Essay Questions

To what is the promise of “Drama, comedy... life's parade at your fingertips” referring?

This line is in reference to the promise that the brand new television set Cary receives as a Christmas gift from her children. The television is a very significant symbol in the story as it represents essentially the kind of life that society expects—one might even say demands—from a woman in Cary’s situation in the 1950’s. That situation is freshly widowed and middle-age and society has essentially distilled the infinite down to two choices for such a woman. One, she can find an older man—preferably a widower—to marry and grow old with. Or, two, she can press the pause button on freeze-frame the rest of her life from that time forward. The television’s promise of “life’s parade” is to be the substitute for marching in her own parade.

What is spectacularly unusual about the scene in which Cary is presented with her highly symbolic Christmas present?

All that Heaven Allows was released on Christmas Day, 1955. If you pay close attention to films made during that decade which are also set during that decade, you will eventually notice something rather odd. Although invented decades earlier with regular programming being broadcast since the late 1940’s, television really exploded as a popular medium in the 1950’s. In fact, it very quickly became so popular that movie studios saw television as a very dangerous competitor for their customers and dollars. As a result, by 1955 more than three-quarters of American households had at least one television set.

Because movie studios didn’t want to advertise their main competitor, it is extremely rare to see a television set in any film made and set during the 1950’s and rarer still is the movie which not only admits to the existence of TV, but praises it. Thus, the praise heaped upon television as a magic box presenting “life’s parade at your fingertips” is not just unusual, but extraordinary. Even the films made in the early 1950’s about television usually adopted a more ambiguous tone toward the invention.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is often regarded as legendary German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s masterpiece. What is the connection between it and All that Heaven Allows?

In 1937, Douglas Sirk fled Germany for Hollywood to escape Nazi persecution of his Jewish wife and thereupon became one of the studio system’s most idiosyncratic directors. Rainer Werner Fassbinder would be considered an idiosyncratic director working under any system in any country, having constructed a reputation making him both famous and infamous. Roughly twenty years after the release of Sirk’s film, Fassbinder remade it under the time Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Although anything but a shot-for-shot remake, Fassbinder retains the basic plot outline of the original. And yet, there is one particular shot that distinctly ties the two films together both narratively and thematically. At one point, the son of the “Cary” character in the remake is driven to such heights of intense emotion over his mother’s romantic relationship with a younger man that he lashes out at the symbol of their deteriorating relationship by launching a kick directly at the television screen.