Successful young novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) accepts an invitation to vacation and write on a friend's remote ranch. On a train bound for New Mexico, he meets stunning Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney), a devoted daddy's girl en-route to scatter her late father's ashes. Ellen sees much of her beloved father in Richard and the two quickly marry knowing very little about the other. As Richard settles down with Ellen, he realizes she’s more complex than initially expected, with a pathological jealousy she directs at anyone and anything Richard cares for. 

A rare example of a noir filmed in Technicolor, LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN won the Oscar for Best Color Cinematography for Leon Shamroy and was selected in 2018 for preservation by the Library of Congress.

“The fascination of this unashamed melodrama lies in Gene Tierney's ability to shift from charming to harming without losing her allure.” —David Parkinson, Empire

“Almost cloyingly luscious, the cinematography feels perversely complicit in Ellen’s monstrous crimes. It not only makes her inhumanly beautiful, but endorses her inhumane perfectionism by surrounding her with beauty that is unsettlingly perfect.” —Imogen Sara Smith, reverseshot.org

“Leon Shamroy’s orgasmic color cinematography…shares a closer kinship to Michael Powell’s British-made BLACK NARCISSUS (1947), where color similarly acts as a breathing character amidst turgid, denied emotions of lust, covetousness, dislocation, and death.” —Matthew Kennedy, Bright Lights Film Journal

The Belcourt Theatre does not provide advisories about subject matter or potential triggering content, as sensitivities vary from person to person.

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