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Posted: |
Mar 31, 2017 - 4:59 AM
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By: |
Regie
(Member)
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On the weekend I watched this 1955 shocker from Douglas Sirk. It is a soap about a middle aged widow (Jane Wyman) who lives in provincial prosperity and falls in love with her much younger gardener (Rock Hudson). I'd seen it years ago but I was prepared to be amused once more, and the film didn't let me down.
Small town stereotypes populate this dull film, which concentrates on the quotidian; the gossipy matrons, the judgmental friendship group, the petulant and entitled children who tell mum she's 'got to sell the house' because 'we've left and there's no reason to hold onto it now'. Wyman appears perpetually flummoxed. The greying, but very respectable, local doctor admires her and wants her hand in marriage, er, 'eventually - after a decent period of time has elapsed'. He cautions paternalistically, "but Carrie, you know at our age it will only be companionship". She looked forlorn and all of 45 - but I laughed.
The casting was so improbable that this mined a rich vein of humour all by itself! But the real deal-breaker was both the dialogue and the music, working in tandem to create stellar comedy. Frank Skinner's score was typical of the melodramatic fare of the period, complete with strings and piano, and these following examples were typical of its cloying impact:
Carrie's daughter: "Oh mother, what will people say when you marry HIM? I'll feel ashamed of you! How could you do this to ME?" (Lowest C on the piano is sounded)
Carrie's friend: "But, darling, isn't he the gardener?" (Lowest C sounds on the piano).
Carrie's nemesis - the local gossip: "Well, it looks like you've finally found something to keep you busy"! (Very low note sounded on the piano)
Carrie: "He doesn't want my money; even though he's poor he is a fine man". (Syrup from the strings; I kept wondering where was Andre Rieu!)
Ron (lying prostrate on a bed after an 'accident'): "Oh Carrie, you've come home".
During this scene a deer, seen standing outside in a snowy idyll right out of Robert Frost, makes its way towards their window - surely one of the most tame and benign of all animals - and a symbolic portent that this love affair isn't going to be torrid and steamy. My amusement was leavened by the mental image of hoards of females weeping silently into their handkerchiefs while watching the film in the 1950s and 60s!!
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This was remade in 2002 as "Far From Heaven" with Elmer Bernstein's last Oscar-nominated score.
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I always chuckle at this dialog exchange:
Ron Kirby: Mick discovered for himself that he had to make his own decisions, that he had to be a man.
Cary Scott: And you want *me* to be a man?
Ron Kirby: [Giving her a knowing smile] Only in that one way.
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Thanks for the link, John, and thanks as always for the music, Ray. I myself have never seen this particular Sirkumstance, but I gather it was a success in its day. If that's the case, then I think we ought to acknowledge that the score probably did do the movie some favors. If you don't like the film, then no music would have done it any good, and if you do like it, as 50's movie-goers apparently did, then old pro Skinner's score was just what the doctor ordered for this particular genre.
A long while ago, the NY Times published a letter I wrote scolding them for an article about four of that year's Oscar nominated scores -- but not FAR FROM HEAVEN. I still haven't seen that movie, either, but now I want to see it more than ever, and ditto its template, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS.
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Sirk was used to be seen as camp, but serious appreciations abound in recent years. See this one, attached to the Criterion edition: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3200-jane-wyman-and-all-that-heaven-allows
The re-evaluation of Sirk is certainly nothing which happened a few years ago or just recently, but during the 60s and 70s - which is more than 40 or almost 50 years ago now! - when he was re-discovered by people like Godard, Fassbinder, Andrew Sarris and Jon Halliday all around the world. There was a big Sirk retrospective in Edinburgh in 1972 which changed the perspective on him a lot. And so many books and articles have been published since that time about Sirk the master stylist who was also a profound critic of American society of the 50s.
Just a glance at the reception of Sirk in a regular Wikipedia article might suffice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Sirk#Later_reception
Or here a bit more:
https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/sirk-from-the-archives/
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Posted: |
Apr 1, 2017 - 7:40 PM
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By: |
Howard L
(Member)
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Hey Regie, read your OP, thought it would make for an interesting challenge, noticed the DVD's available at a local library, picked it up and this evening took timeout from "the Preston Sturges films" and watched the damn thing.
Until now All That Heaven Allows for me had been nothing more than a title. And Rock and Jane together had always been Sirk's Magnificent Obsession of the year before. I got sucked in right away from the beginning of ATHA with the look of the neighborhood. Reminded me too much of my neighborhood growing up though I was born a year after the film. And what with the patented Sirk color scheme of things everything that followed was eye candy to feast upon.
Oy, but well into the picture I became overly conscious of the trapped-in-a-WETV-chick-flick syndrome and things kinda disintegrated. Perhaps it started earlier. Rock had the look of a schemer across his puss that even the revelation that he was a sincere, humble aesthete (for want of a better term) couldn't shake. I felt like I was watching a precursor to the Redford role a few years down the road in The Twilight Zone. Both these guys just could not pull off the messianic visage convincingly in their early days.
And yet "harsh side of human nature" aspects of the provincial American whitebread town right out of a Sinclair Lewis novel never cease to pull me in. It's probably because it hits too close to home.
As for the stag business, I prefer "young buck" in this instance. Innocent, doe-eyed (how's that for irony) and serene countenance notwithstanding, Ron Kirby knew what he wanted even if he was doing fine on his own. Which, of course, applied equally to the woman of his dreams, the certainty of her children's and the old hen community's dissenting opinion notwithstanding. I just thought it was too pat the way he fell for her without much in the way of background. Which probably explains my initial suspicions.
The music was lovely in a cloying way. Enough said. For now.
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Sirk was used to be seen as camp, but serious appreciations abound in recent years. See this one, attached to the Criterion edition: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3200-jane-wyman-and-all-that-heaven-allows
The re-evaluation of Sirk is certainly nothing which happened a few years ago or just recently, but during the 60s and 70s - which is more than 40 or almost 50 years ago now! - when he was re-discovered by people like Godard, Fassbinder, Andrew Sarris and Jon Halliday all around the world. There was a big Sirk retrospective in Edinburgh in 1972 which changed the perspective on him a lot. And so many books and articles have been published since that time about Sirk the master stylist who was also a profound critic of American society of the 50s.
Just a glance at the reception of Sirk in a regular Wikipedia article might suffice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Sirk#Later_reception
Or here a bit more:
https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/sirk-from-the-archives/
Douglas Sirk, a Master of Cinema, definitely!
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