All That Heaven Allows

Douglas Sirk is a truly underrated director, and this film shows why. Although this film becomes more highly regarded as the years go by, especially by non-Americans, it is usually regarded as just a well made soaper. Big mistake. This is a very angry film, a scathing commentary on the conformity and mindlessness that characterized much of the 1950s. Remember, this film was made in 1955, before there were any beatniks or hippies, before the civil rights movement, before there was any pot smoking, before anyone beyond the fringes questioned any of the basic values underlying capitalist America. America was at the peak of its power and prestige, and this was perhaps the first mainstream film that questioned the values that presumably were responsible for that ascendancy. Because this film is essentially about class and the primacy that human relationships must have over material gain, social acceptance, and social conformity.

Think of the forbidden (at the time) themes that this film deals with. Older woman, younger man. The shallowness, insipidity, and snobbery of the upper middle class arrivistes who have "made it," all of which masks their basic insecurity, unhappiness, and self-loathing. A male lead who doesn't care about acceptance by anyone, who doesn't care about money or success, who just wants to be happy and "do his own thing," well over a decade before that phrase was coined. The Wyman character foolishly (at first) decides that acceptance by her peers and children is more important than finding happiness with a man she truly loves, and what does she end up with for companionship? A television set! This was the decade in which "The Lonely Crowd" was published, and this film exemplifies that concept, as well as striking examples of other- vs. inner-directed, far better than any other film of its time.

Sirk was truly a visionary, well ahead of his time. This was why this film inspired Fassbinder's "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul" and Todd Haynes' "Far from Heaven." It is all the more powerful for having been made then and in not being a retrospective look, as is "Far from Heaven," from a more "enlightened" future time. For its social import, I rate this 9/10.

I'll simply align myself with the other commentators who are bowled over by this Sirkfest's vibrant colors, use of lush fake-Liszt and Rachmaninoff, and surprising willingness to attack materialistic '50s values (in this last instance, the film's hardly dated a bit). True, the central romance isn't always convincing -- what does Ron see in Carrie, anyway? -- and the film has to oversimplify its characters to make its points. Carrie's daughter, a social-working bobby-soxer who quotes Freud and wears unflattering glasses, is meant to be something of a joke (until she sheds some feminine tears and suddenly becomes sympathetic); while Carrie's older suitor, underplayed by Conrad Nagel, is looked on as less than a desirable man simply because he limits himself to one drink. (In common with many films from this period, an awful lot of liquor is consumed.) Too, there's an impossibly melodramatic third act, where the circumstances of Ron's accident are howlingly implausible. Nice, though, that the always-reliable Agnes Moorehead plays a socialite who's not as shallow as she first seems, and that Wyman gets to model some attractive '50s fashions. Also note the sumptuous midcentury interiors -- whether the happy couple ends up living in Wyman's suburban mansion or Hudson's renovated barn, I want to live in them both.

Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a middle-aged, wealthy woman whose husband recently died. Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) is Cary's younger, independent-minded landscape gardener. Ron reads Thoreau, respects nature, and values simplicity and honesty. Cary and Ron are attracted to each other. For Ron, marriage to Cary is an easy decision. But for Cary, the decision to marry Ron is harder. She must confront the disapproval of her grown children, and the disapproval of friends whose materialistic, country club values are inconsistent with the values of Thoreau.

In a town where people know each other's business, tongues wag. Feelings get hurt. Conflict erupts. The film's subdued lighting and vivid colors, combined with soft piano and velvety violin background music, create a tone that is sad and sentimental. Viewers are right to say that this Douglas Sirk directed film is a melodramatic soap opera.

Thinly veiled behind the simple plot, however, lies a profound message: "to thine own self be true". It is a message totally out of sync with 1950's America. Yet, the message would surface a decade later as the 1960's youth mantra: "do your own thing".

As an archetype, Ron seems too pure. And Cary's children and friends, shallow, selfish, vain, gossipy, and judgmental, are easy to dislike. This sharp dichotomy is somewhat unrealistic. But it gets the point across. And that point is a blistering indictment of 1950's American materialism and mindless conformity.

The film was thus ahead of its time. Despite its high technical quality, it was snubbed by the Oscars. In retrospect, "All That Heaven Allows" is superior to all five of the Oscar best picture nominees from that year. And its message is just as relevant now as it was fifty years ago.

"All That Heaven Allows" is a film about risks, regrets, and unexpected second chances. We all have had something beautiful, exciting, and wonderful in our grasp, but some of us were foolish and scared enough to let that splendid something escape. Maybe we'll get another chance, maybe we won't, but the pain of regret in between can become unbearable.

This is what our protagonist, Cary Scott, goes through. Cary (Jane Wyman)is a widow of a certain age, who feels trapped by her pristine, suburban existence. She has two children who are away at college, and she is beginning to realize that all her neighbors who claim to be her friends are a bunch of shallow, phony elitists. Cary is unexpectedly swept off her feet by dashing nature lover Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson, as ridiculously charming and brawny as ever). They fall instantly in love and Cary's zest for life is restored by Ron's kindness and simple life values. The fact that Ron is Cary's gardener and over a decade younger than she is doesn't sit well with her neighbors, her callow, eggheaded daughter, or her boorish son. Cary tries to be strong, but her role as the perfect, 1950s suburbanite blinds her to her heart's desire. Cary ends her relationship with Ron... and soon sees how stupid she was to care about others' opinions. Will she get another chance at love, or is she doomed to waste away all alone in a small-town Purgatory?

Douglas Sirk drenches "All That Heaven Allows" in lush, autumnal hues and sweet, somewhat ironic, orchestral score. If it's not one of the best films ever made, it certainly is one of the most beautiful to look at. Wyman and Hudson ooze with romantic chemistry, and the supporting cast of actors are all deliciously hateful as the antagonists who try to tear our lovers apart. Hudson is charming and earthy as always, and with his soothing voice, broad shoulders and ready smile, you don't blame Cary at all for falling for him (who wouldn't??). I liked Jane Wyman as Cary, but found myself wishing she'd stop being so damn nice and just give her horrible kids and friends a good smack in the face and a proper chewing out for trying to dictate her life.

There is so much more going on beneath the surface of "ATHA": Sirk, without being preachy, shows us the common, conformist attitude of the 1950s. How many people saw their loved ones be blacklisted during the McCarthy years... and cruelly abandoned them just because of fear of rumors and speculation? How many husbands kept mum when women were practically forced to be only wives and mothers? "ATHA" doesn't bring up these issues, but it does make one important point: Conformity, injustice, and bitter silence ran rampant during that time. Yet older generations foolishly pine for the '50s with rose-colored nostalgia.

But throwing away your dreams because of what others' think is an ancient problem in human nature, which Sirk primarily addresses. We must learn, sooner or later, that it is more important to do what we feel, not what others tell us, is right. Follow you heart, Sirk urges us. This is what Cary must learn, what we must all learn.

Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows could stand as a lesson about how, in gifted hands, movies can surmount and surpass their source material, elevating the routine into the rhapsodic. And that's more than a matter of just fleshing out the roles with appealing talent or supplying de luxe production values. It takes a sensibility that can suggest the complexity under the commonplace and spot the verities hidden beneath the clichés.

It's an alert sensibility that many emigrés from Europe, apprenticed in the artistic ferment between the wars, brought with them to Hollywood (among them this Dane, born Detlef Sierck). Hollywood gave them more money and security than they'd probably ever known, and when it also gave them hackneyed and meretricious scripts to capture on film, they devised new ways to freshen them up and, against all odds, make them work.

On its surface, All That Heaven Allows is little more than polite fiction from women's magazines circa mid-20th-century (and would today be a romance paperback with a beefcake cover). Youngish widow Jane Wyman starts keeping company with free-spirited Rock Hudson, her much younger gardener; despite wagging tongues among her country-club set and clucks of disapproval from her grown children, she finds, after many a twist and turn, true love.

But from his opening shot Sirk creates a dreamy, storybook world, so Disney-pretty that he might as well have started with `Once upon a time....' Swirling downward from a church steeple in a New England autumn, he shows us an affluent enclave just a commuter-train trip away from New York. Luncheons are taken on patios, station wagons the approved mode of travel and martinis the drink of the evening - the kind of town New Yorkers played by Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck meant when they referred to their `country' places in Connecticut.

In this idyllic bower, Wyman has resigned herself to a stately and well-appointed widowhood; she half-heartedly resists friend Agnes Moorehead's lures to put her back on the market (women without men, by choice or circumstance, just don't fit in). But Wyman's too classy for the boozed-up louts and gossipy shrews in her former set, and still too vital to succumb to valetudinarian Conrad Nagel's proposal for tepid `companionship.'

And that's when Hudson, come to prune the branches, catches her eye - and, somewhat less probably, she his. He whisks her out to see his tree farm, and they explore an old mill on his property (`I love to poke around old buildings,' she explains). When she suggests he fix up the dump and live there, it's to the horn theme from the last movement of Brahms' 1st Symphony. No wonder she ends up staying the weekend.

Here Sirk introduces a subtly subversive element: Hudson's friends, in discordant counterpoint to hers (who dismiss him as `nature boy' and a `good-looking set of muscles'). His are an amiably casual network of all ages and backgrounds who have opted out of the rat race or never cared to enter it (the `quiet desperation' passage from Thoreau's Walden screws the point home). Though their style of merrymaking brings to mind Old World folk festivals, they represent a segment of society rarely if ever seen in films of the era: Low-profile, thoughtful rebels against the smug status quo - post-war pioneers of the voluntary simplicity movement inflamed with a touch of ecological consciousness ( now laughed off as tree-hugging). It's a startling glimpse into a below-the-radar counterculture that must have been around even in the mid-'50s (and there's not a beret, goatee or bongo drum among them - they're presented without a hint of condescension or marginalization).

Hudson proposes, Wyman accepts. Even her children (Gloria Talbott and William Reynolds) are thrilled, so long as they assume her remarriage will be to stuffy, respectable Nagel. When they're told that their new stepdad will be the stud who cleans up the yard come spring and come fall, they go rigid with upper-middle-class snobbery. (And the specter of Mrs. Grundy floats in when Moorehead asks if people will think Wyman and Hudson were keeping company when Wyman's husband was still kicking.) Stranded between her familiar past and an uncertain future, Wyman begs for more time; Hudson, hewing to his mantra `to thine own self be true,' delivers an ultimatum....

Abetted by director of photography Russell Metty, Sirk paints this soapish weeper with a gorgeous palette of hues and tints (a feat that Todd Haynes emulated in his Sirk hommage Far From Heaven, for which this movie served as template). Now and again, he washes half the screen in an autumnal green-gold, the other in an enchanted-night mauve, situating characters at cross purposes in their respective halves.

Of course, splitting or doubling the screen, through barriers or mirror shots, is one of Sirk's signature tropes, reaching its apex when Wyman's hangdog face stares back from a newly delivered television set, a Christmas present from the kids (`Here's all the company you need. Drama, comedy, all life's parade at your fingertips,' goes the spiel.) Pointedly, the set never gets turned on; it's seen but once again, reflecting flames from the fireplace, the focal point of simpler, less sophisticated times, and the values Hudson embodies.

Sirk takes this unlikely June-September romance and buffs it to the highest possible gloss, using his exquisite eye to enrich and deepen every frame. It's lush and sensuous - almost candified (at times gluttingly so) - and all but impossible to resist. When, at the close, a deer gambols up to nuzzle some snow off the windowpane in the mill Hudson has turned into his - their - home, it's an embarrassment of perfection. Never was Disney so magical.