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