Forever Isn't Over Yet

I am a festival widow this week. Until a week from Thursday, M is going to be busy at the International Film Festival, watching movies, schmoozing, schnorring, interviewing, etc. Because we wrote some of the program notes I’ve already seen a few of the films, though I’ll try to get out to see a couple more over the week. Late on Saturday afternoon, after hearing an enthusiastic description from a friend, I met M at The Castro to watch the restored version of Leave Her to Heaven, which is described in the program as “Technicolor Noir.”

Leave Her to Heaven is a perfect Castro film. For one thing, this wonderful restoration really is best appreciated on an epic-sized screen. Yes, Technicolor does look artificial, but it’s in the sense that the colors of a beautiful painting are artificial. The browns and golds are richer, the sky bluer, sunsets deeper and more dramatic. And the melodramatic plot of Leave Her to Heavenn lends itself to the Castro, where audiences tend to participate, faintly hissing the villains, moaning at moments of heartbreak, murmuring uneasily at signs of danger…

We were all fairly restrained for a Castro audience last Saturday, though you could feel everyone shudder every time some skin-crawling hint was delivered early on about what a sick, sick girl Gene Tierney was. The hints in that movie come so thick and fast that by the time she’s maneuvered Cornel Wilde into marrying her it’s hard to maintain much sympathy for him. Who but a complete chowderhead would marry a woman two days after a dinner party that she spent enthusing about how much he looks like her recently deceased father? Any sensible man would have started backing away and invoking a nonexistence fiancée after she’d gathered everyone around a picture of Dad and invited them to comment on the resemblance. And Mom’s resigned expression every time she looks at her daughter, along with the fact that she has an adopted daughter (Jeanne Crain) who was apparently taken on as a badly needed emotional back up should have tipped him off that there was something abnormal about that whole family dynamic.

Gene Tierney had a spectacular overbite, and Cornel Wilde at that age was so doe-eyed he resembled a Keane painting, so the predator vs. deer-in-the-headlights dynamic is believable up to a point. Vincent Price minus his moustache makes an appearance early on in the film as Tierney’s spurned fiancé, and his slithery, blue-blooded, freakishly tall good looks do make him look like a more appropriate mate for her than Wilde. Nobody but Price could make the passionate statement “I will always love you,” sound quite so much like a threat. You can have a pretty good time mulling over what that marriage would have looked like while watching the train-wreck of her union with Wilde unfold in glorious Technicolor.

Or you could just watch the train wreck. Most of the screenplay is so deftly put together that you can see and believe the people around this couple -- like a doctor caring for her invalid brother-in-law, and an old family friend and retainer at the family lake house -- being seriously freaked out by this obvious borderline case well before her besotted husband figures it out. There is a broad daylight murder that’s one of the most harrowing I’ve ever watched, and a death scene that's so creepy that the audience let out a long collective, “eeeeeeew” (and I mean this in a good way.)

Unfortunately, in the last twenty minutes the film devolves into a completely illogical courtroom drama that is plainly intended to set up the unbelievable, tacked-on happy ending. Tierney was no great shakes as an actress, but the nasty woman she plays is the heart of this rather disturbing movie. Once she’s gone, it’s just not as interesting. But she’s only gone for the last fourth of the film, and while she’s there, the term “Technicolor Noir” actually makes sense.