Artists Space

Leave Her to Heaven

Postponed: Film Screening
March 15, 2020, 7pm

Due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19, Artists Space and Light Industry will be rescheduling all programs related to A Film Club for Adrienne Kennedy.

Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945, 111 mins)

Nothing suited the moral ambivalences of postwar America more perfectly than the genre later known as film noir. A distinctive variation on this idiom, shot in Technicolor and doubling as a melodrama, is John Stahl's devastating Leave Her to Heaven, featuring Gene Tierney as the femme fatale. As with other stars of the era, Tierney functioned as a surface for reflection in Kennedy's psyche. "When Gene Tierney drowned her husband's young brother in the middle of a lake, I had no idea that sixteen years later I would find expression for the despair of one of my characters by using the same image, drowning in a lake," the playwright notes. "And it would be a main character based on myself."

Leave Her to Heaven is screened at Artists Space as part of A Film Club for Adrienne Kennedy, presented in partnership with Light Industry.

A woman in a white dress with gold bracelets and red lipstick leans against a tree. Her left arms rests on a tree branch, and her right hand is on her hip.
Film Still for Leave Her to Heaven, 1945. [A woman in a white dress with gold bracelets and red lipstick leans against a tree. Her left arms rests on a tree branch, and her right hand is on her hip.]