Movies are funny things. Ben-Hur was released just a few years after All that Heaven Allows and picked up virtually every Academy Award that was available. Though still highly regarded, let’s face it, most people only think of the chariot race today when they hear the title. All That Heaven Allows wasn’t even nominated for a single Oscar at the time and quite likely would not be nominated today in some kind of retro “let’s fix things” process. That being said, there is little question that while Ben-Hur has at best held steady and more likely lost some of the cache it originally had, the critical view toward All that Heaven Allows has consistently been rising. Few would have thought such a film would ever appear be considered for serious critical attention on a site like this, but the truth is that it is worthy.
Douglas Sirk is the reason why. Not that Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman don’t do their part, but the actors could be easily enough replaced and the film would not suffer much. Not so the director. Replace Douglas Sirk with any director at the time would have actually been considered both worthy and capable without being insulted and it is difficult to come up with a name that could have done with the material what Sirk did. The man was limited in his scope, but with this story he was in his element.
That element is melodrama. Specifically, women’s melodrama. If made today, the film would be classified as a chick flick. Consider that is was made during the height of the Eisenhower Era and released while Joseph McCarthy was still a Senator. In other words, this is a film not just made in the fifties, but steeped in the ideology of that day. Conformism is the rule of the day in this society of relatively affluent (though certainly not rich and privileged) white people. It is a story about what happens to an older woman (Jane Wyman was 38 at the time) who falls in love with a younger man following the death of her husband. That this story is not destined to end happily is a foregone conclusion considering the subject matter and the time in which it is set and was made, right?
Not so much. What has allowed All that Heaven Allows to rise from disposable soap opera to worthy of serious critical attention is the wholesale subversion of expectations. It is not just that the story does not turn out the way one expects, but that in the telling of that story what seems on the surface a plot worthy of a rather forgettable arc in a daytime drama is ultimately revealed as a crucially significant Hollywood critique of American values and hypocrisy. Although not quite reaching the especially lofty and nearly Bolshevist takedown of America in the 1950’s attained by George Stevens in A Place in the Sun, time and patience (with a good deal of help from fan Martin Scorsese) allowed All that Heaven Allows time to simmer before the meat beneath its bronzed melodramatic skin charms was discovered and celebrated. Douglas Sirk made with this film a movie that is to women’s melodrama what the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers is to the horror film.
