All That Heaven Allows (1955)
Directed by Douglas Sirk

Film Review

All That Heaven Allows is quintessential Douglas Sirk.  Not only is it a superbly crafted piece of cinema but it contains Sirk's most scathing critique of contemporary Western values, a subversive anti-bourgeois broadside dressed up as a Mills & Boon-style melodrama.  The story it tells is the stuff of trashy cliché-laden weepies, and yet Sirk masterly transforms this into a devastatingly poignant love story in which a lonely middleclass woman is torn between her need for personal fulfilment and what she thinks society expects from her.  This is Sirk's most powerful indictment of materialism and social prejudice, as well as being one of his most beautifully constructed works.  It continues to have a powerful resonance and has been the inspiration for several other films, most notably Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (1974).

After their successful pairing in Sirk's earlier Magnificent Obsession (1954), Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson are brought together for a second romantic entanglement.  Hudson is far more convincing, somewhat less wooden, than in his earlier Sirkian tear-jerker, although, as before, he is out-classed and out-performed by Wyman, who is simply stunning in this film.  In one of her finest performances, Jane Wyman conveys with harrowing realism the trauma and helplessness of a woman who cannot escape from the prison in which her family, her friends and her own insecurities have placed her after the death of her husband.  Just as the ancient Egyptians immured the wife of the dead pharaoh in his tomb, so Cary Scott is walled up in her suburban palace, condemned to the living death that is daytime TV.  Wyman plays the part perfectly and with such sensitivity that when the story reaches its dramatic peaks you cannot help succumbing to the film's overwhelming emotional force and reach for the Kleenex.

What is perhaps most surprising about All That Heaven Allows is how it is staged and shot.  Bizarrely, rather than underplay the kitsch unreality inherent in the story, Sirk seems determined to embrace and accentuate it.  He undercuts the realism of the drama, using unnaturally garish colour schemes that emphasise the artificiality of the heroine's cosy bourgeois world.  The sets and the way in which they are shot would seem to be more appropriate for a children's fairytale than an adult melodrama. Yet this isn't whimsy on the part of Sirk and his production team but a subtle form of expressionism intended to convey the personality traits and interior states of the protagonists, a device that works remarkably well.

A recurring visual motif is the lonely widow Cary confined within the four walls of her metaphorical and actual prison - the most inspired example being her reflected image in the screen of a television set.  Whilst Hudson's Ron appears to epitomise the free spirit, Wyman's Cary is continually portrayed as the prisoner, unable to give up her creature comforts and the approbation of her friends, even for love.  But are Cary and Ron really so different?   In one telling scene, Cary asks her lover if he would rather she were a man.  Perhaps Ron isn't quite the contented individualist he pretends to be.  If what Cary hinted at is true, it look that he too will have to make compromises to avoid being a social outcast - just as the actor playing him would have to in his own life.  The sad reality is that none of us can ever be truly free; we are all fettered by the arbitrary conventions and flawed standards that society imposes upon us.  Freedom is the greatest illusion of all, as Douglas Sirk reminds us again and again in his beguiling works of cinema.

Film Synopsis

Cary Scott is a middle-aged New England widow.  Well provided for by her late husband, she leads a comfortable life but is anxious over what the future may hold for her.  Her grown-up children and her prim, snobbish friends encourage her to remarry, not for passion, but for companionship.  Cary feels increasingly isolated and wonders if she will ever know happiness again.  Then, one day, she notices a handsome young man pruning the trees in her front garden.  The man, Ron Kirby, is much younger than she is; he is certainly not part of her social milieu; and yet she feels strangely drawn to him.  When he invites her back to his home so that he can show her his silver-tipped spruce, she accepts willingly.  Despite the differences in their ages and social positions, Cary and Ron cannot help falling in love.  But when Ron asks her to marry him, Cary hesitates.  Accepting the proposal would mean giving up her large house.  Her children would reject her.  And, worst of all, she would become a social pariah.  It is too high a price to pay, so Cary tells Ron she cannot marry him and they part.  It is not long before Cary realises that she has made the wrong choice...