Yale Film Colloquium photo
September 10, 2015 - Gene Tierney’s character in the 1945 melodrama Leave Her to Heaven is not exactly the best role model for young women. She is so jealous of her husband’s attention that she drowns her disabled brother, throws herself down the stairs when she’s pregnant, and even (spoiler alert) kills herself and frames her sister for the murder. But for Kirsty Dootson, a doctoral candidate in Film, Media and Art at Yale University, Tierney and Leave Her to Heaven represent exactly what a lot of women like to see on screen.
“We couldn’t get our heads around the fact that her behavior was so abject, but Gene Tierney was so magnetic,” Dootson said in a recent interview on WNHH radio’s “Deep Focus.” “We thought it would be fantastic to do a series of films featuring women like this.”