Michael Draine's Twisted Vista
ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS
(Criterion) DVD $39.95
WRITTEN ON THE WIND
(Criterion) DVD $39.95
In a canny bid to recreate the success of
Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession
(1954), Universal reunited the director
with producer Ross Hunter, Rock Hudson,
and Jane Wyman for the melancholy
Technicolor romance, All That Heaven
Allows (1956). The following year, Sirk
combined Hudson with the formidable
talents of Robert Stack and
Lauren Bacall for Written on
the Wind (1957). An auteur gifted
at transforming assignments into		Music Review Index
strikingly personal statements, Sirk
deployed melodrama to expose
the material affluence and spiritual poverty
of Fifties America.
In All That Heaven Allows, wealthy
widow Carey Scott (Jane Wyman) becomes
a social pariah when she falls in love
with her gardener, Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson).
A instinctual, natural man, Ron has never
read Thoreau’s Walden; “He just lives it,”
Ron’s friend tells Carey. The couple’s
heartfelt, forbidden passion makes the
country-club set feel the vacuity of
lives centered about cocktails and social
functions. “Situations like this bring
out the hateful side of human nature,”
muses Carey’s pal Sara, played by
Agnes Moorhead.
Largely dismissed as camp until an
Eighties critical reassessment,  All That
Heaven Allows has received homage
from Todd Haynes (Far from Heaven),
and in a "Sopranos" plot thread.		Music Review Index
The romantic, autumnal air of
All That Heaven Allows is scant
preparation for the operatic intensity
of Written on the Wind. In an		Twisted Cinema
eye-rolling, teeth-gnashing performance,
Robert Stack tears down the house as
Kyle Hadley, an alcoholic, suicidal
playboy tormented by imagined
infidelities and fears of impotence.
Seeking redemption in the arms of decent,
hardworking secretary Lucy (Lauren Bacall),
Kyle finds love no match for the burden of
unearned privilege. Despite their wealth,
the Hadleys can’t escape the gravity of
their white trash roots; like his nympho
sister Marylee (noir standby Dorothy Malone),
Kyle feels more at home in a scuzzy gin mill
than in the family mansion. Hudson plays
Kyle’s life-long buddy Mitch, farm boy guest
in a Texan House of Atreus.
In an era of rigidly defined notions of
masculinity, Hudson displayed an acute
understanding of outsider status. Hudson’s
characters project a stoic endurance, a
sense of secret consolation for pain taken
in concealing its depth.
Both films abound with gay subtexts: awkward
exchanges in which the American heartthrob is
grilled on his unlikely bachelor status; Ron
Kirby’s war buddy laughs out loud when he
hears that Kirby has a girlfriend in Heaven;
in Written on the Wind, impotence
signifies homosexuality.
Part of the enduring appeal of Douglas Sirk’s
art rests in the fact that Sirk viewed
American life with a cynicism at least ten
years ahead of its time. In the interval
between Heaven and Wind, Sirk directed
Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in
There’s Always Tomorrow (1956),
painting the American family in a similarly
jaundiced light.
A veteran of both UFA and the German
Expressionist theater of the Twenties, Sirk
encodes costumes and décor with color
symbolism as deftly as Hitchcock in Vertigo.
In All That Heaven Allows, each
characterization is so clearly articulated by
the actor’s pose or position in the frame
that dialog is almost incidental. Exercising
the full range of the Technicolor
spectrum, Sirk bathed his cast in fiery red,
ice blue, and chrome yellow to create a
heightened, incandescent reality.
The extras on both discs are of the highest
caliber. All That Heaven Allows includes
half an hour of conversation with Sirk from
a 1979 BBC program, an essay by Fassbinder
(who remade All That Heaven Allows as
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul), a still gallery,
and trailer. Written on the Wind provides
an illustrated, annotated Sirk filmography
that puts the usual single-paragraph bio
to shame. Though the feature films are
16:9-enhanced, the supplements are not.
Both films are presented in stunning 1.78:1
transfers. Though motion artifacts
occasionally crop up, the image is highly
film-like. To luxuriate in Sirk’s phantasmic,
orchestrated color is an utterly intoxicating
visual experience.
published in Scarlet Street #43, Nov, 2001
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