Leave Her to Heaven: The Eyes of Ellen Berent

Therein lies the thorn. Because, from the moment they elope, Ellen and Richard are never alone. Prior to their marriage, we learn, Richard (still a bachelor at thirty when he meets Ellen) lived an idyllic homosocial life, residing with his brother, Danny (Darryl Hickman), and their loyal servant and friend, Thorne (Chill Wills), in a remote Maine lodge named Back of the Moon—aptly, as no woman has ever lived there before. And Ellen learns quickly that Richard intends very little to change with his marriage.

And so Ellen finds herself in much the same position she occupied in her own family: an outsider, suspect. If we feel a twinge of sympathy, it is only enhanced by a bit of sneaky business—Ellen’s supposedly unhealthy attachment to her father finds an uncanny echo in Richard’s attachment to his brother, who suffers from partial paralysis. Yet while Ellen’s attachment to her father is “too much,” is pathologized by her resentful mother and sister, Richard’s to his brother is praised, a sign of his kindness and loyalty. What we see, however, as Richard and Danny swim and play like perpetual preadolescents on a camping trip, is that Richard’s attachment enables him to remain a boy forever. If Ellen cannot be the dream wife, perhaps the blame resides partly with Richard.

Ellen thus faces a classic double bind: she is expected to embody the wife-homemaker ideal, yet the movie’s insular, clannish families make that impossible. Stahl and Tierney amplify the sense of familial claustrophobia as Ellen attempts to forge a place for herself in her crowded marriage. In a particularly vivid scene, she climbs into bed to wake her new husband with a lingering kiss. The moment is charged, erotic—until we hear Danny’s chirpy voice and insistent knock through the headboard behind them. Stahl cuts to Danny in bed directly on the other side of the bedroom wall, jauntily wishing Ellen a good morning too. Richard immediately abandons the prospect of sex and knocks back at Danny, suggesting a “dip in the lake before breakfast.”

It is in this stretch of the narrative that we see most clearly the movie’s sympathetic tug toward Ellen. As James Agee wrote in his (negative) review of the film for Time, “Audiences will probably side with the murderess, who spends all of the early reels trying to manage five minutes alone with her husband.” Ellen tells Richard, “Do you know, ever since we’ve been married, we’ve never been alone, not for a single day?” It’s only moments later that we learn Richard has surprised Ellen by inviting her mother and sister for a visit. Cut to Mrs. Berent and Ruth charging across the lake on a motorboat, in a moment staged like the Norman invasion, or the first assault in Jaws. The solution to too much family appears to be more family, and Ellen aptly suggests changing the name from Back of the Moon to Goldfish Manor.

Feeling trapped, Ellen resorts to drastic measures, in the famous scene mentioned at the beginning of this essay: taking a rowboat onto the lake to coach Danny’s swimming, pushing him beyond his limits, and, slowly, her face a smooth mask, watching him drown. Few remember the scene without remembering Ellen’s sunglasses. They suggest an ultimate cool to her that is bloodcurdling and unforgettable. Then, after Danny disappears under the water, something curious happens. As if she has eyes in the back of her head, Ellen turns around and sees Richard in the distance. Swiftly, she removes the glasses and shows us those eyes, and it is chilling. Not because the look is cold—the coldness of her sunglass-sheathed stare—but because it is hot.

Danny’s killing is, by all standards, an unforgivable act, but one that is so baldly monstrous that it inspires a kind of horrified wonder, and Ellen’s gaze lingers with us like an awful dream for the rest of Leave Her to Heaven. In a bit of narrative cunning, however, we now share a secret with Ellen, and therefore experience the same smack of irony that she does upon realizing that even homicide has not solved her problem. Her attempt to force a family of two by eliminating Danny has resulted only in Richard’s despair and alienation, and his move toward Ruth. The solution, suggested by Ruth (with at least a whiff of passive aggression, given her dark view of Ellen), is that Ellen provide Richard with a familial replacement for Danny. And so Ellen attempts to try on the one socially prescribed role left for her: motherhood.

Swiftly, we see Ellen fail at this role-playing too. Even if we conceive of Ellen as the villain, her open declarations of discomfort and entrapment within her pregnant body feel wildly subversive. Much attention has been paid to the lake scene, but perhaps even more radical is Ellen’s response to her pregnancy, which she sees as deforming her body, slowing her down, and promising her nothing in terms of her husband’s devotions. She tells Ruth that she hates the “little beast” inside her, a shocking declaration that underlines her pathological narcissism. At the same time, however, the declaration—offered as the camera emphasizes Tierney’s costumed bulk and her character’s unhappiness—also serves as a sly acknowledgment of something that all mothers may have felt at one moment or another. Ellen says the things women think but cannot say. Her unspeakable acts may have offered female viewers a cathartic relief from the era’s gender imperatives and an exorcism of their own forbidden feelings and longings.

As if to once again be reminded of what Ellen is up against, we learn that Richard, along with Mrs. Berent and Ruth (at this point plainly a rival for Richard’s attentions), has planned yet another surprise: the destruction of her father’s laboratory to create a nursery for the baby. Knowing as they do of Ellen’s love for her father—not to mention her aversion to surprises—the act feels patently hostile, and Ellen’s pain intensely real. If classic film noir involves men finding themselves hopelessly caught in a web from which there is no escape, it is Ellen here who seems trapped. As the movie charges toward its inevitable ending, we come to understand that Ellen, doomed to fail in a series of impossible roles, would rather, like Jane Eyre’s madwoman Bertha Mason, burn the place down.

The last lines of Leave Her to Heaven return us to the frame narrative, reminding us that it is purportedly attorney and friend Glen Robie who is telling the story. Echoing those early scenes of Ellen’s loved ones making damning pronouncements about her competitive drive, Glen concludes that, given the ultimate outcome, “I guess it’s the only time she didn’t come out first.” But the movie itself seems far from sure. Even as Glen has the last word, it’s Ellen’s parting pledge to Richard that reverberates over the movie’s final scenes: “I’ll never let you go . . .” We feel her hovering over Richard and Ruth as they are entangled in her revenge plans. We feel her in the cruel irony of the closing moments, when we see Richard and Ruth ready to build a life together—just the two of them, as Ellen dreamed of for herself. Such happiness is forbidden to Ellen, who wanted too much, her arms stretched, as in that opening dust-jacket image, up into the heavens.