Sometime around that era when the 1980’s drifted seamlessly into the 1990’s a new term entered into the lexicon of film language. In a case of taking ownership of what would traditionally be insulting and pejorative and transforming into an act of empowerment, “chick flicks” would become shorthand to describe—very loosely, of course—a kind of film that stood in opposition to those popular movies of the time featuring brain-dead action heroes which celebrated the invincibility of masculinity and proved beyond question that one could, in fact, survive quite well in the absence of a brain which worked beyond the rudiments of unthinking self-preservation.
Although the term originated in response to movie stars dominating megaplex screens with names Schwarzenegger and Stallone, chick flicks have actually been a successful Hollywood genre for almost as long as their have been flickering lights projected onto a screen. The heyday of the chick flick was, not surprisingly, the early 1940’s when so many American men were at away at war and cinema seats were dominated by women. Back then, chick flicks had other names: soap operas, weepies, melodrama, tearjerkers and potboilers being mere the most popular. The success of a genre is never allowed to die a quick death by Hollywood and once all those soldiers came home, the only real difference was in how many male seats were sitting in cinemas watching these films in the 1950’s.
Ironically, the king of 1950’s chick flick was a guy named Douglas Sirk. At the time he was making the series of melodramas that would define his character—movies like All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and Magnificent Obsession—Sirk was usually dismissed as a lightweight. As a result, he was never nominated for an Oscar and received just one nomination for the Director’s Guild of America Award. Today, he is very highly regarded for those very same films which characterized his lightweight quality and is, in fact, held in especially high regard by the legendary Martin Scorsese.
Everything that is special about All That Heaven Allows is directly attributable to Sirk’s directorial influence. It is his visual imagination as well as his special affinity for being attuned to the issues of women in society that make his melodramas of the 1950’s acceptable as prototypes for the chick flicks to the new millennium.
Nothing looks quite real in All That Heaven Allows. The colors are almost garishly vivid and nobody is ever going to look at it and think to themselves, “hey, this is a gritty indie made on a low budget in real-life locations.” Once color came to television daytime dramas---soap operas—they began to look exactly like a Douglas Sirk film. The difference between that while TV soap operas tried their darndest to replicate reality on phony sets and unrealistic color, Sirk engaged those very same services to undermine the realism of his own films.
All That Heaven Allows is especially effective in putting this favorite technique of Sirk to use. In addition to shooting on sets that clearly didn’t exist somewhere on location, those very same sets are adorned with mirrors and other highly reflective surfaces. Quite unusual for a 1950’s movie, the film even reveals that its characters own a television set and actually use it. These reflective properties of shiny surfaces, mirrors and television are partly there to look pretty, but mostly there to subtly indicate the audience to be aware that the story they are watching is a reflection of their own reality and that reflection isn’t quite perfect. Everything about this film is stylized to be almost realistic, but not quite. Everything is designed to inform the audience that what they are going to get from the story does not quite mesh perfectly with what they get from real life.
The melodramas of the 193's and 1940’s were called weepies because life ended sadly for the heroine. Perhaps the two most iconic examples are Stella Dallas and Mildred Pierce, two films in which a mother sacrifices everything for her child and receives nothing, winding up alone. The heroine of this film chooses another path, one that aligns more perfectly with her own desires. What Sirk brought to the world of chick flicks in the 1950’s is on perfect display in All that Heaven Allows. A worldview informed by what one learns about human behavior from the movies is almost one capable of dealing with reality, but not quite. Something is out of sync, a little out of joint, not exactly as perfect as it seems, and definitely not perfectly realistic.
