What I was going to write about this evening was Leave Her to Heaven, John Stahl’s 1945 “classic.” My Facebook friend Brooks Peters mentioned it today, saying that his vacation aerie in the Thousand Islands reminded him of Behind the Moon, the rustic Maine camp beloved by brothers Dick and Dan Harland before the poisonous Ellen Berent enters Dick’s life. (Cornel Wilde, Darryl Hickman, and Gene Tierney, respectively). The film, shot in a hyper-super-duper Technicolor so saturated that, by today’s more naturalistic standards, the actors appear to be dying of makeup, is so astonishingly dated that you wait for Sarah Bernhardt, Henry Irving, or perhaps even Louis XIV to show up. Alfred Newman’s music makes you long for the wit and wisdom of All About Eve, which he would score a few years later.  

So I thought I’d watch Leave Her to Heaven, even though I wasn’t really in the mood for one of Darryl Zanuck’s attempts to capture the glories of the great outdoors in a sound stage, while killing his actors with makeup. I got as far as the chilling scene with the doctor at Warm Springs, where Dan is recovering, if that is the word, from polio. “But he’s a cripple,” Ellen blurts out. The doctor is appalled, and hastily accepts Ellen’s assurance that she didn’t mean it. You have to see the movie to know why all of this is so dramatic, but even then it’s not clear whether Ellen is a damaged innocent or an unscrupulous narcissist. On the page, she’s clearly the latter, but the camera prefers her to be a minor force of nature — sweet, but dangerous when crossed. The whole grandeur of Leave Her to Heaven comes from the unresolved tension, if you ask me, between these readings. Speaking of reading, I haven’t read Ben Ames Williams’s novel, but I expect that the movie is faithful to certain big scenes but completely out of tune with the book’s tone. But maybe not. Ben Ames Williams, after all, has not come down to us as a writer to be read.

And then there is Vincent Price.

But it’s late, too late to be clipping stills from the DVD and then writing them up. That will have to wait. For the moment, it’s amusing as well as refreshing to imagine that Brooks Peters is enjoying the crystalline conditions that his photos at Facebook suggest while we suffer the first bad summer day of the year. It is not particularly warm in New York, but the air is close and dead. Even Ms NOLA was praying for rain earlier today.

I am reading two wonderful books, although it’s hard to tell which one of them is the bigger downer, story-wise: Methland, by Nick Reding, and A Meaningful Life, by L J Davis. The latter is, all things considered, amazingly funny — the novel that James Thurber never wrote, and couldn’t have written, for obvious reasons, in 1971. Methland gives rise to feelings of the wildest indignation, but without fixing a target (so far). The descriptions of melting skin and decaying brains that litter Mr Reding’s account of bad times in Iowa do seem, however, to have a lot in common with death by makeup.  

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Gotham Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.