All That Heaven Allows (The Criterion Collection)
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Agnes Moorehead, Conrad Nagel, Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Virginia GreyBrand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 89 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-06-19
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of All That Heaven Allows (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: Sirk and Thoreau
Summary: 5 Stars
All That Heaven Allows is my favourite Sirk film. All his characteristic stylistic trademarks are present: high contrast lighting; precise, tight framing; expressive colour; and frequent use of reflected images and domestic interiors framed through objects like screens and windows that suggest confinement and entrapment. Sirk is dealing here with lives repressed by social conventions and projections of surface respectability.
Rock Hudson's gentle gardener Ron falls for well-heeled New England widow Cary (Jane Wyman) but is faced with interference from her grown-up children, her friends and social circle, as well as the hide-bound morality and hypocrisy of the small town community. One of this film's incidental pleasures is the presentation of an older woman/younger man liaison in a 1955 film with dignity and a total lack of self-consciousness.
Sirk details the milieu with telling examples of how family togetherness can suffocate emotional growth; how bourgeois comfort and wealth can create spiritual emptiness; and how patronising and mean-spirited much of a community's apparent kindness and concern actually is. Against Ron's Thoreau-inspired "natural man", the artificial offerings of Stoningham's elite are shown as a spiritual wasteland, best summated in a telling image of Cary's tortured face reflected in the TV set she didn't want, but that her children thought she "had to have" for Christmas.
The film is full of beautifully worked out images and set pieces that perfectly capture the characters' inner lives and moral dilemmas. Sirk's high contrast lighting in one of the film's memorable scenes precisely expresses the anguish felt by Ron as Cary tries to reconcile her divided loyalties towards her children, her friends and the only life she has known on the one hand; and her strongly aroused romantic/sexual awakening to a man unwilling to compromise his view of his personal integrity on the other.
Oppositions which create the gulfs between their respective worlds abound:the warm, burnished browns of the old mill house interiors lovingly restored by Ron contrast with the hard, marble white surfaces surrounding Cary's living room/fireplace area; its sense of order and tradition is unfavourably compared with the roughly-crafted log cabin style interiors that characterise the home of Hudson's friends Mick and Alida where a laidback life style encourages friends to just drop in and party on; the Stoningham Country Club's vicious and predatory colony of gossips, cheating men on the prowl (Howard), loveless marriages (Mona) and incongruous older men/young bimbo couplings sets in further relief the love, respect and warmth of Mick and Alida's circle
with its impromptu dancing, sing-songs and free-for-all sharing and giving in all senses. This extended sequence, at the film's midpoint, provides a kind of "coming out" for Cary and an awakening on several levels.
Another insightful parallel contrasts the relative suitabilities of Harvey (Conrad Nagel) and Ron as prospective marriage partners for Cary. Outwardly, Harvey has it all over Ron. Cary's children approve of him, he is courteous and respectful in a traditional way (presumably in the mould of her late husband whose friend he was), he mixes in and is approved of by Cary's social circle, and in the eyes of Cary's daughter (the wonderfully precocious Gloria Talbott), he "acts his age" (read sexless). Ron, on the other hand, is from a lower social class (note Ned's haughty response: "The only Kirby I know is old Kirby, the gardener"), he doesn't half try to fit into Cary's world, he drives the wrong kind of car, and is clearly sexually potent. But observe Cary's face when Harvey suggests she'd hardly want romance or that type of thing in a marriage and you realize why in the end it's no contest. Harvey can mix a mean cocktail and has distant memories of male bonding with Cary's departed husband; but Ron has a magnificent window (to his large, open soul) and following the film's deus ex machina which finally brings the lovers together, the appearance of the deer suggests the coming of Spring to Cary's wintry life and no doubt after Ron is nursed back to health by her loving hand, he will be for her as strong and erect as one of his beautiful trees. From the frying pan into the fire? Perhaps. Sirk is robust in critiquing the destructive, materialist, narrow, constricting ethos of small town middle America but he is far from judgmental of some of its victims.
Summary of All That Heaven Allows (The Criterion Collection)
This 1955 film has been remastered for dvd. Wyman is a wealthy widow and hudson is the gardener who loves her in this film about small town america. Features: widescreen 1.85:1 photos theatrical trailer liner notes. Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 06/19/2001 Starring: Rock Hudson Run time: 89 minutes Director: Douglas SirkSimilar DVD Movies
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