Leave Her to Heaven (1945) on Netflix
Passed19451h 50mDramaFilm-NoirRomance
Novelist Richard Harland meets Ellen Berent, a Boston socialite, on a train in New Mexico. He reminds her of her father, and the two marry quickly. Her love for him is possessive.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.6/1017,259 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes84%
Trailer
Plot summary
Ellen Berent, a Boston socialite, travels to New Mexico with her mother and her cousin Ruth to scatter her father's ashes. On the train she meets the novelist Richard Harland, who reminds her of the father she adored. The two turn out to be guests of the same friends, and a romance follows. Her estranged fiancé, Russell Quinton, an attorney, arrives, and Ellen announces she will marry Richard at once. They wed in Warm Springs, Georgia, and settle at his lodge beside a lake in northern Maine. Married life looks fine at first, but Ellen grows jealous of everyone and everything he cares about.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Child actor Darryl Hickman, who played Danny, said the lake water was so cold that his stunt double refused the swimming scenes, so he did them himself; he got a muscle cramp and nearly drowned until a crew member jumped in and pulled him out.
SPOILER
The PCA demanded that the script make clear that Ellen kills her unborn child because she thinks the baby will replace her in her husband's affections, not because she is misshapen, to avoid any flavour of abortion.- Twentieth Century Fox executive Darryl F. Zanuck spent an exorbitant $100,000 in May 1944 for the rights to Ben Ames Williams's novel, a month before the book was even published.
- A draft submitted to the PCA in February 1945 was disapproved for overtly implying that Richard and Ellen had had an illicit sexual affair before their marriage; the screenplay was approved once the affair was minimised.
