Leave Her To Heaven at the Charles Theatre

A new restored 35mm print of John Stahl’s LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN Starring Gene Tierney and Cornel Wilde will be the Charles Revival Series' film for this week.


SHOWTIMES:
Saturday, October 10 at Noon
Monday, October 12 at 7 PM
Thursday, October 15 at 9PM

(1945 John M. Stahl) Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price. Chill WIlls. 110 m. Technicolor.


"Gene Tierney as the most fatale femme in movie history provides the red-hot center to John Stahl's magnificently obsessive 'Leave Her to Heaven' (1945), a delirious Technicolor film noir and a hot pick for the Charles' revival series in a superb 35 mm restoration. From the moment Tierney and Cornel Wilde (playing a best-selling writer) meet as strangers on a train, the film exerts a hypnotic pull as murderous romance, courtroom spectacular (with Vincent Price as the DA) and dysfunctional-family tragicomedy: 'There's nothing wrong with [her], it's just that she loves too much!' says Mom."
-Michael Sragow

"STAGGERINGLY BEAUTIFUL... There's neither a bland nor trivial frame in the whole thing. And it was perhaps never more gorgeous since its release than it is now, in the wonderful restoration... A strangely heartening reminder of just how exhilaratingly bizarre Hollywood moviemaking could get!”
-Glenn Kenny

"Mesmerizing! A very special film! A glorious restoration!"
-Martin Scorsese

"(LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN is) a noir from the classic era, only photographed in rococo color and draped in baroque melodrama."
-Bret McCabe

“A MASTERPIECE OF AMERICAN CINEMA. The onscreen melo boils, but Stahl's gaze remains spare and precise,
like an acidic fusion of Ozu and Naruse. The glamour of the film's palette is but a bandage on a festering canker...
God is in the details, but he remains tauntingly at the margins.”
– Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

“Stahl's purpose unfolds only on the big screen, where the blue-velvet skies and the lethally smooth waters
acquire the unquestioned clarity of a fever dream. Color is the lifeblood of the film, Stahl takes the time to feel his way
into the more vivid hues of the heart... Technicolor reaches its astounding apogee in the lips of Gene Tierney, as red as a witch's apple. Each frame of her seems to be hand-tinted.”
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

"SPECTACULAR! Pure drama and pure cine noir, all at the same time, with brilliant, deceptive photography
which knocks the spectator out when he discovers that those pastel shades conceal vast amounts of madness and sordidness. A forerunner of Sirk, but more turbulent... The most frightening film that cinema has given us about the evil of jealousy.”
– Pedro Almodóvar

“Gothic pyschologizing melodrama, so preposterously full-blown and straight-faced that it's a juicy entertainment.”
-Pauline Kael