Featured Movies
Partners
All That Heaven Allows
Jane Wyman falls for Rock Hudson's gardener.
Wyman is a bourgeois widow trapped in a snobbish social circle. The full misery of her claustrophobic life is summed up when her children hope that a television will alleviate her boredom. Things begin to look up with the arrival of Hudson as a gardener blessed with a Zen-like inner calm. The more she finds out about him and his mildly bohemian friends the more she likes him. She falls for him, he falls for her but together they face the apparently insurmountable obstacles of her snooty friends and conservative kids. Sirk was at his creative prime here - although as it turned out very close to the end of his professional career - and was making a succession of minor masterpieces of melodrama. Sirk fully exploits Hudson's ability to project both solidity and vulnerability, and the film has a pointed gay subtext - at one stage in their affair Wyman turns to him wistfully and asks if he would prefer it if she were a man. The film was much loved by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who loosely reworked it in Fear Eats the Soul. Verdict The rich visual texture, using glorious Technicolor, and a soaring emotional score lend what is essentially a thin story a kind of epic tension. |
