YMMV / Leave Her to Heaven

• Enforced Method Acting: Darryl Hickman claimed in the DVD audio commentary track that director John M. Stahl treated him terribly during filming and that this factored into his performance, specifically the famous drowning scene. When Stahl received word that Darryl Zanuck and Fox execs had watched the drowning scene in the dailies and were raving about Darryl's performance, Stahl then turned his negativity away from Darryl and onto Cornel Wilde to extract the same performance out of him for the rest of filming. When production wrapped, Hickman claimed that Wilde had walked up to Stahl and said: "I won't forget this. I won't forget the way you've treated me" and walked away.
• She Really Can Act: Gene Tierney had already made a name for herself in Laura the previous year, but was still regarded as just a pretty face by both critics and audiences. Her performance in Leave Her to Heaven shifted the conversation and proved that she could take on a role that demanded almost contradictory qualities from a skilled actress, culminating with her receiving her only Oscar nomination for her performance.
• Funny Moments: A rather dark example, but it still counts. Ellen comes into the house after her failed attempt at reaching out to Richard and sits down alongside her mother, obviously looking for sympathy. Without saying a word or even looking at her, her mother immediately gets up and walks away, making it quite clear that she's in no mood to pander to her. Ellen's astonished expression makes it hard not to at least snicker at the whole sequence.
• Hollywood Homely:
  • Ruth is regarded as plain in comparison to Ellen even though they look almost exactly alike.
  • Ellen herself, when she gets pregnant. She laments how terrible she supposedly looks when she's as beautiful as ever.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • In the remake, a fed-up Richard slapping Ellen and finally walking out on her after she finally admits that she let Danny drown.
  • In the 1945 version, Richard single-handedly reversing the outcome of Ruth's murder trial by determining Ellen had actually committed suicide to frame her sister, defiantly laying out everything that she had done that could make such a thing even conceivable ("A woman who sought to possess everything she loved – who loved only for what it could bring her. Whose love estranged her own father and mother. Whose love possessed her father until he couldn’t call his soul his own. Who - by her own confession to me - killed my brother. Killed her own unborn child. And who is now reaching from the grave to destroy her innocent sister. Yes, she was that sort of monster"). It takes the jury only ten minutes to bring back a verdict of not guilty, which says something considering that minutes earlier the courtroom had practically made up its mind to convict Ruth of premeditated murder.
• Moral Event Horizon: Ellen allowing Danny to drown.
• Signature Scene: The drowning scene.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Ellen when she becomes angry at Richard for inviting her mother and sister to visit at the very start of their married life without even asking her first.
  • James Agee took this to the next level in his review of the film, writing: "Audiences will probably side with the murderess, who spends all of the early reels trying to manage five minutes alone with her husband."
  • This would be especially true if the viewer is led to believe that Ellen is suffering from some form of undiagnosed mental illness (some viewers have suggested borderline personality disorder or bipolar depression, the latter which Gene Tierney herself suffered from throughout her life) - which had it been identified and treated earlier likely would have mitigated some of her worse behavioral issues displayed in the film.

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