Beneath the Surface: ‘All That Heaven Allows’ (1955)

In real life we welcome happy endings — we insist on them — and yet in our movies we save for them our scorn. Maybe it’s because happy endings offer a cloying comfort that some are only sickened by, or because in their predictability they cut off the possibility of any other fate for characters on the screen. Certainly such endings are the enemy of nuance, and that’s their greatest offense.

But my own sensibilities don’t entirely align with those of, say, the late critic Hollis Alpert, who apparently believed a happy ending could ruin everything that led up to it. “Dear Universal Pictures Corporation,” he wrote in a wonderfully sarcastic 1955 review for the old Saturday Review of Literature: “I am writing this letter on behalf of my Aunt Henrietta, who went with me to see your new picture, All That Heaven Allows. She wishes me to thank you for giving her the kind of heartfelt emotional experience she so rarely gets from movies these days.” When the two lovers finally reunite at the end of the picture, he wrote, “the lump in my throat was as big as a goose egg. I don’t mind telling you, I cried.”

Alpert would be further comforted to know that the film’s director, Douglas Sirk, had not only chafed at the studio’s insistence on a happy ending but believed the picture should have ended at precisely the place Alpert did: with our hero falling some thirty or forty feet from a snowy cliff into unconsciousness, thus missing his chance at love.

But the truth is, All That Heaven Allows does too many things right, in its first eighty minutes, to be dismissed for what it does in its final ten . It’s something to savor and indulge in — a deeply felt melodrama glazed with a kaleidoscopic color-symbolism finish. Not that its symbolism stops at its color pallette. All That Heaven Allows has layers beneath layers, each layer confirming once again just how mysterious a movie’s meaning can be.

What we first see is a town — or a studio-lot recreation of a town. The craned camera floats peacefully over this idyllic cluster of homes and offices, gliding along to the gentle swaying of classical strings and piano. The town we look upon is here called Stoningham, in an unnamed New England state, but is in fact a studio concoction, known as Colonial Street on the Universal backlot.

It’s the same fake neighborhood where they would shoot Leave It to Beaver (1957–63) — of all maligned symbols of phony suburbia — and it’s still in use by the studio today. It’s only appropriate that our first glimpse of Stoningham is literally artificial, since the film’s entire premise rests on the understanding that such suburbs are saturated with superficiality.

This is the kind of thing people are talking about when they call Douglas Sirk subversive — taking the limitations of Hollywood filmmaking and using them to his own purpose. The story the film was based on he considered “a nothing of a story, really,” but in it he saw opportunity: “I put a lot of my own handwriting into that film. For the first time, I put in my mirrors, my symbols, my statues, my literary knowledge….I was trying to give that cheap stuff a meaning, you know?”

He’d just made Magnificent Obsession (1954), a film in which such cheap stuff has considerably less meaning, although many regard it highly today. In truth, that film is everything that gives melodrama its bad name — overwrought performances, implausible scenarios, unearned sentiment — while All That Heaven Allows makes the case for another, less pejorative understanding of melodrama.

Sirk went to the German expressionists for his inspiration, and you can see in this film the same surreal and exaggerated colors, lighting, and shapes. If the worst of melodrama is that which appeals to our emotions merely, then the best of melodrama is that which appeals to our emotions by marshaling the full arsenal of artistic expression, and somehow manages to critique society in the bargain.

That’s why All That Heaven Allows has endured as a film masterpiece.

The setup is simple: A middle-aged widow falls in love with her gardener (her tree surgeon if we’re being precise). Her society friends begin to shun her, and even her children do. They’re young adults. The son goes so far as to promise he won’t even visit her any longer if she marries the man. Will she leave him, or will she stay with him? By the end of the movie, she’ll do both, and on the way to her doing so we’ll experience scene after scene of sharp social observation and lush physical detail.

After we glimpse the town from above, we settle upon the residence of one Cary Scott (Jayne Wyman), who, after briefly talking in the driveway with a friend (Agnes Moorehead) who’s returned some dishes, sits down for lunch on the patio and invites her tree farmer, Ron (Rock Hudson), to join her. Ron is shot at a low angle, emphasizing his height; Cary wears a gray dress, emphasizing the colorlessness of her life since her husband died. She tells Ron, “I often wish I knew more about gardening. Do you think I ought to take it up?” “Only if you think you’d like it,” Ron says, establishing his character as someone who places a premium on truth to oneself.

Later on, in the evening, we meet Cary’s young-adult children, a snooty brother-sister pair who instantly earn their dislikability. Daughter Kay (Gloria Talbott), for her part, is a university student of psychology, and she inflicts her semi-formed ideas on her mother: “As Freud says, when we reach a certain age, sex becomes incongruous.” Her brother, Ned (William Reynolds), is even worse.

“As Freud says…”

It’s not long before Ron is inviting Cary to come see his millhouse out in the country. It’s an aged but sturdy structure amidst beautiful surroundings, a fixer-upper that Ron intends to fix up.

He shows Cary the greenhouse that allows him to gaze up at the stars from bed at night, the millstone where his grandpa used to grind the flour, the loft where grandpa stored the grain, the stone fireplace, the silver-tipped spruces he grows on his property. He shows her a 5-year-old tree that’s only about half as tall as himself.

“Five years to grow that?” she says. “Don’t you ever get impatient?”

“If you’re impatient,” he says, in a line that will have strange implications later on, “you have no business growing trees.”

This wasn’t the first time Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson had starred in a picture together, and it wouldn’t be the last. The two had just made Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, whose success — according to Hudson biographer Mark Griffin — brought letters flooding into the studio asking for a rematch — “not only from members of Rock’s poodle-skirted fan base but from theater exhibitors across the country. Everyone, it seemed, was demanding an immediate follow-up.”

It was Hudson and Sirk’s fifth of an eventual eight pictures together, and by this time “Sirk’s direction of Hudson,” writes Griffin, “had become almost telegraphic.” Hudson would recall many years later that he’d “found it a rich experience because it was, I felt, a much more playable story [than Magnificent Obsession]. All That Heaven Allows was very playable, and a hell of a good role and rather daring. There was a woman with a young gardener and she’s not well-to-do but comfortable. In those days, it simply wasn’t done. So, it’s a little bit naughty.”

Hudson at the time was engaged in a naughtiness that transcended anything on the screen. I’m talking about naughtiness in the context of that time and place, Hollywood in the 1950s, when transgression was achieved as easily as having sex within one’s own gender. Very few people other than Hudson’s lovers knew about his homosexuality, but in 1985 he would become the first celebrity to die of AIDS-related illness, and then everyone knew. Hudson had been a lifelong Republican, and America had a Republican president at the time with no concern for gays and what was believed then to be strictly their disease. This president was a man Jane Wyman had divorced just six years prior to All That Heaven Allows, and he had the same first name as Hudson’s character in the film.

Sirk was an admirer of Thoreau, and in Ron he created a character who represents many of Thoreau’s ideals. Shortly after Cary first meets Ron’s friends Mick and Alida, a couple of refugees from the big-city rat race who’ve taken to country living, Alida sees Cary perusing Mick’s copy of Walden. Cary reads aloud the famous passage about the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation, and about the one who’s not desperate to succeed and steps to a different drummer. “Why, that’s beautiful,” she says, and is told that it’s Mick’s bible. “Is it Ron’s bible too?” Cary asks. “I don’t think Ron’s ever read it,” Alida says. “He just lives it.”

Ron feeds deer straight from his hand and opens chianti bottles with his teeth. He wears a red-and-black-checked flannel work jacket. His car is made out of fucking wood. He’s stubborn in his principles, and that stubbornness manifests as impatience when Cary remains indecisive on the matter of their marrying. Which is what I meant above, when I wrote about the strange implications of Ron telling Cary, “If you’re impatient, you have no business growing trees.”

We’re obviously not meant to see Ron as impatient, and modern, more enlightened audiences have remarked upon the sexism inherent in the presumption that Ron’s demands are the more reasonable. But is it really sexism? It almost surely is, to an extent, but there’s something else going on, too, and it has to do with Ron’s friends: they’re not assholes. Everybody in Cary’s social circle is a snob, gossip, bore, lech, or some ghastly combination of the above. Everyone in Ron’s social circle is generous, open-minded, easygoing, and ready to sing and dance.

By loading his script this way, Sirk is able to ensure that Ron’s side rolls out the winner every time. Also, Ron’s stubborness is nicely complemented by his insistence that Cary make up her own mind: just because he’s certain about what he’ll stand for doesn’t mean he’s going to try to alter the convictions of someone else.

Ron and Cary’s relationship has become encrusted with ice.

Cary refuses Ron’s ultimatum, and she returns to the family who spurned him based on class, money, and age (Ron is supposedly significantly younger, although there was only eight years’ difference between the two actors). Meanwhile, Ned and Kay announce that they will soon be off to their own post-collegiate lives. For Christmas, they get their mother a television, through which, the dealer promises, she’ll be able to observe “life’s parade, at [her] fingertips.” When she looks into it, however, all she sees is a sad and lonely reflection of herself.

Shortly after they decide on separation, Ron and Cary run into each other at a Christmas-tree sale, where Ron is helping out with the unloading. It’s an amicable reunion, spoiled somewhat by the presence of what Cary assumes is Ron’s new lover. Nevertheless, when we see her back at home that night, she’s wearing a housecoat very similar to Ron’s red-and-black-checked jacket.

I love this way Sirk has of sneaking messages into the mise-en-scene. It’s certainly not something that goes unremarked-upon in discussions of his movies — of this movie in particular — but it’s always fun to point out some of the things. Sirk’s cinematographer here and on so many of his films is Russell Metty, who never seems to get the credit he deserves but whose sense of color and lighting did so much to bring Sirk’s vision to splendid life. Before Metty came along Sirk’s movies had the same sense of composition as his later ones but none of the magical glow. That’s what Metty gave him.

Anyway, Cary’s back at home with her red-checked housecoat, and she begins to realize that she’s made a big mistake. She decides to go back to Ron’s house, to attempt a reconciliation. Meanwhile, we see from a discussion between Ron and a friend, he’s starting to soften up as well. But wouldn’t you know: when Cary gets to Ron’s place, Ron sees her from on high on a nearby rock. Ron screams to get her attention but falls through the snow and off the rockface into a coma. Cary drives away without even knocking, apparently having had second thoughts.

But Ron’s misfortunate proves to be fortunate. Because of his injuries and resultant hospitalization, Cary is brought news of his condition. She goes to visit him, and the movie is given its neat and tidy ending. And there’s nothing at all wrong with that. We insist on happy endings in real life; the least we could do is welcome them in our movies.

Except that’s not really the end of the story, is it? It’s just the end of the part of the story we’re privy to. What if Ron’s recalcitrance returns, and chafes too hard against their domesticity? And what if Cary then flees back into the arms of her kids, only to find that Ned has kept his promise to never see her again?

That’s always possible, but I like to think Cary and Ron made it.

They probably did.

I’m sure they did.