Douglas Sirk: “This is the
dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash
that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.”
And so it is with the series of melodramas (or more dismissively,
“women’s weepies” as they were called at the time) that German emigre Sirk made
in Hollywood in the 1950s, retiring after making his most financially successful
film, Imitation of Life, in 1959. But 1955’s All That Heaven Allows
may even be the better film. On its surface, the film tells the story of a
society widow, Cary (Jane Wyman) attempting to move past the lonely mourning
that has defined her life for herself, her children, and the community around
her by falling in love with her Thoreau-reading, free-living young gardener Ron
(Rock Hudson), and the consequent fallout with her selfish children and the
gossipy community whose standards she violates by not remaining the lonely
widow or remarrying with someone appropriately dignified. But working
underneath this the film is relentless in its assault on that community; its
ideas of making money to keep up with the joneses, its view of a woman as a
possession to be walled up in the tomb of the late husband, its view that a
woman must bear the responsibilities of tradition at the expense of her own
happiness.
The film opens its credit sequence with a high shot of the town
square and the clock in the foreground, then slowly works its way to look down
the cozy streets (which we will soon learn are largely populated with malicious
vipers) before coming down to ground level to introduce us to Cary and her
friend Sara (Agnes Moorhead, who alone stands by her side during the drama to
follow), quickly and economically setting up the relationships of Cary, her
children, her status as widow, and her place outside the country club set. Cary
meets her gardener, invites him for the lunch Sara has skipped out on, and a
mutual attraction sparks between the two before he continues on his way to
work. Cary later joins Sara for a cocktail party in the company of the deeply
respectable and stultifying boring Harvey; she's clad in a scandalously low-cut
red dress, which does not escape the notice of her children - or the town’s
main gossip, the hilariously catty Mona (Jacqueline de Wit), whose every
barbed, bitchy line throughout the film is gold.
Cary soon goes on a date with Ron to visit his friends, a group of
bohemian non-conformists who could not contrast more sharply with Cary’s rigid society
world, and falls in love with him. But when Cary decides to introduce her
social circle to Ron, all hell breaks loose - not only is she an older woman
(its implied that the age difference is greater than a decade, even though
Wyman was in reality only eight years older than Hudson), but she’s
disrespecting the memory of her dead husband, and the false insinuation that
this affair may have even begun before he passed away is a bit of gossip too
delicious for someone like Mona to pass up. But it’s Ron’s non-conformity that
rankles as much as any of the above - his goal in work isn’t to make as much
money as possible, he drives a beat-up, purely functional car, he lives in a
restored old mill - all qualities which add to Cary’s attraction to him and his
lifestyle and place her further outside the society she’s inhabited.
These conflicts with her social circle and her children pitted
against her emotions and her inner life are the meat of the film, and far more
serious than the light soap opera that Sirk's films were taken to be at the
time. Dialogue that seems trivial - for example Cary's daughter home from
school talking about the ancient Egyptian custom of “walling up the widow alive
in the funeral chamber of her dead husband along with all of his other
possessions, the theory being that she was a possession too so she was supposed
to journey into death with him. And the community saw to it that she did. Of
course that doesn’t happen any more.” is answered by a curt retort from Cary
“Doesn’t it? Well, perhaps not in Egypt.” And this idea is reflected by the
visual palette of the film - not just the bright colors that may seem
unmotivated by the actual sets of the film but are always reflective of the
emotional states of the characters, but also the framing and composition, which
frequently places barriers - doors, screens, banisters - between Cary and her
children or fellow townspeople to represent her mental division from them, or
mirrors to open up the space and also symbolize the divide between Cary's
actual self and the social image she feels the need to present. It's brilliant,
layered filmmaking, as masterful in Sirk's chosen genre of melodrama (Sirk
preferred the term “dramas of swollen emotions”) as Hitchcock is with his
exquisitely planned suspense. He's aided in this by the great cinematographer
Russell Metty, who made eight films with Sirk (and also shot Welles' Touch of Evil, Kubrick's Spartacus, Huston's The Misfits, and many more) and is here given a kaleidoscopic range
of color to work with.
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Patrick Brown
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