I just finished reading Leave Her to Heaven by Ben Ames
Williams, which I mentioned having picked up at City Lights
in SF. I bought it thinking it would be kind of a cross
between Laura and Bedelia. In fact it came out in 1944, the
year between those two books and was the 7th best-selling
novel of that year and although it shares a lot of the same
plot elements as the Vera Caspary novels, I thought it
superior to both. But I think it's more melodrama than noir.
The only crime in the book could be called manslaughter at
best and there was a lot of the Freudian psychology in it
that was popular at the time. Though the femme fatale was a
cold-hearted bitch very reminiscent of Caspary's Bedelia and
as ruthless as any in hardboiled crime fiction.
Then I saw the movie. It would be had to classify it as noir.
It's been argued here, I believe by Jim among others, that
just the simple fact of it being in color disqualifies it
from being noir and I tend to agree with that. If you do a
search on IMDB for films tagged (albeit loosely) with
"noir" you come up with 465 movies, of those only 14 are in
color. That means that 97% of the films tagged "noir" are
black & white. When you start looking over the list of
color films you realize that films like Leave Her to Heaven
and A Kiss Before Dying really aren't noir, so the percentage
is even higher. I've not actually seen a color film pre-1958
that I think stylistically fits in the genre.
Not being color is the least of the disqualifying aspects of
the movie though. It's not urban. It's shot mostly in the
daylight outdoors and, the most disqualifying point of
all--it's not really a crime film. The screenwriter seemed to
overlook the fact that the crime for which one of the
characters goes to jail for at the end was actually written
out of the story leaving many a viewer, I'm sure, scratching
his head at the end.
The movie was also badly miscast with Cornel Wilde and Gene
Tierney and badly acted as well. It was if they were trying
to cash in on the success of Laura, but didn't emulate any of
its style. It certainly could have been made into a film
noir, but ends up not even coming close.
Jeff
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