Leave Her to Heaven

Leave Her to Heaven is a 1945 American film directed by John M. Stahl, starring Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, and Vincent Price. Adapted by screenwriter Jo Swerling from the 1944 novel of the same name by Ben Ames Williams, the film concerns a socialite whose marriage to a prominent novelist spurs a violent, obsessive, and dangerous jealousy in her. Shot in Technicolor, filming took place in several locations in California, as well as Arizona and New Mexico in the summer of 1945. Leave Her to Heaven was released in the United States theatrically on December 20, 1945. The film was a box-office hit, grossing over $8 million, and was Twentieth Century-Fox's highest-grossing film of the entire decade. In the decades following its release, Leave Her to Heaven garnered a cult following and has been the subject of critical analysis for its unique blurring of genres including the psychological thriller, melodrama and film noir. It has also been noted for its numerous visual and narrative references to figures in Greek mythology. The film's title is drawn from William Shakespeare's Hamlet, in which the Ghost urges Hamlet not to seek vengeance against Queen Gertrude, but rather to "leave her to heaven, and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her." In 2018, the film was selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."