently got my hands on a copy (first time seeing it in decades) and was pleased to discover it to be even better than I remembered. Sure, it's no The Little Foxes, yet it tells its story with an economy and visual style that perfectly serves its tone of mounting suspense and escalating tensions. It's a dynamic, emotionally rich showcase for the talented cast and a great many Southern Gothic clichés, ultimately managing to enthrall and entertain in spite of its flaws. 

Nan Martin as Charlotte Watkins

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Much of Toys in the Attic is said to be autobiographical, down to Hellman setting the story in her hometown of New Orleans, basing the character of Julian on her salesman father (who had two clinging sisters), referencing an aunt who had an affair with her African-American chauffeur, and, as per the play’s themes of latent incest, drawing upon her own adolescent feelings towards an uncle.

I credit this as the reason why the relationships in Toys in the Attic resonate with so much emotional authenticity. Even when the sometimes-overreaching aspects of a melodramatic subplot—involving a land swindle and an emotionally abused wife (Nan Martin) seeking escape—threaten to overwhelm the proceedings, what remains compelling are the complex dynamics in the relationship between the three siblings, and the threat Lily poses as a clingy interloper in their long-established cycle of dysfunction.

The selfish, crippling side of love rears its head when the
 always-in-need-of-rescue Julian finds someone who needs him.

Like Julian, I am the only boy in my family. While I was never exactly doted on by my four sisters, I remained somehow shielded and apart from the tensions and issues they shared amongst themselves; a fact which engendered resentment from some, envy in others. There was no lack of love between us, but the way we were viewed and related to by our parents (I could do no wrong, my sisters fell under strict scrutiny) affected how we viewed and related

What I most responded to in Toys in the Attic is how it captures the curious way some families can handle the failures of its members with far more generosity and grace than they do the successes. How living with unhappiness (as long as it means things will remain unchanged) can be a less frightening prospect to people than taking the kinds of risks that can bring about true happiness.

Confrontations and Confessions
"When you love, you take your chances on being hated by speaking out the truth."

PERFORMANCES

If you don’t like Geraldine Page, I doubt you’ll much care for Toys in the Attic. She’s the entire show. And what a show it is. Wendy Hiller (underplaying nicely and turning stillness into an art) is the grounded center around which Page’s Tasmanian Devil of a faded southern belle spins uncontrollably and destructively. Playing a delusional, manipulative character whose life of peculiarly selfish selflessness has left her a throbbing mass of unrecognized desires, Page is simply forceful and more than a little frightening.   

Baby Doll
What's a Southern Gothic without a brass bed and rumpled sheets?

Yvette Mimieux suffers more from how her character is written than from anything specific I can cite in her performance. Perhaps because Mimieux had just come off of a film in which she played a developmentally challenged girl (Light in the Piazza -1962), the filmmakers decided to drop that angle of her character completely. Unfortunately, without her mental capacity being called into play, her Lily, now written as being simply naive and immature, winds up coming across as a bit of a nitwit. Mimieeux is very effective in the role, but as for the character --I'm afraid that with her grasping behavior and moping countenance, Lily becomes an annoying presence long before she has the opportunity to become a sympathetic one.

Gene Tierney is a welcome sight and is very good (and charmingly funny) in a small role requiring the 41-year-old actress to look believably older than 44-year-old Dean Martin. The film doesn't exactly succeed on that score, but Tierney and the dashing and dignified Frank Silvera do make for a very a handsome couple. 

I thought Dean Martin was surprisingly good as Julian. He's an actor of limited range, to be sure, but he doesn't embarrass himself and has moments so good that he makes me wish he had tried his hand at dramatic roles more often. Admittedly, I did find myself imagining from time to time the kind of depth and nuance Jason Robards might have brought to the role, but in the end, I had to concede that Martin brings a kind of effortless charm and boyish exuberance to the role that I can't really imagine in Robards.  

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
By way of a striking visual style that emphasizes the dominating and confining aspects of the Berniers home, Toys in the Attic finds a deft way of expounding on the film's theme of emotional and self-imprisonment.

Fearful that Julian is having an affair and feeling unwelcome by his sisters, Lily's isolation is dramatized in this shot which makes the childlike woman appear to be standing in an oversized crib. 

Many scenes are shot from an attic's eye view, the characters minimized and dominated by the house

Bars and fences are a recurring visual motif. The incestuous love Carrie has for her brother has always kept Anna at a remove. Frequently Hill frames Page & Martin in the foreground with Hiller kept separate and apart

Again, the characters are filmed in ways to make them appear caged in and confined by the house

My favorite shot, one which Hill claims was not planned, but just a happy accident, comes at a pivotal point of betrayal. At a moment when Carrie has the choice to reassure Lily of Julian's love, she opts to reveal secrets intended to destroy their marriage. That her clothing and the patterned walls create the impression of Carrie becoming one with the house is a brilliant visual accident.

Movie trends inevitably suffer from oversaturation, resulting in perfectly fine films being rejected by critics and the public alike due to the genre's cycle having run its course. Distanced from what in 1963 must have looked like yet another go-round of decorous depravity and decay told with wavering southern accents; Toys in the Attic appears now to be a seldom-discussed film (no minor classic, but entertaining and well-made) worthy of reappraisal.


BONUS MATERIAL

In 1960, Wendy Hiller starred in the London production of Toys in the Attic, playing the Geraldine Page role.

In 1976 Yvette Mimieux appeared with her Toys in the Attic rival Nan Martin in Jackson County Jail: a Drive-In exploitationer in which the usually-passive Mimieux breaks character and beats a prison guard to death with a stool!

Copyright © Ken Anderson

BLACK WIDOW 1954

Today to get the public to attend a picture show,

It’s not enough to advertise a famous star they know.

If you want to get the crowds to come around...

You’ve got to have Glorious Technicolor,

Breathtaking CinemaScope,

And Stereophonic Sound.

Cole Porter -1955 Broadway musical "Silk Stockings"

“The first big murder-mystery in CinemaScope!” “The first crime-of-passion story in CinemaScope!" Thus screamed the poster and newspaper ads heralding the 1954 release of 20th Century-Fox’s all-star, all-color, widescreen film noir, Black Widow. Well, seeing as I somehow managed to never even hear of this movie until just last year, I’m going to have to take them at their word that Black Widow represents a series of "firsts" in the annals of CinemaScope. What I can attest to is that by combining the backstage bitchery of All About Eve (1950) with the murder-mystery-told-in-flashback structure of Laura (1944), and burnishing it all to a garish, high-gloss color palette reminiscent of How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Black Widow succeeds in being a pleasingly campy goulash of disparate genre tropes and style conventions in search of a unifying tone.

Ginger Rogers as overbearing diva of the New York stage Carlotta Marin

Van Heflin as slow-witted theatrical producer Peter Denver

Gene Tierney as patrician stage star Iris Denver

George Raft as the Beau Brummel of the NYPD, Detective Lt. C.A. Bruce

Peggy Ann Garner as  Southern-fried "purpose girl" Nancy Ordway

Reginald Gardiner as lapdog househusband Brian Mullen

Given the big push by 20th Century-Fox in order to compete with the escalating popularity of television, CinemaScope, like today’s mania for 3-D (that ship has struck dry-dock by now, hasn't it?), is a technological advancement devised to enhance the moviegoing experience that doesn't necessarily translate to enhancing the quality of the film itself. In its time CinemaScope was a spectacle-based invention which proved ideal for epics (The Robe – 1953), musicals (There's  No Business Like Show Business – 1954), and scenic adventure films (Beneath the 12-Mile Reef – 1953). Black Widow, a murder mystery based on the novel Fatal Woman by Hugh Wheeler (of A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd fame) was an early experiment by Fox to try out its widescreen process (with blistering color by Deluxe) on a less visual, more narrative-driven genre.

Set in the glamorous world of the New York theater (although no one in the film ever sets foot on a stage), Black Widow feels more like Americanized Agatha Christie than full-blown noir. It throws together a colorful assortment of cliché Broadway luminaries, bigwigs, hangers-on, and bohemian Greenwich Village types, then stands back as this close-knit group of professional pretenders grows progressively unraveled by the inconvenient intrusion of a murder into their cloistered enclave. 

Virginia Leith as Claire Amberly
Although I always associate Leith with Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying (1956), fans of MST3K will recognize Leith as the disembodied talking head in 1962s The Brain that Wouldn't Die

While Black Widow is built around the noir staple of an innocent person having their life spiral out of control due to being falsely accused of a crime, missing-in-action is the hard-boiled dialogue and requisite climate of fatalism necessary to make this overlit whodunit feel like the real thing. Not helping matters is the fact that time which would have been better spent fleshing out character motivations and plot twists is given over to draggy amateur sleuthing that leans heavily on coincidence and relies too often on slow-witted police work.

Skip Homeier as John Amberly

Plot: Naive to the point of thick-headed Broadway producer Peter Denver (Heflin) befriends guileless 20-year-old wannabe writer Nancy Ordway (Garner) while his stage star wife (Tierney) is out of town. Although their friendship is platonic nature, it nevertheless raises the manicured eyebrows of Denver's neighbor, Great Lady of the Stage and all-around busybody Carlotta Marin (Rogers), despite the demurred assertions of her cowed husband, Brian (Gardiner), Denver's best pal.

At the periphery of this innocent but potentially combustible situation are: well-heeled sister and brother, Claire and John Amberly (Virginia Leith and Skip Homeier)--she a slumming Greenwich Village artist, he a law student; Nancy’s uncle Gordon (Otto Kruger), a low-tier stage actor; Anne (Hilda Simms), Nancy's sharp-as-a-tack co-worker; Lucia Colletti (Cathleen Nesbitt), the Denver's loose-lipped maid; and, once things take a nasty turn, Lt. Bruce (Raft), the steel-eyed, near-immobile detective.

Otto Kruger as Gordon Ling

The mystery at the core of Black Widow is handled fairly effectively, what with some throw-us-off-the-scent casting and a perhaps unintended lightness of touch helping to generate a few genuinely unexpected twists along the way. Also working in the film's favor is how the duplicitous and ruthless world of show business turns out to be a mystery-friendly environment rife with the potential for homicide.
And I certainly can't find fault with the production itself, it being a veritable cavalcade of stagy sets, overdone fashions, and rife with what was apparently a '50s hair vogue: The poodle cut - those unflatteringly short perms resembling gold-hued bathing caps made of tense, lambswool curls.

But in the end, neither the dark promise of the film's title, nor the camp excesses suggested by its gaudy visuals are ever realized in sufficient force to make Black Widow more than a handsomely mounted, slightly overdressed crime thriller.

Cathleen Nesbitt as Lucia Colletti

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It isn't common for a film’s greatest strengths to be found in its weaknesses, but Black Widow is frequently at its most persuasive when serving up a brand of moviemaking so glossily old-fashioned, its patently theatrical artificiality begins to take on the characteristic of something resembling a style.

From the outset, Black Widow embarks on a narrative course endorsing a mode of dress (the crisp, stiff clothes look like costumes), setting (95% soundstage, 5% NYC locations), and performance (all indication, little believable emotion), all supporting the theory of a concentrated effort on the film’s part to bear as little resemblance to real life as possible.
There's an alien "otherness" to the look of the film created by the lighting and composition requirements of the CinemaScope process. A process that turns New York into a sterile and oddly spacious environment (a basement Greenwich Village coffeehouse looks to be roughly the size of an airplane hangar) which puts it at direct odds with the kind of shadowy claustrophobia one associates with film noir.

The sort of natural, laid-back blocking CinemaScope made necessary

I sound like I'm complaining, but honestly (and this may be mere perversion on my part) I found the discordant visual tone to actually work to Black Widow’s advantage. Based on its initial scenes and not knowing anything about the film before I saw it, I thought Black Widow was going to be a light romantic drama. One of those '50s “woman’s pictures” combining elements of All About Eve (Tallulah Bankhead was first approached for the Ginger Rogers role), The Moon is Blue (that film’s star, Maggie McNamara, was first choice for the Peggy Ann Garner role), or a continuation of Rogers’ own Forever Female (1953) - another age-centric rivalry set in the world of theater.

That these posh surroundings, pretty people, and harmlessly waggish conversations are setting the stage for a murder mystery took me totally by surprise. And so it remained throughout: Black Widow's key lit, musical comedy sheen works at such amusing variance with what one has come to expect from noirish suspense thrillers that it inadvertently serves as a device to keep the audience off balance.

Mabel Albertson (left), known to scores of classic TV fans as the smothering mother figure on Bewitched, That Girl, and The Andy Griffith Show, gets a chance to let her hair down (and, by the looks of it, her bosom) as Sylvia, the tough-broad proprietress of a Greenwich Village hangout

PERFORMANCES

Beyond the musicals she made with Fred Astaire, I’m not enough of a fan of top-billed Ginger Rogers to know if the divinely catty character she plays in Black Widow is as much a departure from type as it seems. She has always displayed a charming brassiness in films like Stage Door and Golddiggers of 1933, so perhaps this isn't that much of a stretch, but with Van Heflin’s one-note performance and the obvious fragility of Gene Tierney (the actress was in the early throes of a mental breakdown during filming), Ginger Rogers' flamboyant energy is a godsend. Plus, she gets all the best lines.

In a role that amounts to little more than a bit part, Broadway actress Hilda Simms
gives the most natural, convincing performance in the entire film

For former child star Peggy Ann Garner (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), Black Widow was a a bid for adult legitimacy on par with Patty Duke's Valley of the Dolls...and it proved to  be just about as successful. Given grief by critics at the time for not being a believable "type," I think she succeeds in the role chiefly for that reason. Garner's Nancy Ordway is a far more convincing babe-in-the-woods on the make than, say, Anne Baxter's brazenly transparent Eve Harrington in All About Eve.

Pretty much the entire arc of Van Heflin's character

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

To convey the grand style of the New York theater folk at the center of Black Widow, 20^th Century-Fox designer William Travilla whips up a drag queen's wet dream of ostentatious outfits for Ginger Rogers to parade around in. Happily, the longtime dancer is physically up to the task.

Carlotta - "To put the kindest face possible on it, the girl was a little horror. A transparent, syrupy little phony with about as much to offer a man as 'cuckoo the bird girl.' Not even Peter with all of his radiant innocence about women could have been stirred for one instant by that dingy little creep."

Peter - "Lottie, the girl is dead!"

Carlotta - "I know...and that’s precisely why I refuse to speak harshly of her!"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

For a movie written, produced, and directed by a single individual (Nunnally Johnson of How to Marry a Millionaire, The Grapes of Wrath, The World of Henry Orient, etc.) Black Widow distinguishes itself by being almost completely lacking in distinction. Polished, well-made, and not nearly as vulgar as one might hope given the subject matter, Black Widow looks and feels like Hollywood product, circa 1954, that could have been directed by any number of studio contract professionals.

The tall, lanky fellow holding his hat is future TV producer Aaron Spelling.
Gene Tierney's health problems while making Black Widow necessitated her being seated in virtually all of her scenes  

And perhaps that's why, for all its slick competence, Black Widow never coalesces into more than just a pleasantly diverting way to  spend 95 minutes. A crime-of-passion movie without passion is a cold affair indeed, and Black Widow, while lovely to look at and fun in a detached sort of way (imagine absent-mindedly playing a game of "Clue") is ultimately most rewarding as a time-capsule view of Hollywood in its final years before it was forced to change in the mid-1960s.

Never intended to break new ground, Black Widow - a 40s noir retrofitted with color and CinemaScope - is but an example of 1950s Hollywood trying to hold onto its audience by giving them brighter and shinier versions of what they've always given them. Sorta like today today's digital, HD, CGI, 3-D opuses.

The black widow, deadliest of all spiders, earned its dark title through its deplorable practice of devouring its mate. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN 1945

"Leave her to heaven, and to those thorns that in her
 bosom lodge to prick and sting her."
                                                                 William Shakespeare "Hamlet"

One area in which old movies effortlessly surpass contemporary motion pictures is in their ability to render the grotesque glamorous. The value of such facility is debatable, but sometimes I want my movies realistic, and other times I want my movies to be MOVIES...in big capital letters. Due to censorship and social mores of the time, older movies had to be very artful in how they dealt with unpleasant subjects. And whether it was murder, jealousy, obsession, or infanticide; when buffed to a high gloss by the Hollywood Dream Machine, bad never looked so good.

Gene Tierney as Ellen Berent

Cornel Wilde as Richard Harland

Jeanne Crain as Ruth Berent

Vincent Price as Russell Quinton

No film better exemplifies this than that Technicolor noir classic, Leave Her to Heaven. A film of such alluring visual overripeness that one can easily forget that it is probably one of the darkest and most twisted visions of familial dysfunction ever to come out of post-war era Hollywood.

Leave Her to Heaven is a rarity in the world of 40s film noir: the darkness occurs in the bright (and colorful) daylight. And at the center of this bright-hued nightmare is perhaps one of cinema's most relentlessly evil monsters. The monster in question? None other than the austerely exquisite Gene Tierney (saved from bland perfection by a charming overbite), fulfilling, in her role as socialite Ellen Berent, the long-standing film noir edict that any female that desirable has got to spell nothing but trouble.

Femme Fatale Red Flag #23: Really big monogram 

And trouble she is, for Ellen is nothing short of a walking “attractive nuisance” violation waiting to happen. Smart, lovely and affectionate on the surface, underneath all that window dressing lies a woman with a doozy of a father fixation and a psychopathically obsessive idea of love. The object of Ellen’s affection is author Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde, a worthy competitor to Tierney in the beauty department), whom she meets briefly on a train and who soon thereafter becomes the one she MUST have.

Babe Alert! We feel your pain, Ellen.

Never mind a pesky little detail like her already having a fiancé (a wounded-looking Vincent Price).

Russell- "I'm not a man who loves often, Ellen. I love once."
Ellen- "Thank you, Russ. That's quite a concession."
Russell- "I loved you and I'm still in love with you."
Ellen- "That's a tribute!"
Russ- "And I always will be...remember that."
Ellen- "Russ, is that a threat?"

To say that Ellen’s love for Richard grows after they get married is not to state the half of it. Ellen will be satisfied with nothing less than having Richard to herself 24/7, and woe betide the woebegone (be it family members, caretakers, or wheelchair–bound little brothers) foolish enough to think she’ll allow it to be otherwise.

Wedded Bliss...or else!

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The '30s and '40s may have been boom years for the “women’s film” (movies with female protagonists, told from a woman’s point of view, marketed to a female audience) but film noir always seemed to be lurking in the shadows, contrasting all those sunny Mrs. Miniver & I Remember Mama images of femininity with vitriolic visions of women intent on the destruction of the male.

Indeed, the fear of women is what sex in film noir is all about. The twist in Leave Her to Heaven is that the almost ethereally beautiful Tierney lacks the obvious sexual threat of, say, a Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, or Barbara Stanwyck— all of whom looked as if they’d just as soon plunge a pair of scissors into your back as look at you. Tierney's Ellen Berent is the ultra- scary female writ large because she looks like so many of the pin-ups and girls-next-door of the era. Made up to resemble every brunette Gene Kelly ever pursued in a wholesome musical, it’s quite startling when Tierney reveals herself to be a sick ticket of the order rarely seen in Production Code era movies.

Sweet as pie

The "crazy eyes" first make their appearance

PERFORMANCES
Gene Tierney gives the performance of her career and is the absolute embodiment of star power in this, her Academy Award nominated role. Though her character has all the trappings of overheated melodrama (overblown emotions, ostentatious glamour), she brings a level of assuredness to her portrayal that dares you to turn it into camp. Scene after scene dances right on the edge of being a real howler on par with Lana Turner during her Ross Hunter period - or any period Douglas Sirk - but there's something about the truth of her characterization (we don't like Ellen, but we "get" her) that keeps the film on track. She's terrific.

 The famous "Swim in the Lake" sequence

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Who else? Gene Tierney. Outside of Vanessa Redgrave in Camelot, Julie Christie in Petulia, or Faye Dunaway in that big party scene in The Towering Inferno, I can’t think of another film in which a mere mortal was made to look like a fairy-tale goddess. (And if you haven’t seen Ms. Dunaway in that movie, do yourself a favor and rent it for that sequence alone. She and her cheekbones manage to upstage both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, and she should have won a special Oscar just for keeping that jaw-dropping gown up.)

 Now THIS is what a movie star looks like!

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

If it was the intention of the filmmakers to put us off our guard by making this bleakly downbeat psychological thriller look like a picture postcard, then they succeeded. The gorgeous visuals: from art direction to costumes to locations, serve to create an almost David Lynchian look at the dark underside of a certain kind of privileged life. A certain kind of only-in-the-movies life. The effect of seeing such horrible things perpetrated by pretty people in glorious surroundings is both confounding and unsettling.

 The cinematography in Leave Her to Heaven -

David Lean meets Alfred Hitchcock

I came across this film relatively recently, and as a big fan of movies featuring overdressed bad girls, I was stunned that I had somehow missed Leave Her to Heaven in my youth (I mean, did Carol Burnett ever do a parody of this movie?). Anyway, fully expecting to be treated to a howling camp-fest of lacquered cheese, I was surprised, if not shocked, at what a powerful film it is. I mean, the various conflicts and tragedies are the stuff of melodrama, but they somehow have real emotional bite...a palpable feeling of despair. I was overwhelmed by how artfully the film was constructed and how daring its themes were. Who would ever think a major motion picture from the 1940s would include this exchange:

 Ellen- (Referring to her unborn child) "I hate the little beast, I wish it would die!"

Ruth- "How can you say such wicked things?"

Ellen- "Sometimes the truth is wicked."

YIKES! Even after watching it several times over the years, the film never seems dated (the clothes, yes, the emotions, no) and it remains one of my favorite melodramas to this day. Near perfect, its only misstep is a courtroom scene in which Vincent Price seems to be (over)acting in a different film entirely.

Undeniably dark, Leave Her to Heaven is the best example of what I call classic moviemaking: solid cast, top-notch technicians, sure-footed director, and a great script. The basics. All the CGI and 3-D in the world isn't gonna help a movie if it doesn't have these.

And I'll never let you go. Never, never, never... 

Copyright © Ken Anderson