![\"colin08\"](\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/colin08.jpg\")
<\/a>The Ben Affleck blockbuster movie Gone Girl<\/em> is the stuff of water-cooler talk. But if you really want to be in the know about Gone Girl<\/em>, the trip will take you to Maine. And Gone Girl<\/em> author Gillian Flynn is the first to acknowledge it.<\/p>\nIn a Huffington Post<\/em> interview, Flynn counts among her top three \u2018must-see thriller movies\u2019 \u201cOoh\u2026Leave Her to Heaven<\/em>. It\u2019s sort of an old femme noir with Gene Tierney. It is one of the all-time best, a domestic thriller.\u201d<\/p>\n Consider the plot of Leave Her to Heaven<\/em> (so much a forerunner of Gone Girl<\/em> the English newspaper The Guardian<\/em> brings it up in a review): \u201cWhen the film shifts to Amy\u2019s perspective in the second act, the film gestures toward turning her into a juicy femme fatale \u00e0 la Gene Tierney from John Stahl\u2019s Leave Her to Heaven<\/em>\u2014a nasty Technicolor noir in which a gorgeous and gingham-dressed, if more-than-slightly sociopathic housewife kills herself and frames her husband for it\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n The Leave Her to Heaven<\/em> inspiration appears in the October 6 New Yorker<\/em> review, too. So am I saying everything cool comes from Maine? Well, this is Portland Monthly Magazine<\/em>.<\/p>\n Leave Her to Heaven<\/em> was years ahead of its time in charting the emotional arc of a dark-hearted babe.<\/p>\n Bangor, Maine novelist Ben Ames Williams (1889-1954) wrote Leave Her to Heaven<\/em> in 1944. What\u2019s great about Williams is, he dared to create complicated female lead characters with rich, dark dimensions when the American pop culture was still 15 years away from launching Barbie dolls. I\u2019d have to write SPOILER ALERT if I even started to tell you the plot of Leave Her to Heaven<\/em>. Instead, do for Maine writer Williams what you did for Flynn. Download this novel with Maine settings (lakeside, at a camp called Back of the Moon, and Bar Harbor) on your Kindle. All I\u2019ll say is, Ellen makes a hell of a lousy lifeguard.<\/p>\n Or, if you\u2019re a film buff like Flynn (her dad\u2019s a film professor), watch the 1945 movie, which stars Gene Tierney as evil Ellen, Cornel Wilde, and Vincent Price.<\/p>\n Even darker is Williams\u2019s delicious novel The Strange Woman<\/em>, set in Bangor. Here\u2019s the elevator pitch: The Redcoats overrun Bangor, humiliating the men defending the town. As the invaders formally march in, a beautiful little sprite breaks away from the Yankee line, runs across the field, and starts flirting with the British soldiers. And this little girl is just getting started\u2026<\/p>\n Which renders her yet another devilishly powerful female lead character decades ahead of the 21st century, and like Flynn\u2019s Amy, more than just a complicated woman.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone knows that \u2018complicated\u2019 is a code\u00a0word for bitch,\u201d Flynn jokes in Gone Girl<\/em>. But an ocean away, Flynn the writer takes things a little deeper in The Guardian<\/em>. \u201cI don\u2019t write psycho bitches,\u201d Flynn says in her interview. \u201cThe psycho bitch is just crazy\u2013she has no motive, and so she\u2019s a dismissible person because of her psycho-bitchiness.\u201d<\/p>\n There has to be something more. Maine\u2013you\u2019ve got to love us for our lobsters, pine trees, and our, shall we say, \u201chigh-maintenance\u201d ladies.<\/p>\n November 2014 The Ben Affleck blockbuster movie Gone Girl is the stuff of water-cooler talk. But if you really want to be in the know about Gone Girl, the trip will take you to Maine. And Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn is the first to acknowledge it. In a Huffington Post interview, Flynn counts among […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":247,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[87],"class_list":["post-10144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editor","tag-november-2014"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10144"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14444,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10144\/revisions\/14444"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"