[go: up one dir, main page]

    Release calendarTop 250 moviesMost popular moviesBrowse movies by genreTop box officeShowtimes & ticketsMovie newsIndia movie spotlight
    What's on TV & streamingTop 250 TV showsMost popular TV showsBrowse TV shows by genreTV news
    What to watchLatest trailersIMDb OriginalsIMDb PicksIMDb SpotlightFamily entertainment guideIMDb Podcasts
    OscarsEmmysSan Diego Comic-ConSummer Watch GuideToronto Int'l Film FestivalIMDb Stars to WatchSTARmeter AwardsAwards CentralFestival CentralAll events
    Born todayMost popular celebsCelebrity news
    Help centerContributor zonePolls
For industry professionals
  • Language
  • Fully supported
  • English (United States)
    Partially supported
  • Français (Canada)
  • Français (France)
  • Deutsch (Deutschland)
  • हिंदी (भारत)
  • Italiano (Italia)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Español (España)
  • Español (México)
Watchlist
Sign in
  • Fully supported
  • English (United States)
    Partially supported
  • Français (Canada)
  • Français (France)
  • Deutsch (Deutschland)
  • हिंदी (भारत)
  • Italiano (Italia)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Español (España)
  • Español (México)
Use app
  • Cast & crew
  • User reviews
  • Trivia
  • FAQ
IMDbPro

Tout ce que le ciel permet

Original title: All That Heaven Allows
  • 1955
  • Tous publics
  • 1h 29m
IMDb RATING
7.6/10
18K
YOUR RATING
Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in Tout ce que le ciel permet (1955)
An upper-class widow falls in love with a much younger, down-to-earth nurseryman, much to the disapproval of her children and criticism of her country club peers.
Play trailer2:31
3 Videos
88 Photos
DramaRomance

An upper-class widow falls in love with a much younger, down-to-earth nurseryman, much to the disapproval of her children and criticism of her country club peers.An upper-class widow falls in love with a much younger, down-to-earth nurseryman, much to the disapproval of her children and criticism of her country club peers.An upper-class widow falls in love with a much younger, down-to-earth nurseryman, much to the disapproval of her children and criticism of her country club peers.

  • Director
    • Douglas Sirk
  • Writers
    • Peggy Thompson
    • Edna L. Lee
    • Harry Lee
  • Stars
    • Jane Wyman
    • Rock Hudson
    • Agnes Moorehead
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.6/10
    18K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Douglas Sirk
    • Writers
      • Peggy Thompson
      • Edna L. Lee
      • Harry Lee
    • Stars
      • Jane Wyman
      • Rock Hudson
      • Agnes Moorehead
    • 125User reviews
    • 95Critic reviews
    • 78Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 2 wins total

    Videos3

    Official Trailer
    Trailer 2:31
    Official Trailer
    The Worst Gifts in Our Favorite Holiday Films
    Clip 2:37
    The Worst Gifts in Our Favorite Holiday Films
    The Worst Gifts in Our Favorite Holiday Films
    Clip 2:37
    The Worst Gifts in Our Favorite Holiday Films
    Why "The Act" Is Peak True Crime Melodrama
    Clip 3:34
    Why "The Act" Is Peak True Crime Melodrama

    Photos88

    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    + 80
    View Poster

    Top cast39

    Edit
    Jane Wyman
    Jane Wyman
    • Cary Scott
    Rock Hudson
    Rock Hudson
    • Ron Kirby
    Agnes Moorehead
    Agnes Moorehead
    • Sara Warren
    Conrad Nagel
    Conrad Nagel
    • Harvey
    Virginia Grey
    Virginia Grey
    • Alida Anderson
    Gloria Talbott
    Gloria Talbott
    • Kay Scott
    William Reynolds
    William Reynolds
    • Ned Scott
    Charles Drake
    Charles Drake
    • Mick Anderson
    Hayden Rorke
    Hayden Rorke
    • Dr. Dan Hennessy
    Jacqueline deWit
    Jacqueline deWit
    • Mona Plash
    • (as Jacqueline de Wit)
    Leigh Snowden
    Leigh Snowden
    • Jo-Ann Grisby
    Donald Curtis
    Donald Curtis
    • Howard Hoffer
    Alex Gerry
    Alex Gerry
    • George Warren
    Nestor Paiva
    Nestor Paiva
    • Manuel
    Forrest Lewis
    Forrest Lewis
    • Mr. Weeks
    Tol Avery
    Tol Avery
    • Tom Allenby
    Merry Anders
    Merry Anders
    • Mary Ann
    Helen Andrews
    • Myrtle
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • Douglas Sirk
    • Writers
      • Peggy Thompson
      • Edna L. Lee
      • Harry Lee
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews125

    7.617.7K
    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6
    7
    8
    9
    10

    Featured reviews

    bobsgrock

    Look closely, you can see the shimmering plastic.

    All That Heaven Allows is a darker, more cynical film than Douglas Sirk's previously more conventional and successful Magnificent Obsession. Because of that film's attraction, Sirk was reunited with the two leads, Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. The result is a more potent story and much stronger social criticism. From the opening shot, in all its Technicolor glory, we see an overhead view of a small, self-contained American town, idyllic in its existence with all the right colors and characters in their proper place. However, look a little closer and you will see the glistening of the plastic leaves and matte paintings as backdrops. Sirk shows us the surface of a seemingly perfect society while slightly skewering it by also revealing its artificiality and decadent skeletal structure.

    To continue this deconstruction of 1950s America, we see a newly made widow, Cary Scott, who is now resigned to living her life according to the pleasures and approval of her ungrateful children and her condescending circle of friends. On the surface, this appears to be nothing more than fodder lifted out of typical gossip magazines of the era, but Sirk with his wildly imaginative visual style gives us something more to chew on. It soon becomes clear, especially once she strikes up a romance with her muscular gardener (Rock Hudson), she is unable to truly break free from the bonds of social convention and have a true sense of understanding the world Ron gives to her.

    Sirk won't even let Ron off the hook. As in Magnificent Obsession, none of the character are so wonderful and virtuous that we should completely enamor ourselves to them. He himself is rather forceful, unmovable in his intentions to wed Cary without any understanding of her situation. Simply put, they both have deeply embedded flaws to deal with, a most shocking and unfortunate conclusion Sirk flaunts in front of us.

    If you are in the mood for a good old-fashioned melodrama, Douglas Sirk is certainly your most popular option and just might be the best. Unlike other films of its type and time like the enormously successful Peyton Place or A Summer Place, Sirk goes much deeper than anyone else. Often, his films require several viewings to get a true understanding of what he is saying about these people, this time and this place. One final note; the ending will seem to many modern audiences as simple contrivance by the studio to assure profits. However, whether or not it was what Sirk intended, looking closer may result in seeing exactly what he wants us to see: unbridled selfishness for various reasons by all types of people.
    9bmacv

    Disney was never so magical - Sirk polishes weepy romance to an exquisite gloss

    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.
    9Michael27-1

    Douglas Sirk's Visual Extravaganza

    At times, the aesthetic appeal of a film is so overwhelming, it surpasses the draw of the big-name stars and plot. And "All That Heaven Allows" is one of those rare examples. Anyone familiar with Douglas Sirk-directed projects knows his grandiose style. And this 1955 masterpiece sums up the best of Sirk drama, with the surface sheen, thundering music, noted stars and biting social commentary. This film, in fact, is so beautiful, that it requires repeated viewings just to be able to take it all in.

    Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson re-team from Sirk's inferior "Magnificent Obsession" that was such a hit the year before. In this story, Wyman plays a wealthy widow bound to the claustrophobic confines of her uppity New England town. Her friends and two grown children do their best to convince her to marry Harvey, a stuffy and older neighborhood bachelor. But Wyman wants more. She ends up falling for her younger gardener, played by Hudson. After bonding over the virtues of the silver-tipped spruce, they embark on a love affair which is rejected by the community and Wyman's own children. They feel she is far too upstanding to be with a gardener. The reluctance of those around her to accept this relationship cause Wyman to have to choose between love or respect from her town.

    Sirk takes what is a sappy, predictable tale and turns it into a visual feast. This is true eye candy for film buffs. Sirk sets the stage for this story against a heightened background of the reds, golds and yellows of a New England autumn. Every detail from Agnes Moorehead's red hair to sunsets to Wyman's lipstick and even the cars is given the Technicolor treatment to the max. Sirk's knack for visual irony is also heavily present throughout. The film opens with a shot of the town's clocktower with pigeons roosting. The pigeons are divided into two groups - a gaggle of black pigeons representing the townspeople on one end, and on the other are two white pigeons nuzzling, representing Wyman and Hudson and the division they face in this community. This is just for starters. Other stunning examples are when Sirk uses shades of blues and greys and reds to convey character's feelings of sadness or anger. And of course there is the famous television set scene. And through all of this emotion and cotton candy extravaganza is Frank Skinner's lush score that soars in all the right places. "All That Heaven Allows" is a first-rate classic that is a must for fans of Sirk or anyone who are devotees of lush melodramas from the studio heyday.
    9sabby

    Wyman and Hudson re-team for this classy melodrama

    Due to the success of 1954's "Magnificent Obsession", Universal once again called on Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead, and director Douglas Sirk for this passionate, heart-gripping look at the hypocrisy of small-town America. Wyman, a rich widow in this well-to-do New England town, falls in love with her gardener (Hudson) and all hell breaks loose. Her community ridicules her and her grown children are horrified by her. She finds herself having to choose love or the respect of those around her.

    The cinematography is beyond extraordinary, the score by Frank Skinner is unbelievably moving, Wyman is exquisite, and Sirk gives some of the best direction of his career. A really classy melodrama and completely worthwhile.
    marcslope

    You go, girl!

    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.

    Related interests

    Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight (2016)
    Drama
    Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (1942)
    Romance

    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      The façade later cannibalized to make up the front of the Bates home in Psychose (1960) is visible a few houses up from Cary Scott's (Jane Wyman's) block.
    • Goofs
      When the deer runs away, a crew member can be seen hiding behind the automobile.
    • Quotes

      Ron Kirby: Mick discovered for himself that he had to make his own decisions, that he had to be a man.

      Cary Scott: And you want *me* to be a man?

      Ron Kirby: [Giving her a knowing smile] Only in that one way.

    • Connections
      Edited into Quand la peur dévore l'âme (2007)
    • Soundtracks
      Consolation No. 3 in D-flat major
      (uncredited)

      Music by Franz Liszt

    Top picks

    Sign in to rate and Watchlist for personalized recommendations
    Sign in

    FAQ17

    • How long is All That Heaven Allows?Powered by Alexa

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • December 25, 1955 (United States)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • All That Heaven Allows
    • Filming locations
      • Circle Drive, Backlot, Universal Studios - 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, California, USA(Studio, as "Stonington")
    • Production company
      • Universal International Pictures (UI)
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Gross worldwide
      • $598
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      • 1h 29m(89 min)
    • Color
      • Color

    Contribute to this page

    Suggest an edit or add missing content
    • Learn more about contributing
    Edit page

    More to explore

    Recently viewed

    Please enable browser cookies to use this feature. Learn more.
    Get the IMDb App
    Sign in for more accessSign in for more access
    Follow IMDb on social
    Get the IMDb App
    For Android and iOS
    Get the IMDb App
    • Help
    • Site Index
    • IMDbPro
    • Box Office Mojo
    • License IMDb Data
    • Press Room
    • Advertising
    • Jobs
    • Conditions of Use
    • Privacy Policy
    • Your Ads Privacy Choices
    IMDb, an Amazon company

    © 1990-2025 by IMDb.com, Inc.