All That Heaven Allows [Criterion Collection]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

One of director Douglas Sirk's best and most successful romantic soapers of the 1950s, All That Heaven Allows is predicated on a May-December romance. The difference here is that the woman, attractive widow Cary Scott (Jane Wyman), is considerably older than the man, handsome gardener-landscaper Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson). Sirk builds up sympathy for Cary by showing how empty her life has been since her husband's death, even suggesting that the marriage itself was no picnic. Throwing conventionial behavior to the winds and facing social ostracism, Cary pursues her romance with Ron, who is unjustly perceived as a fortune-hunter by Cary's friends and family--especially her priggish son Ned (William Reynolds). Amusingly, Conrad Nagel was to have had a much larger part as Harvey, an elderly widower who carries a torch for Cary, but his role was trimmed down during previews when audiences disapproved of an implicit romance between a sixtyish man and a fortysomething woman! All That Heaven Allows was remade by unabashed Douglas Sirk admirer Rainer Werner Fassbinder as Ali--Fear Eats the Soul (1974), in which the age gap between hero and heroine was even wider. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 1
• Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1 (Alternate Wide Screen)
• Audio: 5.1, PCM Mono
• Screen: Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
• Subtitle: English

AWARDS

• Library of Congress

•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1994

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Director:

  Douglas Sirk

• Producer:

  Ross Hunter

• Screenwriter:

  Peggy Fenwick

• Cinematographer:

  Russell Metty

• Composer (Music Score):

  Joseph E. Gershenson

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Joseph E. Gershenson

• Composer (Music Score):

  Frank Skinner

• Editor:

  Fred Baratta, Frank Gross

• Art Director:

  Alexander Golitzen, Eric Orbom

• Set Designer:

  Russell A. Gausman, Julia Heron

• Costume Designer:

  Bill Thomas

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  Leslie I. Carey, Joe Lapis

• Makeup:

  Bud Westmore

• First Assistant Director:

  Joseph E. Kenny

• Short Story Author:

  Edna Lee, Harry Lee

REVIEW:

• Douglas Sirk's stylized romantic melodrama is one of the most fascinating of his films and the most thoroughgoing in its critique of American middle-class values. Its simple story concerns a romance between a 40-ish widow, Jane Wyman, and her young gardener, Rock Hudson, which scandalizes her social circle in a small New England town. "Sirk has made the tenderest films I know, they are the films of someone who loves people and doesn't despise them as we do," wrote R.W. Fassbinder about the director who was his primary influence. Sirk, a German immigrant who preferred to work in the frequently disdained genre of the "woman's picture," was able to imbue shopworn soap operas of trapped and oppressed women with a unique blend of humanism, social comment, and subterranean visual irony. Here, he points up the petty intolerance of the friends and grown children of a lonely widow, who are disturbed by the notion that she should still need love and sexual fulfillment. In a scene featuring the television as fetish object, Sirk deftly underlines the emptiness that he found in the rituals of American society. The director's characteristic use of mirrors, doorways, and various architectural details to frame compositions implies both limits of the world of his characters and the artifice of his narrative. ~ Michael Costello, Rovi