Born Detlef Sierck, Douglas Sirk had a successful career in German theatre before he was forced to leave the country in 1937. Sirk's leftist politics and Jewish wife made him a potential target for oppression (and probably worse), so he came to Hollywood. But what Sirk found in America was a form of cultural and artistic repression that of course paled in comparison to what was going on in Germany, but which forced the director to hide his politics and style within genre pictures. Sirk began making thrillers and comedies with George Sanders. But he found his biggest success with the Rock Hudson/ Jane Wyman/ Agnes Moorehead melodrama Magnificent Obsession. So just one year later, Sirk got the band back together to make All That Heaven Allows, a remarkable picture that has the distinction of being perhaps the most miraculously weepy 90 minutes of cinema ever filmed. Amazingly sentimental and meticulously crafted, All That Heaven Allows rewards both the emotions and the intellect.

And this has become the autumn of Douglas Sirk. The most pleasant film I've seen this fall is Francois Ozon's 8 Women, which tranfers Sirk's style to a teasing French musical. And in theatres today (if you live in a major city) is Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, which is attracting Oscar buzz and looks to be a near-slavish homage to Sirk. And then there are all of the allusions to Sirk's work in I Spy, which is clearly meant as a remake of Written on the Wind. Darnit. Even when I try to be serious, sarcasm just filters its way into my reviews. I apologize. It's muscle reflex somewhere between my brain and my fingers.

The plot of All That Heaven Allows is deceptively simple: The camera begins sweeping down on a bucolic small New England town, perhaps Connecticut. It finds its way to Cary (Jane Wyman), a middle-aged widow living in a large comfortable house. And why the first impression is that the house is missing the inevitable and quintessential white picket fence, don't worry, it's in the back yard. Cary has prepared lunch for her friend Sara (Anges Moorehead), but when Sara has to cancel, Cary invites Ron (Rock Hudson), the stud trimming her trees, to have a bite. Ron has been working her garden for several years, but Cary has never really noticed him. That's because Cary is, like everybody around her, stuck in the malaise of 1950s America, where keeping up with the Joneses was more important than being yourself.

Certainly Cary is a woman with physical and emotional needs, but since the death of her husband, she's nearly cut herself off from society out of concern for the role of widows in the outside world. She dresses in drab colors and only entertains meek old bachelor Harvey (Conrad Nagel), who frequently proposes marriage, but more out of the need for companionship than love. Cary has two horrid children, buddy capitalist Ned (William Reynolds) and obnoxious college student Kay (Gloria Talbott). All Cary cares about is making her children happy and maintaining the proper social decorum. But Cary is a smart woman and knows that something else must be out there.

Ron is the one who opens the door. First she's just visiting him at his tree nursery and make-shift home in an abandoned mill, but quickly romance develops. She meets his friends and they accept her into the fold with glee. But when rumors start getting out that Cary is dating her gardener, that she's dating a younger man, that she's dating at all, the gossips in town begin to talk. Soon it's been made clear to Cary that she has to make a choice: Social acceptance or Ron.

Does this sound like a romance novel? It probably should. Repressed housewife finds lust and love with unkempt hired help only to meet with disapproval from those around her. It's not complicated.

I guess an over-literal reading of the film would be baffled by why Ron would fall so hard for Cary. On her side, it's easy: Ron is a stud, he's good with his hands, he has fun friends, and he's a nature boy. And while he's not big with book-learnin', he's a fairly smart guy. Cary, on the other hand, is buttoned-down, repressed, and her ex-husband was Ronald Reagan. [Sorry. I understand that I'm having problems confusing the textual world of All That Heaven Allows with Jane Wyman's own life, but I've always found it pleasant that Wyman won an Oscar (for Johnny Belinda) the same year she and Reagan divorced, almost as if Hollywood were congratulating her for dumping The Gipper (or consoling her for being dumped).] Certainly there's something in Cary that noticeably brightens when Ron's around, but I'm not completely sure that that justifies his love for her. He must see something in Cary that Sirk doesn't feel like showing the audience.

Sirk (with art directors Alexander Golitzen and Eric Orbom) constructs Cary's world as one of superficiality, a surface gloss under which there's nothing. Notice the props we see in her house. The dominant image in her living room is a trophy won by her late husband. This trophy, in tying the living room together, also ties Cary to her past. It's a conversation piece that can only take conversation away from Cary and back to a man she loved, but still constrains her from beyond the grave. The trophy is so central to the soul of the house that it's the first thing a slightly-more-liberated Cary moves when she realizes she loves Ron and its absence is the first thing that her bratty son notices when he returns home. The movement of the trophy symbolizes a movement into the present, if not the future, while her son, as a proxy for the dead father, wants to leave her stuck in the past, as if Cary's only honor was in marrying a man who once won a trophy.

Mirrors also play an important role in Sirk's style. They're all around Cary's house and they require her to constantly step outside of her own individuality to see herself as others must see her. Mirrors here are a tool of the repressive outside world, encouraging conformity and mimicry.

Cary's home is full of plush furniture, mirrors, paintings, and other symbols of middle class materialism. Sirk uses the camera to show how tightly Cary is wedged into the trappings of her home life. This is contrasted with Ron's living situation. When Cary first sees his home, Ron is living in a greenhouse. This suggests that he's so confident in his own individuality that he's willing to literally live in a glass house. But Cary encourages him to renovate the abandoned mill and he decorates it to match his own conception of "home." While Cary's place may be more stately, you have to go deep into the living room to stand next to the fireplace, while the hearth in Ron's home is the focus. Sirk's making an obvious statement on, well, warmth, both physical and emotional.

Shot by Russell Metty (Spartacus and Touch of Evil), All that Heaven Allows shows how a filmmaker can provide handsome visuals without discrimination, but can pick and choose when he wants the camera to pick up on warmth. For an example of this compare the film's two major party scenes. At the first, Cary goes to a clam bake at Ron's friend Nick's house. At the second, Ron joins Cary at Sara's house for a party. Sara's party is a genteel afair, but for all of the classy suits and beautiful dresses, Sirk stages the party to be physically stuffy by having the actors load the frame and then not move. In order to get to the bar, Ron and Cary have to go through an obstacle course of stagnant gossips. Does this reflect difficulties in social mobility in the period? If you want it to. And it's very different from what happens at Nick's party. There, the party is set up with throngs of people moving in all directions. Mobility here is difficult because everybody is movie along so much, laughing and smiling. Unlike the stodgy martini glasses at Sara's gathering, here, guests drink cheap chianti. And, perhaps most importantly, the book on Nick's coffee table is Thoreau. "The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation," Cary reads. And this is true of her "club set" friends.

Douglas Sirk isn't condemning Small Town America as being meretricious. Certainly there are positive characters in Cary's circle of friends, particularly Sara and the kindly Dr. Hennessy. What bothers Sirk is a place where people will pretend they're happy to see you to your face and then turn around and destroy your life with lies the minute you walk away. It's a place whose rotten foundation can never be properly rebuilt as long as pillars of society would rather gossip and undermine than let people live the lives that make them happy.

Oh and Sirk's also not a big fan of television. He's ahead of the curve on this one and his take is totally different one from the earliest cinematic satires of the new medium. Rather than criticizing television as soulless entertainment for the masses, Sirk is concerned with the way that television was being marketed in its earliest days. He properly notes that television was promoted as the refuge of the lonely housewife, when in reality it merely kept women confined to their homes, cooking, cleaning, and watching the idiot box. There's only one TV in All That Heaven Allows, but its first appearance literally left me shaking. Crazy powerful!

All That Heaven Allows is perfectly cast in both the parts you grow to love and the parts you end up hating. As the slanderous Mona, Jacqueline deWit is like a viper, but she seems almost benign compared to just how repulsive Reynolds and Talbott are as Cary's children. Those two kids needed a hiding in the worst way. Nagel has a impotent decency as ever-rejected old Harvey and Moorehead has decent reserves of stubbornness as Sara.

Wyman's performance owes much to Sirk's willingness to treat women with a cinematic respect usually only accorded to men in this period. She's the proactive (if hesitant) center of this piece. Sirk never treats her as a sex object, but happily exposes her radiant beauty. And she has a decent amount of chemistry with Rock Hudson.

Hudson gives a typically sturdy performance that has added depth because we know now that he was one of the victims of the conformity of the 1950s. While everybody in Hollywood knew Hudson was gay, it didn't fit with his on-screen image and he had to stay deep in the closet. But you can still imagine certain scenes amusing the actor. There's a classic moment where Ron and Cary are in his car and he's explain to her that in order for his friend Nick to be an individual, he had to learn to be a man. Cary asks, "And you want me to be a man?" To which Ron smiles and responds, "Only in that one way." And much could be made about how Ron is so virile he even attracts young bucks. But I would be referring to deer.

With Frank Skinner's beautiful score swelling at all the proper moments, I can imagine some viewers crying for the final thirty minutes of the movie. I didn't cry, but I still felt all the proper tugs at my heart strings, all the while watching Sirk's flawless craftsmanship.

******
DVD Notes: All That Heaven Allows is another great Criterion DVD. Beyond the obligatory beautiful transfer of the film, there's an interesting 30 minute BBC interview with Douglas Sirk from 1979 as well as an informative series of essays on Sirk's films by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Recommended:
Yes

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