Customer Reviews

All That Heaven Allows (The Criterion Collection)

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Watching one of Douglas Sirk's 50's melodramas is slightly akin to visiting another planet. Everything about the Sirk reality is a bit askew: the people are basic and sincere, while their surroundings are heightened, beautiful and artificial (we know certain exterior scenes are filmed on sets, but the sets themselves are so big and elaborate they boggle the mind). It's a strange mix -- simple characters in an exaggerated world, almost like a David Lynch movie in which the only violence that occurs is emotional.

But if you give Sirk's movies time and attention and allow yourself to be taken in by the strangeness, they are surprisingly easy to accept on their own terms.

Sirk's 1955 film, "All That Heaven Allows," tells the story of the romance between a well-to-do widow and a young, dreamy, non-conformist gardener. It's the oldest problem in the world: they could be happy and in love if only it weren't for the other people around them.

I think the key to the success of this film is the performance of Jane Wyman as the widow. Her character is so fragile, yet also surprisingly strong. She says no more than she has to, but what she does say speaks on many levels. She's kind, but she's also after something she clearly wants very badly. Wyman is able to communicate these contradictions and complications with a calm, almost effortless stoicism.

The Criterion DVD is a marvel of technology. It has quickly become my favorite disk and there are a lot of disks that I like -- the picture and transfer are unbelievably crisp, the colors are richer than wet paint, the movie is restored to its proper aspect ratio, and you also get Fassbinder's essay on Sirk (he remade this movie in thoroughly different form with a film called "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul"), and there's also a long, fascinating interview with Sirk himself -- I'd never seen or heard any footage of the director until I saw this and the interview alone made it worth buying.

If you're a fan of Sirk, you're going to love this disk. And if you're not familiar with his work, this is the place to start.

All That Heaven Allows is a remarkable story about an older woman, Cary Scott (Jane Wyman), falling in love with a younger man, Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), which was something unthinkable in the 1950's. Their love for each other seems to be doomed from the beginning with children pressuring Cary and a town that is full of malicious gossip. Ron disregards the public outcry against their love, but it is not as easy for Cary who has lived most of her life with the same societal policies that are now harming their love for each other. All That Heaven Allows offers a thoughtful story of social restrictions that might hamper the development of human beings and it does so with a brilliant cinematic experience.

From the opening shots of a small (presumably a New England setting, although I am not sure where this was actually filmed) town during fall, to the bright blue car that pulls up to Jane Wyamn's home, to Agnes Morehead's head turning shade of lipstick, you know that "All That Heaven Allows" is firmly rooted in the 1950s. It's nice to see Douglas Sirk getting the critical appreciation he deserves (most recently with the full length Sirk homage "Far from Heaven".) This film is gorgeously photographed (pay attention to the scene where Wyman and daughter confer in the light of the stained glass window) and well told. While this film can hardly be called a "hard hitting" look at 1950s society at first glance, the more you watch it, the more the subversiveness comes through. One of the most telling moments is the conversation between Jane Wyman and the wife of Rock Hudson's friend who talks about realizing how caught up she and her husband were in material trappings and how they opted out of that lifestyle. This conversation (and indeed this film) is just as resonant and important today where materialism is rampant and the longings underneath the surface are never explored.

Rock Hudson is fine as Jane Wyman's landscaper/love interest. He's an incredibly good-looking man and is the recipient of one the film's funniest lines when Wyman asks him "Would you prefer I was a man?" Of course, this line is only funny in hindsight now that we know what we do about Hudson's life. Agnes Morehead (pre-Endora) is also very good as Wyman's best friend.

As somebody who was only familiar with Jane Wyman from her work as the devious Angela Channing on "Falcon Crest" (a role she truly must have relished), it is nice to see her playing much more sympathetic characters in her heyday. The eeriest thing is that despite a few wrinkles as she got older, Wyman always looked the same. Wyman is very good in this film as she vascillates between the financial stability of the upper crust and the emotional satisfaction of life with Hudson. I highly recommend this film, and cant say enough good things about it. If you're not a fan of soap opera melodrama, you may want to stay away, but it's your loss as this is a gorgeous film that deserves the respect years of scrutiny have given it.

All That Heaven Allows is my favourite Sirk film. All his characteristic stylistic trademarks are present: high contrast lighting; precise, tight framing; expressive colour; and frequent use of reflected images and domestic interiors framed through objects like screens and windows that suggest confinement and entrapment. Sirk is dealing here with lives repressed by social conventions and projections of surface respectability.

Rock Hudson's gentle gardener Ron falls for well-heeled New England widow Cary (Jane Wyman) but is faced with interference from her grown-up children, her friends and social circle, as well as the hide-bound morality and hypocrisy of the small town community. One of this film's incidental pleasures is the presentation of an older woman/younger man liaison in a 1955 film with dignity and a total lack of self-consciousness.

Sirk details the milieu with telling examples of how family togetherness can suffocate emotional growth; how bourgeois comfort and wealth can create spiritual emptiness; and how patronising and mean-spirited much of a community's apparent kindness and concern actually is. Against Ron's Thoreau-inspired "natural man", the artificial offerings of Stoningham's elite are shown as a spiritual wasteland, best summated in a telling image of Cary's tortured face reflected in the TV set she didn't want, but that her children thought she "had to have" for Christmas.

The film is full of beautifully worked out images and set pieces that perfectly capture the characters' inner lives and moral dilemmas. Sirk's high contrast lighting in one of the film's memorable scenes precisely expresses the anguish felt by Ron as Cary tries to reconcile her divided loyalties towards her children, her friends and the only life she has known on the one hand; and her strongly aroused romantic/sexual awakening to a man unwilling to compromise his view of his personal integrity on the other.

Oppositions which create the gulfs between their respective worlds abound:the warm, burnished browns of the old mill house interiors lovingly restored by Ron contrast with the hard, marble white surfaces surrounding Cary's living room/fireplace area; its sense of order and tradition is unfavourably compared with the roughly-crafted log cabin style interiors that characterise the home of Hudson's friends Mick and Alida where a laidback life style encourages friends to just drop in and party on; the Stoningham Country Club's vicious and predatory colony of gossips, cheating men on the prowl (Howard), loveless marriages (Mona) and incongruous older men/young bimbo couplings sets in further relief the love, respect and warmth of Mick and Alida's circle
with its impromptu dancing, sing-songs and free-for-all sharing and giving in all senses. This extended sequence, at the film's midpoint, provides a kind of "coming out" for Cary and an awakening on several levels.

Another insightful parallel contrasts the relative suitabilities of Harvey (Conrad Nagel) and Ron as prospective marriage partners for Cary. Outwardly, Harvey has it all over Ron. Cary's children approve of him, he is courteous and respectful in a traditional way (presumably in the mould of her late husband whose friend he was), he mixes in and is approved of by Cary's social circle, and in the eyes of Cary's daughter (the wonderfully precocious Gloria Talbott), he "acts his age" (read sexless). Ron, on the other hand, is from a lower social class (note Ned's haughty response: "The only Kirby I know is old Kirby, the gardener"), he doesn't half try to fit into Cary's world, he drives the wrong kind of car, and is clearly sexually potent. But observe Cary's face when Harvey suggests she'd hardly want romance or that type of thing in a marriage and you realize why in the end it's no contest. Harvey can mix a mean cocktail and has distant memories of male bonding with Cary's departed husband; but Ron has a magnificent window (to his large, open soul) and following the film's deus ex machina which finally brings the lovers together, the appearance of the deer suggests the coming of Spring to Cary's wintry life and no doubt after Ron is nursed back to health by her loving hand, he will be for her as strong and erect as one of his beautiful trees. From the frying pan into the fire? Perhaps. Sirk is robust in critiquing the destructive, materialist, narrow, constricting ethos of small town middle America but he is far from judgmental of some of its victims.

Reuniting from the previous year's hit, "Magnificent Obsession", Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson play lovers torn apart by small town hypocrisy. Wyman is wealthy widow, Cary Scott. She falls in love with her gardener, Ron Kirby(Hudson),and is chastised by her community and loathed by her two grown children. Great, elegant melodrama from director-extraordinarre Douglas Sirk. The film starts off a bit slow, but the dramatic payoff is highly worth the wait. The cinematography, muisc, and dialogue all come together for a beautiful film event.

This gorgeously melodramatic potboiler was made in the mid-50's just as Jane Wyman's star power was waning and Rock Hudson was becoming a superstar. But All That Heaven Allows is most memorable as a study of small town intolerance, now it's portrayal of a world that is mostly picture perfect - at least for the inhabitants of Stonington, Connecticut where the movie is set - comes across as rather quaint.

These days All That Heaven Allows is most notable for forming the basis of the brilliant Julianne Moore film Far From Heaven, out a few years ago. Both have the same visual look - white churches, nice homes and beautiful trees - and both films attempt to skewer societal narrow-mindedness. Yet there are obvious differences: Far From Heaven dealt with racial and sexual politics, while this film - keeping mindful of the time it was made - mines the effects of class and economic status.

Carey Scott (Wyman) is a middle-aged widow, living a quietly domestic life in Stonington. She has a lovely home and two devoted children, she's also a pillar of society and cares a lot about her standing in the community. Yet Carey is also a fragile and lonely woman, and there's a part of her that aches for some kind of emotional connection.

She has a number of wealthy men, who routinely court her, but it is Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) who she is ultimately drawn to, he's a tall, muscular and handsome young man who customarily prunes her trees. Ron is not a dolt; he's a college educated, intuitive and sensitive, but over the years, has learnt to spurn the trappings of society. Uncomplicated and trouble-free, he lacks the phony polish and sophistication of Carey's city friends.

An outdoorsman - Ron lives in a picturesque cabin by a bubbling stream in the country and has lots of artists, writers and has lots of fun loving bohemian friends who regularly come to visit him. Carey seems to represent everything, Ron is rebelling against; however, the two soon fall in love, swept up by their mutual attraction. There initial courtship is tempered by Cary's insecurities - it's not so much the class as the age difference - she is older by a decade.

Problems also arise when Carey's prudish and snobbish children (William Reynolds and Gloria Talbott) turn on her for wanting to marry a gardener, some one of a lower class; they see him as some type of gigolo, a big shot who obviously has no real money of his own, and is content to feed off their mother's wealth. Resistance also comes from Carey's oppressive society ladies. Her best friend Sara (Agnes Moorehead) - while staying loyal to Carey - warns her that there are those on the town who will talk.

Carey's friends pretend to be urbane and classy but they lack refinement. In fact, they're all rather petty and shallow. When Carey invites Ron to one of Sara's soirée's, her guests anxiously stare out the window, waiting for Ron to show up so that they can sink their talons into him - he is their quarry, and thing to be ridiculed, especially by Mona, the town gossip (Jacqueline De Witt).

Wyman and Hudson are both standouts as Carey and Ron; Wyman does a great job of playing this damaged, vulnerable women who has been going through life letting other people - mostly her hypocritical and selfish children - make most of the big decisions for her. And the gorgeous Rock is exemplary as the sophisticated, and extremely good-looking muscle stud who sweeps Carey off her feet with his tender and sensitive side.

All That Heaven Allows is absolutely gorgeous to look at, with director Douglas Sirk bathing the film in brilliant primary colours, which highlights the natural beauty of the New England landscape. Sirk shows a bourgeois family in which the children oppress their mother instead of the other way around. Sirk also presents an intimate and quite daring portrait of a woman who gets caught up in unnecessary negativity, her paranoia at what people are saying threatens to engulf her and she needs to learn to just go with the flow.

Carey knows that it is wrong not to marry Ron - after all, she loves him, despite the age difference - but she is far too concerned with honoring the petty social mores of the time, and satisfying her insincere and two-faced children, in the end, this doesn't really mean much, especially when true love is involved. Mike Leonard June 06.

One of the single most influential films to come out of the 1950s world cinema, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS is probably Douglas Sirk's masterpiece, realizing most perfectly his notion of combining middle-class melodrama with exquisitely glossy and perfectly framed screen compositions. It's one of the least campy of his films (though it does have its satisfyingly ridiculous moments here and there--pay attention to the sudden appearance of the deer in the last scene). And he was able to coax a fine performance from his star Jane Wyman, who manages to anchor the emotionally overwrought screenplay by projecting true feeling.

The film's plot is operatic, but its also incredibly obvious and heavyhanded: a well-to-do New England widow (Wyman) falls in love with her handsome individualistic gardener twenty years her junior (Rock Hudson), and thus incurs the wrath of her children and the contempt of the country-club set. That's it, but Sirk pumps everything with so emotion that the story might as well be lifted from Homer or Virgil, and so people have seen the film as much more meaningful than any surface reading of it could possibly allow. In many ways, the film is all about how surfaces can be allowed a totalizing power that comes to substitute for depths. Although ostensibly the film trumpets a rejection of mid-century American materialism in favor of the rugged individualism Hudson's character champions, the form of the film constantly tells us that things are lovely and people are not (at the film's conclusion, Hudson's character signals his love for Wyman's widow by transforming an old deserted mill into the kind of fussy, beautifully chosen interior that might be showcased in a homes magazine). And no male actor has ever seemed more to embody the appeals of surface beauty than Rock Hudson, with his titanic handsomeness, mellifluous speaking voice, and underreactiveness.

Had Hudson been paired with another Sirk female star like Lana Turner the whole thing might have lapsed into sheer ridiculousness; but Jane Wyman manages to bring something to the film that causes everything to hold together. The great scene where she is given the television set at christmas has been justly celebrated, but she may be at her finest in the lovely scene where she comforts her distraught daughter (Gloria Talbott, who does much with an otherwise awful part). This film has been enormously celebrated by later directors, including Fassbinder and Todd Haynes (both of whom have made their own films that pay tribute to this) and Tarentino and Scorsese.

All That Heaven Allows starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson has always been one of my favorite movies. The Criterion Collection DVD is outstanding! The transfer to DVD is just plain gorgeous. I've watched this movie on TV and on VHS many, many times. Watching it on DVD is like watching it for the first time. Get this DVD now! Gwendolyn Aughtry, Landover, MD

It is ironic that during the 1950s, when the former Douglas Sirk was at his most successful in terms of audience appeal, he was virtually ignored by the critics... He is now seen, however, as a director of formidable intellect who, despite his background in classical and Avant-Garde Theater, achieved his best work in melodrama...

With its penetrating, literate screenplay, its fine and sympathetic acting, its tasteful sets and artwork, its wonderful music, cleverly adapted from some of the finest music of Franz Liszt and other romantic composers, 'All That Heaven Allows' is another film, passed over in its own time as "just another soap opera."

Sirk tries to capture the tensions of real everyday living in his representation of a lonely elegant widow steeped in a snobbish society...

Jane Wyman is (Cary Scott), an attractive middle-aged mother who is having difficulty in adjusting to her status... She lives in comfortable circumstances in a handsome house, but her character is more concerned with maintaining a veneer of social respectability than with addressing reality...

Sirk turns a conventional love story, between Cary and her younger gardener Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) into a study of the fall of American idealism and innocence, and lush images of nature contrasting with claustrophobic, petty-minded snobbery of a country-club set...

Ron prefers to grow plants in his nursery near an old mill, and lives life according to his own rules - which do not comprise cocktail parties, gossip, and superficial camaraderie... He is obviously handsome, and Cary gives herself numerous reasons why she should not encourage him... The difference in their respective ages being, in her view, the most salient of all... But Ron keeps returning, it is obvious he is attracted to her...

But as their romance deepens, so does the widow's dilemma... The family, so often glamorized by Hollywood, is regarded as selfish and inhibiting, with the widow's teenage children horrified at the idea of another man tainting their dead father's sacred memory... So Cary retreats, and decides to walk away from a love that promises the chance to rediscover her own passion in his sensual embrace...

Sirk does interesting things with reflections, most notable the sight of Wyman reflected in the screen of a television set that her son and daughter buy her in Christmas to keep her company... Staring deeply into its surface, deep sadness closed her heart as she wanted to escape the pain of her mistake... Her physician (Hayden Rorke), whom she consults on her miserable headaches, tells her that there is absolutely nothing wrong with her, that she must stop living by the opinions, the smiles and frowns of others...

Wyman convincingly gives the impression of a woman torn between the fires of her own heart and her devotion to her family and friends... She and Hudson have a good chemistry together, and obviously the film, exquisitely photographed in Technicolor, carries off its intended effect perfectly...

I'm in my early 30's but I remember when I first saw this movie on AMC eight years ago. What compelled me to purchase this DVD (just 4 days ago) is the high melodrama and holiday elements. The colors in the movie are rich, the people in the movie are rich, the stretch from a real world (far from our modern one) where everyone is polished, everyone is far-out socially charged is just like watching a culture on a distant planet. It is an odd yet sweet movie. I wish AMC would play more classics like this movie, yet they seem to be running movies from the 1990's lately. Good for the DVD industry, though!