cybrsrch
Its sad and sickening that this even in the smallest way reflects the attitudes of the time, what a backwards ignorant place it was in the 50's. The self righteous attitudes speaks to the evangelicals and the warped morals of so called christains. This film was all about social status and money grubbing, with a side dish of abuse and inferred rape and murder as the base feeling these backward men represent. Why not have the molester reach up her skirt too at the party, goes along with the warped idea that this is in anyway a story about truth, just a perverted look at how they abused women, more tRumpian that anything, MAGA, lets all time warp back to the 50's where rape is just a mental state and men do as they please
funkyfry
Director Douglas Sirk takes a story by the obscure writing team of Edna and Harry Lee, puts it together with two big stars in Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, and emerges with a first-rate critique of the class prejudices and soul-crushing expectations in Country Club America. There aren't many surprises along the way, really, but the thing doesn't just sit there either.... if we, the audience, are allowed to come up for air, then we would lose some of our identification with the superficially "unimportant" tribulations of the heroine, Cary (Wyman). As for Hudson's character (Ron), he doesn't just read, but lives, Thoreau... yes, a character in the movie actually says that. Let's not pretend the movie is any more subtle than any of Sirk's other work.We could pick it apart for all its "unreality", but in my opinion the film was never designed to be real. It's a sort of expressionist take on American culture, one which Sirk would follow up with even more broad strokes on the subject in following years. I do think that the film's discussion on class division would have more weight if, for example, Ron's supposedly rustic hideaway didn't look like something out of Woman's Home Companion's winter guidebook. The Ron Kirby character is a bit too far out of the realm of reality, perhaps because his persona had to be twisted in such a way to make him totally acceptable to the types of people in the audience who might, in their day to day lives, represent the characters in the film who reject him on social grounds. So, it's all very harmless, and when we meet Ron's working class friends they come complete with the friendly Greek fisherman, bird-watching old lady, etc. One wonders what the effect would have been, for example, if one of Marlon Brando's early 50s characters had walked through the door.But again, let's never mind "reality", and let Sirk have his own little pretensions. My main real criticism along those lines is that the film did not show any kind of social pressure coming from Ron's friends against his settling with Cary. Indeed, Ron's best friends (played by Virginia Grey and William Reynolds) are practically gurus of philosophy and tolerance. In actuality, it is not just the rich who perpetuate class division in America. Not to mention, the fact that she was obviously approaching 40 and already had children would have made her an unacceptable wife to many of his young friends, or so we might imagine. The film steers clear of any such criticism and as a result it's take on class (and age-ism) in America is lop-sided.The most cunning and memorable shot in the film is, of course, the one with the TV set turned into a mirror of Cary's loneliness, after she has succumbed to social/family pressure and ended her relationship with Ron. It deserves praise, but Sirk does not just fashion memorable images, but convincing scenes: often, from the most conventional and predictable situations. For example, the big party thrown by Cary's friend Sara (a fire-redhead Agnes Moorehead) -- everything about the scene is already known to the audience; we've seen it in a dozen films. What makes this one memorable is the depth of sleaze to which Donald Curtis' character descends, and his drunken self-conviction. Cary was a tramp all along, he figures, and it's his male prerogative to assume that he can now take her whenever he pleases. As Ron and Cary leave, we hear a voice from amongst the crowd telling us that poor Harvey (Curtis) was fortunate to survive an encounter with such a beast as Ron! It's a better film than it deserves to be, and credit can go to a very solid cast being directed with purpose and intelligence by Sirk.
Perception_de_Ambiguity
It might not be a masterpiece of visual storytelling - most of it comes from plot and acting - but emotionally it's top notch, especially in the second half the film gains a seemingly unstoppable momentum. This being said it's certainly a nice-looking film with vibrant colors and surprisingly much shadow work that in films from this period one usually only sees in film noirs (which most of the time were in black and white). But one memorable visual cue is Cary's (Jane Wyman) reflection in the TV set (a gift from her children) which is effectively used as it traps her into a box and recalls what Cary's daughter said earlier about wives in Ancient Egypt getting put into a tomb together with their deceased husbands. Funnily in RWF's 'Ali: Fear Eats the Soul' the son kicks in the mother's TV set when she introduces the children to the man she intends to marry.Amidst all the melodrama there also is much humor, even up to the last frame with the deer in the window, though none of it suggested to me that Sirk was just a hipster who never actually meant anything what he put on screen, he just keeps things humorous, so I thought the giggles in the theater were mostly justified.Sirk, who made melodramas for Universal, where most films of its ilk eventually could probably be seen as confirming to consumerism and generally to what might be called the "American way of life", didn't subscribe to those things. Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) is an outsider who found his own way in 50's America and Cary eventually follows him, mostly for his sake, but she is attracted to his way of life as well. Not to mention that most of Cary's friends and her children are pretty much exemplary Americans in theory, yet what shines the brightest in the film is their ignorance, their selfishness, and their compulsion to follow the herd by reacting the way they think they are supposed to react out of fear not to fit in. Those are probably not the first things one thinks of when one is invested in the romance that concludes with an emotionally satisfying happy ending. I'm not sure that this makes Sirk's work a prime example of subversive cinema, but likely a prime example of subversive works produced within the studio system.When Cary picked up Henry David Thoreau's book Walden my eyes almost fell out of my skull, just two days ago 'Upstream Color' brought the book to my attention and now again it was an important part of a film that again didn't fail to quote from it.I liked most of what I have seen from Sirk and I wouldn't say that 'All That Heaven Allows' is necessarily his crowning achievement but I had nothing to complain about and it's certainly up there with his best work, it sure is an excellent film and representative of Sirk's oeuvre at large.
