All That Heaven Allows

That’s it, I’ve drunk the kool-aid, I’m a Douglas Sirk fanatic. Take the last sentence of the previous review, change “very little” to “some,” and you have my take on this film. It doesn’t bother me a bit that Rock Hudson is opaque and ludicrous as the Thoreavian man in nature. It doesn’t bother me a bit that the music is ladled like syrup over every scene (that’s why it’s called melo-drama), or that the Technicolor landscapes and interiors look utterly artificial, an alternation of Currier & Ives lithos and design spreads from a Fifties issue of House and Garden. No, Sirk himself said there is a fine line between trash and fine art, and he has clearly stepped over the line. This was the film that made the whole Cinematic Landscape film series click into place in the planning, and for me, if for no one else, it worked perfectly. I watched the whole film immersed in the byplay between mirrors and windows, indoors and outdoors, society and nature, and revelled in the wish-filling conclusion, when the couple goes into the final clinch, indoors by the fire, where it’s livable, but in front of a wall-sized picture window revealing a dazzling snowscape, into which a young doe wanders to offer a benediction on the deserving (of love and animal passion) widow Jane Wyman and her nature boy. Add that this was the source of two other favorite films of mine, Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, and only its provenance as pure Hollywood product keeps this film just out of the Pantheon. (1955, dvd@cai, r.) *9-*