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ALL
THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS
9/10
USA
1955 : Douglas Sirk : 89mins
Sirk’s
deliriously enjoyable melodrama remains startlingly overt in its critique
of America’s bourgeois attitudes during the Eisenhower 1950s. Jane Wyman
is Cary Scott, a fortyish widow with two college-age children, Kay (Gloria
Talbott) and Ned (William Reynolds). Some years having elapsed since the
death of her businessman husband, Cary now feels ready to spread her wings
a little – not easy in a cosy Manhattan-commuter town like Stoningham.
While Kay and Ned see ineffectual oldster Harvey (Conrad Nagel) as an
ideal match for their mother, Cary stuns everyone by embarking on a relationship
with free-spirited gardener Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson). Their romance offends
local sensibilities not so much because the vigorous Ron is conspicuously
younger than Cary, but because he’s perceived as a lower-class manual
labourer (he’d been employed to prune her trees) with some dangerously
‘progressive’ ideas. As peer pressure mounts, Cary is faced with an agonising
struggle to reconcile her desire for love with the vociferous opposition
of her friends and family…
It’s
easy to see why this film inspired Rainer Werner Fassbinder
and Todd Haynes to come up with their own loose remakes: Fear
Eats The Soul (1973) and Far
From Heaven (2002). Peg Fenwick’s script (based on a story by
Edna L Lee and Harry Lee) tells a story so simple and strong it verges
on fable – the basic opposition of the individual’s personal feeling against
society’s peer-pressure can be adapted to almost any culture at any time.
Though trainee social-worker Kay often provides surprisingly direct socio-psychological
commentary in what Ned derides as “$10 words” - Cary’s blank-faced non-reaction
to being breezily informed about her son’s Oedipus complex is a highlight
- much of the dialogue is crammed with metaphors and subtexts which, while
often far from subtle (calling this harshly judgemental town ‘Stoningham’,
for example) build into a penetrating and persuasive social critique.
In
fact, so dense is the web of double meanings and sly allusions that it’s
very tempting, in the light of what we now know about Hudson (a rather
earnest performance as an unlikely proto-beatnik) to analyse the whole
Cary-Ron relationship in search of potential gay undertones. There’s even
one dialogue exchange which ends with Cary - handsome rather than drop-dead
gorgeous, masculine-named and short-haired – asking Ron if he wants her
“to be a man” as she struggles to reconcile her feelings and responsibilities.
Such nudge-nudge moments do give All That Heaven Allows an undeniably
amusing kitsch-camp level, but this is a film that entertains and engages
on multiple levels simultaneously. Sirk is a director in confident charge
of his medium, cramming in countless visual metaphors, employing heightened,
stylised direction to create a vividly artificial environment in which
Cary and Ron are as much archetypes as individuals, though special mention
must also be made to recognise the crucial contributions from creative
duos Alexander Golitzen & Eric Orbom (art direction), and Russell
A Gausman & Julia Heron (set direction).
Sirk’s
use of lighting and colour is dazzlingly effective as a means of quite
literally illuminating the characters’ psyches and the precise dynamics
of their interactions and, along with cinematographer Russell Metty, he
does some remarkable things with shadow – watch how Ned’s face is barely
visible as he coldly informs Cary of his refusal to accept Ron as his
potential stepfather. It’s one of several shocking displays of selfishness
– the children are so venal that you do start to wonder what kind of mother
Cary (who, we’re told, married at 17) must have been to raise such an
obnoxious pair.
The
children’s actions are, in fact, so extreme in their blinkered
meanness that Cary’s plight threatens to tip over into near-farcical depths
of misery when she takes the fateful decision to turn down Ron’s marriage
proposal. She’s rewarded with the ‘gift’ of a television set – in one
of the most famously grim domestic scenes in all American cinema. But
the film isn’t finished with us yet – the final act sees our heroine and
hero see-sawing between happy and sad endings, with a bittersweet resolution
that defies such glib categorisation and instead relies on each viewer’s
subjective interpretation. By this stage, despite the artificality, melodrama
and dark humour of what’s gone before, we realise just how thoroughly
we’ve become bound up in Cary’s predicament. Because watching All That
Heaven Allows is rather like having one’s emotions fed through an
antique clothes-wringer: the mechanism may be cumbersome, stiff, and needlessly
ornate… but it doesn’t half get the job done.
21st
February, 2003
(seen 19th February, National Film Theatre, London)
by Neil
Young
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