All that Heaven Allows
A Technicolour fantasia from the golden age of Hollywood now approaching it’s seventieth birthday, Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All that Heaven Allows receives a 2K restoration as it joins the Criterion Collection, starring Jane Wyman as wealthy but youthful widow Cary Scott and Rock Hudson as Ron Kirby, the gardener who tends her trees as his father did before him, looked down upon by Cary’s friends for his menial position but gazed upon by her with adoration.
Opening with a panning shot across the rooftops of upper class Stoningham, actually the redressed “Colonial Street” backlot of Universal which would later feature in The Munsters, The ‘Burbs and Desperate Housewives, with the leaves turning red as the summer ends Cary is ready for a new spring in her life but first she must survive the winter, the cold shoulders of her supposed friends at the country club and the disapproval of her adult children.
Kay (I Married a Monster from Outer Space‘s Gloria Talbott) initially delighted that her mother is dating, Ned (The Thing That Couldn’t Die‘s William Reynolds) is aghast at her low cut dress, but both are united in their rejection of Ron due to the age difference while Cary’s best friend Sara Warren (Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte‘s Agnes Moorehead) points out the local gossips will focus on their financial disparity and that she opens herself to accusations of impropriety, Ron having been a regular visitor to the property while Cary was still married.
In fact, there were less than nine years between Wyman and Hudson while a greater source of community concern should perhaps have been that Cary’s children were only fourteen years younger than her, but adapted by Peg Fenwick from the 400 page novel of the same name by Edna and Harry Lee there is a sense All that Heaven Allows is greatly simplified, any complexity in the characters and their relationships sacrificed on the altar of a brevity atypical of the era when Hollywood crafted grand epics to compete with the threat of television, Cary herself receiving a set as a Christmas gift from Ned.
Colourful but superficial, with Cary and Ron thrown together for an awkward and brief working lunch in the opening scene without preamble and neither actor pushing themselves to make the relationship seem genuine or deeply felt, Cary’s devotion is subject to the approval of the sniping peers to whom she capitulates with an ease which would disappoint the defiant matriarchs Wyman played in her later career, while then-rising star Hudson’s laid back performance is only a step away from indifference, leaving the film standing on thin ice until a desperate late stab at drama coming when Ron, manly man of the forests in his red checked shirt, falls in the snow.
Released on Blu-ray the same day as 1954’s Magnificent Obsession, also directed by Sirk and starring Wyman and Hudson, the new edition of All that Heaven Allows is supported by a commentary from writer John Mercer and film scholar Tamar Jeffers-McDonald, archive interviews with Sirk and Reynolds, a profile of Sirk, and Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, an extended 1992 video essay on the star, his screen image and his secret life, the multitude of clips contained within unfortunately sourced from very poor sources.
All that Heaven Allows is available on Blu-ray from Criterion now
