All That Heaven Allows • 1955 • Directed by Douglas Sirk
Kay: Personally, I've never subscribed to that old Egyptian custom of walling up the widow
alive in the funeral chambers of her dead husband … Of course it doesn't happen anymore...
Cary: Doesn't it?
— Gloria Talbott and Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows
In 1937, successful German theater director Detlef Sierck, along with his Jewish wife, actress Hilde Jary, was denounced to authorities by a vengeful ex-wife, and forced to flee 1937 Germany; with little else but moxie and a considerable European reputation, the newly christened Douglas Sirk quickly found work in wartime Hollywood, starting out, appropriately enough, with an anti-Nazi potboiler, Hitler’s Madmen. Sirk, however, might well have been remembered simply for a long string of colorful, quirky, better-than average programmers, were it not for his fortunate teaming with an inordinately supportive studio and an equally sympathetic producer: of the 23 (!) consecutive films he made at Universal, four made for kindred spirit Ross Hunter (Magnificent Obsession {1954}, All That Heaven Allows {1955}, Written on the Wind {1956} and Imitation of Life {1959} form the core of his American work; of these, All That Heaven Allows is the undisputed masterpiece.
Restless and unfulfilled, but uninterested (unlike like her middle-aged
cohorts), in becoming a ‘country club woman’, not-that-recently-widowed Cary
Scott (Jane Wyman) starts hanging out with her idealistic, working-class (and
far younger) gardener Roy (Rock Hudson).
Charmed by his rugged individualism
and his (gasp) proto-bohemian lifestyle, Cary falls hard, but assumes that, won
over by true love and her hunky, neo-primitive beau (he doesn’t read Thoreau,
remarks a friend, he lives it), her very
buttoned down neighbors and family will understand. They don’t.
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| Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) announces to her son (William Reynolds) and 'liberated' daughter (Gloria Talbott) that she's in love with her younger, hunky, bohemian gardener Roy... They are not amused. |
Her prissy,
suspiciously overprotective son throws a hissy and storms out of the family
meeting; her well-educated, Freud-spouting intellectual daughter, whom she expects
to understand, cracks and goes into hysterical overdrive when her classmates make
sport of Mom’s new squeeze; and her neighbors openly mock her at a party thrown
by her open-minded pal Sara (Agnes Moorehead)
to introduce the couple. When Roy refuses to join the rat race (even a little
bit) to make things easier, Cary walks out in a huff, deciding to put family
and community before true love. Will Cary (aided by a succession of Dickensian
chance encounters and misunderstandings, and an anti-climactic near death
experience) wise up in time? Take a wild guess.
All That Heaven Allows is
a fever-dream, near hallucinatory evocation of the textures, geography and
manners of 1950’s Middle American Surburban Life, which hides, just below its
surface, a strong, well-spoken and quite daring critique-cum-satire of those
very tropes and conventions. Much has made of the supposed biting/scathing
nature of Heaven’s social conscience,
but in fact, Sirk’s genius in Heaven is in crafting a film which could
be (and was) adored by legions of clueless romance-novel fans as a
straightforward true-love-triumphs-over-adversity yarn, while its social
bravado and plucky anti-establishment
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| All That Heaven Allows' most overtly scathing social
commentary comes in those moments in which Cary and Roy try,
unsuccessfully, to navigate the oppressive territory of their country
club centered community... |
tilt were right there waiting for those
ladies ready and willing to pick up on it. And pick up on it, one assumes, many
did, as Heaven preceded by only a few
years the Beatnik movement (Roy’s pals’ nonconformist parties are an absurdly
earnest and lusty hoot) and the feminist revolution. (Heaven also seems to provide a template for latter day soaps,
which, regardless of their wildly varying quality, are nothing if not socially
relevant.) Sirk is able to walk this delicate tightrope (Heaven, despite its seemingly controversial bent, was a huge
success) precisely because he is never sneering or condescending to his
characters, or for that matter, to the ideals which were the theoretical
foundation of this flawed American fantasy. Instead, Heaven inhabits that same imaginary hyper-real universe as, (oddly
enough) the films of Sergio Leone, sharing an approach in which a dreamlike
evocation of an idealized setting is played with an amped up sincerity that
constantly (with tongue planted firmly in cheek) teeters on the edge of, but
never falls into, outright parody.
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| The justifiably celebrated panoramic tracking shot that accompanies the opening credits of All that Heaven Allows, courtesy of Russell Metty's rapturous cinematography. |
All of which would be admirable, but unconvincing, had not Sirk brought to “my melodramas” (his words) the impeccable craftsmanship and flair for well-acted drama born of his Weimar theater days. Like another melodrama specialist and cult favorite, Mario Bava, Sirk was a youthful painting enthusiast, and, with the aid of his long-time collaborator the great cinematographer Russell Metty, his graceful, lissome camera paints Heaven in a lush swath of impossibly rich, vibrant gorgeousness, lingering on and lovingly caressing
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| Metty and Sirk render everything breathtaking. - People - |
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| Landscapes - |
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| even... cars... |
every face, object and natural vista with sensual glee (the psychedelically colorful opening aerial shot of Cary’s picture-perfect New England hometown is one of the great establishing shots in cinema). In the end, Heaven becomes as much archetypal fairytale as soap opera, transformed as it is by its deliriously beautiful and unabashedly symbolic visuals.
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| It's not corny if it works... |
In addition, Sirk carried from the theater a deft and
apparently inspiring facility with actors, drawing out five
Oscar-nominated performances over his career — Dorothy Malone won, for
her fine work in Written on The Wind, though it is the normally
tightly-wound Robert Stack, as the raging, impotent son and heir, who,
in the also-nominated and atypical performance of a lifetime, dominates
that film. In Heaven, Wyman and Hudson lead a cast of past and future
B-movie stalwarts, including Conrad Nagel as the bitter schlump who assumes that a love starved Cary will fall for his oily come-on; Moorehead in her most sympathetic role
as her unlikely ally Sara; Nestor Paiva (Creature from the Black
Lagoon), Merry Anders (The Hypnotic Eye) and Virginia Grey (The Naked
Kiss) as Roy’s bohemian pals; and especially perennial TV guest star
Gloria Talbott —
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| Cary's daughter Kay, inspired by her own budding love for a non-conformist, becomes, finally, her ally - as played by under-appreciated future I Married a Monster from Outer Space bride and perpetual TV Guest Star Gloria Talbott |
hilarious and touching as Cary’s
not-quite-as-liberated-as-she-thought daughter. Hudson (in a performance often
mistakenly characterized as ‘wooden’), actually seems to be channeling
the future, soon-to-become-immortal Hudson persona: smooth, sleekly
romantic, and ever so gently self-mocking. But it is Wyman who steals
the show and anchors the film, delivering Heaven’s crackling, pithy
dialogue with yet another of her quietly complex and multilayered
performances; conveying deep, seething emotion with the subtlest of
nuanced expressions and hinting gestures — establishing her, in
retrospect, as (despite those awful hairdos) one of the finest actresses
of her generation.
Finally,
Sirk was a master of the perfectly realized moment – Every time Heaven
threatens to risibly fly off the rails, Sirk delivers a quiet, evocative
passage of astonishing power: Cary and Roy’s exploration of the old
mill, as Roy (ahem) ‘brushes away the cobwebs’ for Cary, the frozen look
of silent desperation on Cary’s face at every appearance of the young
woman she wrongly assumes to be Roy’s lover, and the devastating shot of
Cary’s reflection in the screen of the television her children have
bought her to help ease her into a dignified and resigned old age – all
work which is powerful testimony to the triumph of talent and sincerity
over material.
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| In a film filled with mirror images... |
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| ...and Reflections... |
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| ...this one is especially haunting... as Cary sees her reflection in the screen of the TV her children have bought her to save her from the 'shame' of being a fulfilled lover and turn her into a compliant, narcotized aging widow... |
At the very peak of his
success however, Sirk and wife Hilde, never all that comfortable in what they
viewed as a decadent and vulgar Hollywood, returned to Europe and ultimately
settled in Switzerland. Sirk made only three more films, in Germany, including
an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ one-act play Talk to Me Like The Rain, but his reputation as one of film’s great
originals was, unlike many of his Hollywood peers,
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| Douglas Sirk |
quickly established in his
lifetime. In rapid succession, a pair of loving appreciations in Cahiers du Cinema (one by Jean-Luc
Godard) praising his superb craftsmanship and maverick sensibility; the
publication of Andrew Sarris’ monumental “The
American Cinema” (with its then-unfashionable approval of Sirk) and Jon
Halliday's interview volume "Conversations
with Sirk"; and two exhaustive career retrospectives at the Edinburgh
Film Festival and the University of Connecticut Film Society in the early 70’s,
all conspired to cement Sirk’s rightful place in cinema history. Still, though
he accepted, with the encouragement of rabid fan Werner Rainer Fassbinder, a teaching
position at the Munich Film School, Sirk, ever the contrarian, was skeptical of
the politically correct adoration of the New Wave, and insisted to the end that
his best film was the questionable, if still highly entertaining, Taza, Son of Cochise! It was therefore,
perhaps in spite of himself that Sirk nonetheless delivered a handful of the
most challenging and slyly subversive films of the outwardly repressed,
inwardly turbulent 50’s; of which All
That Heaven Allows is the grand and delirious gem.
