shock of the new; it’s the shock of the same old misogyny played yet again. They now provide politically correct analysis with old films on TCM, not sure how long it will last, I hate it. That is sort of what I am doing here. No, it’s defintely not. I can’t tell you how much I admire the misogyny of Leave Her to Heaven. Don't get me wrong -- I don’t admire misogyny in itself, just the expert expression of it. This is vile but extremely adept propaganda; the problem being that the people who denounce it are all too ready to produce vile propaganda of their own, which is what a ‘pro-women’ film would be. For years I was accused of writing gay propaganda by people who hadn’t ever seen my plays; for me, this was the supreme irony, as I was regularly castigated and ultimately exiled from my own community for being anti-gay. I worked with Martha Cronyn many years ago (yes she was related to Hume, and was a marvelous actress — but so incredibly insecure; I spent most of my time trying to convince her she had talent). Anyway when one of my earliest plays The Dressing Gown was mired in controversy, she took me aside and meekly inquired (meekness was her trademark) ‘Why do you hate gay men so much, Sky?” I didn’t hate them any more than I hated anyone else, the problem was my fundamental misanthropy and my hatred of hypocrisy. But back then I was trying to write 'message plays.' Anyway, when I set out to deconstruct the misogyny of a minor masterpiece of hate literature called Leave Her to Heaven, I am trying to make all and sundry (the 98 people who occasionally read this blog) aware that all art is political, but that it is our job as artists to try and not make art that is consciously so, to not think we have failed if they ‘didn’t get the point’ but rather, if they do. For there must be something else, beyond the mundane didactic, the quotidian preaching ('Wear a mask, save your mother!') that is our lot, even in this pandemic world. I wish I could say Leave Her to Heaven transcends sexual politics; it certainly tries. It is an adaption of a novel, ergo very pretentious. And the title comes from Shakespeare (Hamlet’s curse on his mother) and Shakespeare -- though not at all misogynistic himself -- lived in a very misogynistic era. But he would have been bored by Leave Her to Heaven, because in almost every play he wrote, he in some way or another acknowledged women’s desire, and hardly ever blamed it for evil. The play also has a line in it that echoes Othello. When the statuesque Cornel Wilde is trying to figure out what’s wrong with his crazy obsessive new wife Gene Tierney (very windblown, sparkly-eyed and wet-lipped, yes, this is Oscar worthy stuff!) his mother-in-law says “She loves too much.” This is almost, but not quite -- ‘loved not wisely but too well.’ But Othello doing that is nothing like a woman doing it, especially when she is drowning in feminine virtue. Women love, you say? Well this one loves too much. Women care you say? This one cares to the point of suffocation. Women would do everything for the man they love? Well this one kills her disabled brother-in-law (who she labels ‘a cripple’ -- in a deliciously detestable, politically incorrect moment, even then) and then murders her unborn child by throwing herself down a very lovely flight of blue carpeted stairs. “I wish the little beast was dead” she mutters. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say — not that Gene Tierney is too feminine -- but that she picks only one of the feminine virtues (i.e. loving ‘her man’) and plays it to death, ignoring love for ‘family’ and love for ‘children.’ And this is where we get to the essence of the film’s vile misogyny. Cornel might as well be naked in this film; my ex-ray vision kept seeing through his clothes. He often removed shirts and displayed his magnificent chest and arms in films — not so here, but you know they are there, He was a sex symbol of the highest order, and from the moment Gene Tierney sets eyes on him she wants him. The fact that she is framed as a desiring woman should be evident from the fact that she proposes to him; or rather she announces they are getting married and then proposes -- to his chagrin. Yes — there is some Freudian stuff tossed in (he looks like her father) as this is 1945 when Freud was chic, but the fact is that she wants to be screwed by him night and day. Any woman who wants this is a demon, we all know it, a child killer (isn’t that what all those promiscuous women do — have lots of sex, get pregnant all the time, and then abort their children?). You can say that Leave Her to Heaven is some sort of universal parable (and I hate them as a rule) about anybody who loves too much but there is far too much misogynistic cultural baggage swirling around the prototypical image of the unnaturally horny, destructive female for that idea to be ‘universal.’ What exactly is the difference between ‘loves to much and ‘desires to much’ when Cornel Wilde is the object in question? Gorgeous Gene Tierney just sits in her little boat watching little crippled Danny drown (Darryl Hickman played the guileless Danny; his brother was Dwayne Hickman who starred in Dobie Gillis), wearing the most divine sunglasses, and we know it’s all just so she can get back to the house and screw Cornel Wilde one more time. What could be a more appalling example of homicidal female lust? Blanche Dubois at least has our sympathy: Tennessee Williams loved her even more than he loved Stanley (who Williams treats quite self-consciously as a sexual object). (Apparently the reason he cast Marlon Brando as Stanley was Brando quite successfully fixed a leak in his Provincetown plumbing -- and yes that is a dirty joke, and yes I owe it to a Cole Porter song and also to a line from Hello Dolly). It’s that kind of technical mastery we truly feminine creatures love. I’m in a good mood because I got a 'booty call' last night. I had to put him off until tonight, (poor boy). For yes, I am, unabashedly, a desiring woman. But -- you will note -- not a murderous one. If you can only get that through your head! What I mean is: desire is not murder. Although an orgasm seems like a little death. Let me tell you, we should all be so lucky.
