All That Heaven Allows

Director: Douglas Sirk

1955 / 89min / 35mm

Perhaps the very finest of Sirk’s Ross Hunter-produced melodramas, All That Heaven Allows pairs Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson as, respectively, a well-off widow in country club Connecticut, and the broad-necked, Thoreau-reading gardener who she falls for. Her priggish children, aghast, conspire to break off the pairing, an endeavor that ends in a bone-chilling Christmas conciliation—the presentation of a gift television set as a kind of death sentence. Of this scene Rainer Werner Fassbinder, profoundly marked by his encounter with Sirk’s film, would write: “At that point everyone in the moviehouse breaks down. They suddenly understand something about the world and what it does to people.” Right on.

Distributor: Universal

Part of The Leaves Are Falling