From the archive: "All That Heaven Allows"

Along with that other key Douglas Sirk text Imitation of Life, All That Heaven Allows was the most obvious inspiration for Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven. Widower Jane Wyman turns her back on the captains of industry at the country club, and those consolations (a sexless male "companion", a life-support television set) urged upon her by friends and family, in favour of pursuing a relationship with younger gardener and all-round nature boy Rock Hudson. His Ron Kirby has a thing about trees - without sniggering, he invites Wyman back to his place to check out his silver-top spruce - and can't pass up an opportunity to make fire with his bare hands, from which we can derive he's as good with wood as The Fountainhead's Howard Roark was with a large pneumatic drill; he even has friends who rather carelessly leave copies of Walden lying about the house. Her ultra-conservative entourage, on the other hand, see her fling as a flagrant attack on the family home. Given her sudden, miserable headaches, it's clear there are going to be tears before bedtime; the surprise is the manner in which they arrive.

There's an undeniable frosting of kitsch to dust off: you have only to observe Hudson feeding deer in the snow to see that. Yet Sirk is very knowing and modern in what he omits, and what he chooses to leave in: clock the ingenious way he cuts around Wyman's daughter attempting to explain "the sex attraction" to a suitor, or the drinks party from hell, in which the central couple are subject to the same scrutiny and bitching as reality-television contestants - a sequence that plays as cruel today as it ever did. Performed and dressed with acute sensitivity, yet at least as bold in its staging as it is radical in its ideas, the biggest compliment one might pay the film fifty years on is that it didn't really need Haynes' (excellent) film to tap its underlying reserves of irony and tragedy - they were there all along, and closer to the surface than might perhaps have been expected.

(August 2009)

All That Heaven Allows screens on Channel 4 this Wednesday at 1.25pm.