The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Romantic drama

DIRECTOR

Douglas Sirk

WRITERS

Peg Fenwick (screenplay); Edna L. Lee, Harry Lee (story)

STARS

Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead, Conrad Nagel

BEFORE

1954 Sirk pairs Hudson with Wyman in Magnificent Obsession, a melodrama about a reckless playboy.

AFTER

1956 In Written on the Wind, Sirk directs another romance with Hudson as a working-class underdog.

1959 Sirk’s Imitation of Life tackles gender and race with the tale of an actress hiring a widow to care for her daughter.

Douglas Sirk was a director skilled at balancing the conventional with the subversive. His lush Hollywood melodramas were the chick flicks of the 1950s: a parade of magazine-cover movie stars dressed and lit to perfection, falling in and out of love against a backdrop of cherry-blossom suburbia. But these big-screen soaps contained dark depths that were disguised by Sirk’s craft, and none more so than All That Heaven Allows.

Suburban prison

On the surface, the movie is a love story, in which a widowed housewife, Cary (Jane Wyman), falls for her handsome gardener, Ron (Rock Hudson). Ron doesn’t care about the difference in age or social class. Unfortunately others do, and when Cary’s college-age kids object, Cary breaks off the affair. Beneath this tragedy is an indictment of small-town America’s moral codes, which contrived to keep women in their place.

“The community saw to it,” says Cary’s daughter early in the movie, as she explains an ancient Egyptian custom in which widows were buried alive in the tombs of their husbands. “Of course, it doesn’t happen anymore.” But Sirk shows his audience that it does. The glossy colors he uses to portray Cary’s suburban cage mock its ideal image. Every frame communicates her unhappiness, to the point where even her daughter admits that it may have been wrong to force the breakup with Ron. Will Cary find the courage to defy the conventions that dictate her life? Sirk knew he’d get his audience firmly on Cary’s side.

“You were ready for a love affair, but not for love.”

Cary / All That Heaven Allows

What else to watch: Written on the Wind (1956) ✵ Imitation of Life (1959) ✵ Seconds (1966) ✵ Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)