Daily Archives: Monday, October 19, 2015

  • All That Heaven Allows

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Douglas Sirk (1955)

    All That Heaven Allows reunites Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson after the success of Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession the previous year.  Once again she’s a wealthy widow (this time the Hudson character wasn’t responsible for her husband’s death).  He is now a tree surgeon rather than a brain surgeon (and has a wardrobe of lumberjack shirts etc to prove it).   There are other resonances with the earlier film.  Just as Magnificent Obsession had a bogus philosophical strand so the Hudson character in All That Heaven Allows reads Thoreau:  as luck would have it, when Wyman finds a copy of Walden in Hudson’s house, she opens it at the very page that includes the bit about a man marching to a ‘different drummer’.  Obsession ends with Wyman waking from a coma, brought back to life by the sight of Hudson’s loving face as much as by his medical skills.  Sirk reverses the situation here:  Hudson comes round from a bad concussion when he senses Wyman’s presence at his bedside.   The camera pulls back from the happy couple to show in the window a deer – the reappearing symbol of their beautiful, vulnerable love – that is frolicking in the snow.

    All That Heaven Allows – adapted by Peg Fenwick from a story by Edna Lee, and which takes its title from a poem by the Earl of Rochester – gained a new lease of life a few years ago as the main inspiration for Far from Heaven (2002).  Seeing it at last supplies conclusive proof of the pointlessness of Todd Haynes‘s film.  In All That Heaven Allows, Cary Scott (Wyman) and Ron Kirby (Hudson) fall in love but their relationship scandalises Cary’s children and the suburban New England community in which the story is set – because of the difference in both age and social standing between Cary and Ron.  In Far from Heaven, the Julianne Moore character, when she discovers that her husband has been having gay sex, strikes up a relationship with a black gardener.  The prejudices on display in All That Heaven Allows are a noxious blend of triviality and intensity; they also reveal that, in mid-fifties bourgeois America, an inter-class relationship that was also inter-racial would have been unthinkable.  Todd Haynes virtually admits this in the muted, perfunctory account of reactions to the wife-gardener liaison in Far from Heaven, yet the film was still praised for ‘dealing with’ socially controversial issues.   The chief mouthpieces of intolerance in All That Heaven Allows are Cary’s son and daughter, badly played by William Reynolds and Gloria Talbott respectively, who are supported by a few of their mother’s snotty friends.  What’s striking is that, in spite of the crude, exaggerated illustrations of prejudice, it still manages to make you angry.  (I may have been even more enraged because the representatives of prejudice were crap actors too.)

    Film-making requires such a range of technical skills that some writers on cinema seem anxious to insist that, because a director is technically gifted and inventive, his or her movies must be similarly sophisticated in all other respects.  The Wikipedia article on All That Heaven Allows explains that ‘Many theorists view the film as a social critique of the conformity obsessed 1950s’ – it would certainly take a bold theorist to see the picture as a vindication of that conformity.  In truth, All That Heaven Allows is a very obvious romantic melodrama that’s remarkable mainly for its visual vibrancy and extravagance – Sirk’s director of photography was Russell Metty and this is one of the few fifties colour films to come out of Hollywood that still looks good.  The daring and beautiful palette of All That Heaven Allows makes Todd Haynes’s scrupulous re-rendering of its colour schemes in Far from Heaven another aspect of the latter film’s redundancy – for all that it’s technically accomplished redundancy.

    There’s a conviction in Sirk’s direction that gives the storytelling a momentum although there are oddly careless moments too, as when Ron, accepting a glass from Cary’s hostile son, congratulates him on mixing a good martini before he’s tasted a drop. (This might work if we felt Ron was so nervous that he spoke a prepared line at the wrong moment but there’s no suggestion of that.)  A couple of overhead shots of a snowscape reveal an inexplicable green patch.  (Perhaps theorists view this as a symbol of verdant hope in the pervasive coldness of the conformity-obsessed 1950s.)   As in Magnificent Obsession, Jane Wyman is stiffly noble, although her potential for suffering is scaled down a bit from the earlier picture.  Rock Hudson is his usual mix (in dramatic roles) of woodenness and affecting vulnerability.  Agnes Moorehead gives a decent performance as the only one of Cary’s acquaintances who combines snobbish prejudice with affection for her friend.

    14 May 2010

  • Bizarre, Bizarre

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Drôle de drame

    Marcel Carné  (1937)

    My tastes must have changed since the mid-1980s, when I first saw and enjoyed Drôle de drame.  I’m going to use the original French title for this note because it’s slightly less irritating than Bizarre, Bizarre – even though the latter conveys well the movie’s roguish tone, and bizarre is the word to describe Marcel Carné’s film in respect of its English setting and characters.   Carné’s and Jacques Prévert’s screenplay is adapted from His First Offence, a 1912 novel by the Orcadian writer J Storer Clouston.  His First Offence is referred to on the writingthenorth.com website as a ‘slapstick thriller’ and IMDB terms Drôle de drame ‘a French farce set in Victorian London’.  In fact, it’s Edwardian London but the IMDB description gets across the thoroughgoing Frenchness of the movie – this comes through not only in the characters (although they’re supposedly English) but also in the look of the London streets, in the prettiness of the interiors and a mimosa garden behind the house where the main action takes place.   There’s even accordion music of the kind that’s so often been used by English-speaking film-makers to cue the audience into a Parisian setting.  Pauline Kael calls Drôle de drame ‘a satirical comedy of the English mania for detective fiction’ but the satire seems to extend into territory covered in George Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Decline of the English Murder’ – territory, that is, in which British newspaper coverage of the leading murders of the day effectively blurred the boundaries of fiction and true crime.  The crowd behaviour in the closing stages of Drôle de drame somewhat recalls the climax to Hitchcock’s silent film The Lodger.

    Carné opens with a public meeting of the ‘League of Virtue’, at which a sternly impassioned cleric inveighs against the morally corrupting effects of the detective novel – specifically the work of one Félix Chapel.  The cleric is Archibald Soper, the Bishop of Bedford; Félix Chapel turns out to be the nom de plume of Soper’s cousin, the mild-mannered botanist Irwin Molyneux (Michel Simon).   The bishop (Louis Jouvet) invites himself to the Molyneuxs’ home for dinner; when their cook (Jenny Burnay) suddenly walks out, Irwin’s wife Margaret (Françoise Rosay) has to take over in the kitchen.  Irwin explains his wife’s absence from the dinner table by telling Soper she’s away for a few days.  The bishop’s temperament keeps him always on the lookout for nefarious deeds by others; he suspects that Irwin has done away with his wife and goes to the police.  The farce plot of Drôle de drame is well constructed and the pattern of concealments by the middle-class characters is clever.  Mrs Molyneux can’t be seen dead (as it were) doing her own cooking.  The bishop, needless to say, is a moral hypocrite:  he’s had a liaison with a music-hall performer.   Irwin Molyneux is really Félix Chapel; it’s Irwin’s daughter, Eva (Nadine Vogel) who gives her father the ideas for his whodunits; and Eva gets these ideas from Billy (Jean-Pierre Aumont), the Molyneuxs’ milkman, who adores her but whose feelings Eva can’t bring herself to admit to reciprocating.  But the film got on my nerves this time around:  like last year’s Frank (a very different piece in other respects), Drôle de drame revels so much in its off-the-wall humour that the effect is excluding rather than infectious.

    Most of the high-powered cast give performances that are more accomplished than enjoyable but a few performers manage to be both things.  Jean-Pierre Aumont is delightfully funny and charming as the romantically determined Billy.  Aumont is well partnered by Nadine Vogel as Eva:  she has a lovely, hard-to-read quality that’s distinctive in this company.  As the censorious, increasingly rattled bishop, Louis Jouvet has the look of an exophthalmic bird of prey; he gives his lines an amusing incantatory rhythm and a profoundly sepulchral tone.  Pierre Alcover, as the blustering Scotland Yard detective who becomes the bishop’s antagonist, repeatedly works himself into a fine choleric lather.   But I’ve a blind spot as far as Michel Simon is concerned; and Jean-Louis Barrault, in spite of his extraordinary appearance, left me cold as the young man turned serial killer by reading Félix Chapel (unlike in Les enfants du paradis, Barrault’s mime-inspired movement doesn’t connect here with the role that he’s playing).   There are plenty of busily theatrical turns in the smaller roles.

    2 October 2015

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