Discussion: Leave Her to Heaven

After Sunday afternoon Noirvember screenings, join Northeastern professor Nathan Blake in the Education and Community Engagement Center to discuss the film, the genre, and the gender tropes it defined and defied.

ABOUT Leave her to heaven

Novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) seems to have found the perfect woman in Ellen (Gene Tierney), a beautiful socialite who initiates a whirlwind romance and steers him into marriage before he can think twice. Yet the glassy surface of Ellen’s devotion soon reveals monstrous depths, as Richard comes to realize that his wife is shockingly possessive and may be capable of destroying anyone who comes between them.

A singular Hollywood masterpiece that draws freely from the women’s picture and film noir alike, Leave Her to Heaven boasts elegant direction by melodrama specialist John M. Stahl, blazing Technicolor cinematography by Leon Shamroy, and a chilling performance by Tierney, whose Ellen is a femme fatale unlike any other—a woman whose love is as pure as it is poisonous.

ABOUT NATHAN BLAKE

Nathan Blake is a Teaching Professor in the Media and Screen Studies Program at Northeastern University. He teaches courses on film theory and analysis, genre films, American culture, and digital media. With publications on combat simulations and motion capture alongside the visual rhetoric of disabled veterans and athletes, he is currently developing work on ecocinema and the posthuman.