Leave Her to Heaven
October 13

Veteran proto-Sirkian melodramatist extraordinaire Stahl (he had already made solid first versions of both Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life by 1935) creates this most propulsive tale of daddy-complex jealousy with the help of flawless snow queen pulchra Gene Tierney and Academy Award–winning Technicolor cinematography by lens god Leon Shamroy (available for gawking in a newly minted print). Has any woman ever looked more awfully gorgeous than when Tierney casts her father's ashes across her chest in that luridly empurpled and incestuous consecration? A young Vincent Price is fantastic, as always, as the troubled girl's jilted fiancé.

—Guy Maddin

• Written by Jo Swerling, from a novel by Ben Ames Williams. Photographed by Leon Shamroy. With Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price. (110 mins, Color, 35mm, From Criterion Pictures/20th Century Fox)