All That Heaven Allows Reviews

Few directors could use color as expressively as Douglas Sirk could. Sarah Jane’s emotionally and mentally fragile state being expressed through dark purples and sad clown faces says more about her character than any words could in Imitation of Life. Or the hedonistic, wild pagan dance that Marylee does in her garish pink and red room and clothing explains practically everything we need to know about her self-destruction and wild sex life in Written on the Wind. This same use of expressive color coding allows us deeper emotional access to the plastic, gilded surface world on display in All That Heaven Allows.

Like many great films, it was made because a previous film (Magnificent Obsession) featuring the main creative team (Sirk, Hudson, Wyman) had been a runaway success. Much like Howard Hawks had crafted a perfectly entertaining film with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not and went on to make a masterpiece with The Big Sleep, Sirk really hit an artistic goldmine with this tale of suburbanites enforcing conformity and enforced emotional, romantic and sexual exile.

The plot is pure, unadulterated melodrama of the highest order. Jane Wyman is a wealthy widow in New England whose life revolves around her collegiate children, her country-club friends, and the few lecherous men in town who vie for her affections, if only for just one night. Rock Hudson plays a gardener working on her property, earthy and almost hypnotically attractive; he entrances her from their first meeting on. As they fall in love, the society around them will try to pull them apart, and restore a civilized order to her isolated, but “merry” widowhood.

The worst blow comes not from her friends and neighbors, but from her children who are horrified to discover that their mother is a person, complete with romantic and sexual needs. There’s a truly heartbreaking moment when they try to pacify her depression over breaking up with Hudson by buying her a television set, symbolically trying to entomb their mother within the family home complete with any and all of the latest gadgets to keep her distracted from her true pain. Behold, the consumerist American culture being given the lie to.

The shot that opens the film – of the town’s church spire against a chilly autumn day – sets the color palette and thematic stage for the events about to unfold. This chilly, cold, stiff building with its doctrine demanding conformity and unthinking allegiance to the values it assigns encapsulates the very nature of the conflict. And no character better exemplifies this than Wyman’s best friend, Agnes Moorehead. Moorehead’s performance is something extraordinary, at once prim, proper and supportive, but there’s a note of malice beneath those supportive words. And notice how she’s always there to remind everyone of what the society at large will say about the events. When the romance briefly implodes, Moorehead, like any true snake in the grass, is there to welcome Wyman back with open arms and try to smooth things over with the rest of the social clique.

The color coding goes a long way in econoimically presenting us with information about the nature of the characters and their emotional states. Moorehead’s devil-skin red dress comes to mind. Hudson’s constant flannel jacket does as well. So does the smaller touches, like the clearly plastic tree branch that Hudson gifts to Wyman early in the film. As she longingly stares at the film, her children become visible in the mirror, coming in-between her and the vase she has placed the branch in. This obsession with surfaces and clearly artificial props and exteriors allows for us to pay more attention to the emotional hell being played out before us. We know that’s a fake branch, we see the mirror’s reflection, and yet we automatically know that her entombment is an enforced prison thrown upon her by a society obsessed with keeping up appearances and things the way that they are.

It’s been decades since this was (unjustly) dismissed as a “weepie,” “women’s picture” lurid trash. Thankfully, the European critics and filmmakers of the 70s helped bring about a reevaluation and appreciation of Sirk’s work. And the “happy” ending we’re given is blown out into such ridiculous hysterics – a deer comes to the window to bless the (re)union of Wyman and Hudson – that one can’t help but appreciate, adored and admire the ironic notes that would crop up in his best work.