Menu
by Toby Perini In his 1955 film All That Heaven Allows, Douglas Sirk enacts what is probably one of the most unsubtle, yet quite well hidden critiques to the American capitalist society that was rising from the ashes of the Second World War. Thanks to the veil of sentimentalism and idealization typical of the melodrama, Sirk was able to discuss themes that he could not have touched in other genres. In this point in his career, Sirk wasn't as celebrated as a genre-defining director; in fact, quite the opposite, his films were often disregarded as 'women's pictures' and rarely analysed in a deeper sense by the contemporary critics, perhaps this is the reason why Sirk's work was allowed a certain amount of radicalism, considering the context of the mid-century Hollywood industry, with all its restrictions and censorship.
Cary Scott (Jane Wyman), a middle-class widow from the Stoningham, a small town in New England, falls in love with the lower-class, younger gardener Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) and subsequently a scandal within the community ensues. In a perfectly idyllic, carefully constructed and heavily saturated scenery we follow Cary as she struggles trying to balance her appearance within a close-knit, obnoxiously bourgeois community and her relationship with Ron, which threatens the stability of the former. Acting as a redeemer, Ron helps Cary to realise the truth of her condition, saving her from the misery that class-imposed conventions would have brought upon her otherwise. The critique is quite unsubtle throughout the film; in some significantly comparative scenes, Sirk delineates perfectly Cary's friends' attitude towards the slightest deviation from the norm, but most importantly, their inherently misogynist hypocrisy is shown, for example, in the engagement party scene, where Cary's friends do not object at all to a younger woman marrying an older man for money, all while Cary is being ostracised for being in the exact same situation, only that the gender is this inverted. Another apparently insurmountable obstacle to Cary's happiness are her children: from a completely different generation, yet just as attached to appearances as the rest of the community they grew up in, they selfishly and unreasonably refuse to accept Ron as their mother's companion because they fear the rumours might affect them as well. Sirk challenges with smartly contextualised key scenes the conservative concept of the woman as the selfless housekeeper who, after the death of her husband, should uphold her husband's reputation and have as her only focus her children and the house. The director affirms quite clearly that this society-imposed restrictions can only bring misery on all parties involved, demonstrating how an unhappy maternal figure forced to live by the same mentality that keeps her imprisoned, can only have as an outcome an egotistical, insensitive and often obtuse offspring, bound to perpetrate the same patriarchal values. In his review of All That Heaven Allows,Christopher Sharrett writes: “Douglas Sirk, as much as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a chronicler of America. The period of this chronicle- the neurotic fifties – was never pictured with more wit and understanding”. Personally, I think the comparison with F. Scott Fitzgerald is extremely fitting if we take into consideration Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby, which is too, a critique of post-war American capitalism, and it does so with a detailed description of the opulence in which the protagonist lives in, and that is where it is possible to draw the comparison: in All That Heaven Allowsone of the most striking aspects is certainly the mise en scène: vibrant, saturated and unnatural colours go along with placed frames within the frame and a general abundance of objects and décor, creating a visual clutter that in its artificiality denounces the materialism of the so-called American Dream that Sirk was probably well-acquainted with, being a German immigrant (or rather, political refugee). If we were to follow Auteur Theory and affirm that the director's personality, style and past influences emerge in each of his works, then it is necessary to mention Douglas Sirk's theatrical background as a producer in works of playwrights ranging from Sophocles to Shakespeare, but perhaps the biggest influence is the contemporary Bertolt Brecht: almost following Brecht's theories on theatre to the letter, Sirk does not try to fool us in a completely immersive filmic experience, but instead constructs a perfect, bright, shiny, romantic world that has no pretences of realism. With Brecht he also shares the same disdain for bourgeois entertainment, stemming from a political background too uncomfortably close to Marxism for '50s Hollywood, and that is why some inconsistencies are noticeable in All That Heaven Allowswhen lines like “She doesn't want to make up her own mind; no girl does. She wants you to make it up for her” are spoken. One might conclude that Cary has exchanged her middle-class suburban cage for a simply more rural (and good looking) one, and to some extent, she has, but Sirk was working under the strict limitation of the industry at the time. While remaining in a safe status quo, the director got away with more radical themes than other popular contemporary genres such as noir and musical. “The studios loved the title All That Heaven Allows. They thought it meant you could have everything you wanted. I meant it exactly the other way round. As far as I am concerned, heaven is stingy” Sirk said on about what is considered one of his most representative works, really exposing the duality of the relationship between the target audience of his pictures and the actual message behind them. Sirk has been given his due credit only after Jean-Luc Godard's piece on Cahiers du Cinema, before that, his films were disregarded as women's pictures, cheap melodrama for bored, frustrated housewives, and maybe this is the reason why they were allowed the amount of class analysis they presented the audience with. Like a snake that bites its own tail, Hollywood's own conservative views enabled Douglas Sirk to create films that spoke to the most radical part of the least radicalised viewer. Works Cited • Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk. Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1997 • Christopher Sharrett, “All That Heaven Allows” in Cinéaste Vol. 39, No. 4. Cineaste Publishers, Inc., 2014 Bibliography • Barbara Klinger. Melodrama & Meaning, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1994 • Sonbert, Warren. "Douglas Sirk and the Melodrama."Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, vol. 56 no. 1, 2015, p. 214-219. Project MUSEmuse.jhu.edu/article/579227.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
UCC Film WritersEditorials and reviews by students at University College Cork. Archives
April 2024
Categories
All
|