In 1945, after several years of wartime heroines battling their troubles cheerfully for the sake of their men, American audiences were treated to two films about women who loved, not wisely, but far, far too well. Mildred Pierce , a Joan Crawford vehicle about a woman’s obsessive devotion to her worthless offspring, and Leave Her to Heaven, a movie which showcased Gene Tierney, at the radiant height of her beauty, as a young bride who killed people in order to keep her husband all to herself. Both films portrayed female love not as a source of comfort or strength, but as a noose around someone’s neck. And both were major box-office hits. Mildred Pierce would win an Oscar for Joan Crawford’s performance while Leave Her to Heaven won for Leon Shamroy’s breathtaking Technicolor cinematography. No murderess ever looked as good as Tierney looked in that film, her blue-green eyes echoing the sapphire tint of the shadows behind her. Even while audiences gasped at her crimes, it was impossible not to be enraptured by the otherworldly sunsets, glittering lakes, and extravagant sets that Tierney stalked through in her quest to hold Cornel Wilde’s attention. And yet, critics of the time seemed curiously dismissive of Leave Her to Heaven and viewed its Technicolor beauty as so much extra tinsel. Bosley Crowther carped that the film was “a piece of cheap fiction done up in Technicolor and expensive sets.” James Agee mused that “the story’s central idea might be plausible enough in a dramatically lighted black-and-white picture or in a radio show with plenty of organ background…but in the rich glare of Technicolor, all its rental-library characteristics are doubly glaring.” Agee’s take on the film’s vibrant color cinematography is a classic example of the old studio bias that Technicolor should be used only for musicals, epics, and light entertainment. Black-and-white on the other hand, was meant for either serious dramas or twisted crime thrillers. From 1939 through 1966, the Academy awarded a separate Oscar for best black-and-white cinematography and best color. And in those years, the black-and-white winners included films such as The Naked City (1948), A Place in the Sun (1951), The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), and The Hustler (1961). The color winners were films like An American in Paris (1951), The Quiet Man (1952), Gigi (1958), and Ben-Hur (1959). Technicolor was seen as too distracting; it made things seem larger than life. It was also a much more expensive film process and as such, was generally awarded to films that were designated crowd-pleasers. Leave Her to Heaven, a film whose heroine killed innocent boys, induced her own miscarriage, framed people for murder and had implied incestuous yearnings for her dead father, was not the typical 1945 idea of escapist entertainment. However, the Technicolor in Leave Her to Heaven is utterly vital to the film’s story. It can’t be dismissed as either a distraction for undemanding audiences or even as an example of beauty for beauty’s sake. While most filmmakers would have made Leave Her to Heaven in the style of a traditional film noir with moody black-and-white cinematography that would entrap the characters (Mildred Pierce is a fine example of the classic noir look), Leon Shamroy and director John Stahl create a world that’s just as lovely as its heroine. But unlike Gene Tierney, whose performance is a marvel of coolly contained, whispering madness, the Technicolor loudly clamors for attention. It expresses all the insane emotions that the murderess Ellen can’t openly admit. She is playing the part of a conventional wife, after all. Ellen is not the most expressive of film psychopaths. Her most famous scene, the drowning of her husband’s brother Danny is one of the most terrifyingly quiet murder scenes in film history. She takes the boy out to the lake to practice his swimming. She waits in the boat as he swims alongside her, chatting cheerfully. Her eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, Ellen watches in silence as Danny gets seized by a cramp and starts to sink under the water. He calls her name and she continues to look back at him. The only other sound is the lap of the waves against her boat. When he finally goes under for the last time, Ellen whips off the sunglasses, her eyes narrowed with utter hatred. For the briefest of seconds, the madness is revealed. Otherwise, Ellen is almost the perfect model of serene privilege. She dismisses a jilted fiancée, a district attorney, with utter composure, saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll still be able to vote for you.” She can cook good dinners, talk about hunting, wear the latest fashions. But when Ellen’s jealousy takes hold of her, Tierney never plays it big. Instead, her face goes still and masklike, her eyes staring off into the distance. She’s like a snake coiling up, ready to strike. And yet, as terrifying as she is, there’s a tragic dimension to Ellen. She can’t admit her desire to keep Richard to herself, devoid of any other human contact, because that’s not what the perfect wife does. It’s not what a sane person does. In spite of similar themes, Leave Her to Heaven is almost the funhouse mirror reflection of Mildred Pierce. Gene Tierney’s performance is as quiet and subtle as Joan Crawford’s performance is vivid and tormented. Ellen’s obsession with her husband is written in dramatic purples and reds and blues, while Mildred’s devotion to her nasty daughter is played out in furtive shadows. Both films are fantastic. But Mildred’s love is like the love of any noir hero for his femme fatale, the guilty but helpless feeling of somebody who deep down knows better. It makes sense for her story to wear the chiaroscuro of a crime film. Ellen’s love on the other hand, is proud and demanding and greedy. It doesn’t allow for remorse or failure. And the Technicolor represents it perfectly, crowning her like the mad queen of a fairy land. Compared to the wisecracking and nervous characters of Mildred Pierce, the supporting cast of Leave Her to Heaven seems prematurely entombed. Just contrast Eve Arden’s breezy one-liners in Mildred Pierce (“Alligators have the right idea—they eat their young”) with Mary Philips’ understated diagnosis of her daughter’s psychosis: “There’s nothing wrong with Ellen, she just loves too much.” Tierney is so remote and icy in her perfection that it would seem almost impossible to find any connection to her. But John Stahl directs Ellen’s ostensibly normal family members in performances that are bizarrely detached. During Richard’s first evening with the family, her mother and Ruth rebuff his attempts at conversation with a simple, “Ellen’s gone outside.” In essence, they resign him to his fate as coolly as if he were a virgin sacrifice. Later, when Ruth is forced to admit her secret passion for Richard in a courtroom (it’s that kind of movie), Jeanne Crain barely blinks an eye or moves a muscle. Even Vincent Price, playing Ellen’s former fiancée, clips all the humor from his delivery. “I’m still in love with you and I always will be,” he tells her, glaring down with all the tenderness a boss might give to a recalcitrant union worker. There’s a subtle suggestion in Leave Her to Heaven that all of these people are in some sense, removed from any deeper emotion. They mouth all the right sentiments but something’s always off. Why do they crowd around Ellen but look at her with so little affection? Ellen may be evil but at least she feels things and acts upon them. Cut off from any connection to the supporting cast, the audience has little choice but to sympathize with Ellen in her quest to just get the hell away with her man. The alternative to the Arctic chill of the Berents and their cohorts is the stalwart wholesomeness of Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde). Wilde, with his puppy-dog eyes and wooden line reading may seem miscast at first as the object of Tierney’s Wagnerian passion. In fact, he’s perfect as the personification of bland niceness, the kind of nice guy that Hollywood films liked to reward. Richard gets the best of everything: beautiful houses, loyal friends, a successful writing career, and a gorgeous wife that “wants to do everything for him.” He gets it all without showing a trace of real effort or determination. Wilde’s vague discomfort in his role suggests that he’s every bit as baffled by his triumphs as you are. He flirts clumsily with Ellen, she soon responds with a marriage proposal. Wilde’s expression is that of a man who’s lobbed a baseball over a fence, only to have an entire fleet of M1 Abrams tanks show up at his doorstep. The portrayal of hapless Richard Harland makes sense when you view him, not so much as a character, but as a representation of the American consumer. Because that’s the other aspect of Leave Her to Heaven’s visuals: the idealization of American life. Everything looks as glossy and perfectly staged as a magazine ad. When Ellen dives into a pool, she’s surrounded by rose trellises and fluffy clouds. Not a hair is displaced under her bathing cap. She wanders restlessly through rooms with elaborate floral wallpaper, the posies so large she almost disappears amidst them. Richard’s remote cabin is a large and cozy lodge, stuffed with hunting trophies and plush couches. There isn’t a single surface in this film that doesn’t look beautiful, expensive, and utterly untouched. And Ellen herself is part and parcel of that unreal perfection. She’s just another dream product, the perfect wife that Richard takes, not because he loves her, but because she’s the epitome of what men are supposed to want. Leon Shamroy’s use of Technicolor fulfills two functions simultaneously. It tells the story of hidden passion and obsessions, emotions that Ellen herself can’t express any other way than murder. And it uses hyper-real visuals to seduce the audience, lulling them with visions of what they can’t have before gleefully revealing it as a lie. The perfect wife is an obsessive destroyer. The successful husband is a weak victim. They are both being choked by the roles they have chosen. And in the end, everyone will suffer for it. Leave Her to Heaven takes its title from Hamlet and the Ghost’s dismissal of Gertrude to the mercies of the afterlife. But in fact, the more appropriate Shakespeare line to sum up this movie, its heroine, and its unforgettable use of color is from Macbeth. “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t.” In this movie, the monstrous is always lurking under the beautiful. Aubyn Eli blogs about color movies—and a whole of black-and-white ones—at The Girl with the White Parasol.