All That Heaven Allows **** (1955, Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead) – Classic Movie Review 3434

Admired cult director Douglas Sirk’s gloriously plush 1955 romantic melodrama All That Heaven Allows stars Jane Wyman as the lovely New England upper-class widow Cary Scott who falls for the down-to-earth, hunky, romantic, much younger gardener Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), horrifying her children and her friends in the country club.

Sirk and producer Ross Hunter’s sequel to their 1954 hit Magnificent Obsession, which also starred Wyman, Hudson and Agnes Moorehead, is an absorbing, beautifully made tearjerker, startlingly attractively filmed in the most surreal-looking Technicolor by cinematographer on equally unreal sets designed by Alexander Golitzen.

Now that soap opera is so much part of life, even of people who do not watch them on TV, it is easy to accept and relish the film’s delicious air of unreality and artificial atmosphere, and be swept along by the power of its heightened emotions.

Sirk turns romantic melodrama into a Hollywood art movie. Wyman (1917 – 2007) proves a real expert at this kind of thing. No wonder she was the queen of TV’s Falcon Crest (1981 – 1990) in the Eighties as Angela Channing.

Also in the cast are Conrad Nagel, Virginia Grey, Charles Drake, Gloria Talbot, William Reynolds, Jacqueline DeWitt, Leigh Snowden, Donald Curtis and Alex Gerry.

Peggy Fenwick writes the screenplay from the story by Edna L Lee and Harry Lee.

The Universal studio lot façade later used for the front of the Bates home in Psycho (1960) is visible a few houses up Cary’s block.

On 6 March 2019, it was announced that Universal Pictures is moving ahead with its Rock Hudson biopic All That Heaven Allows and is in talks with Richard Lagravenese to write the screenplay. In 2018 Universal bought the movie rights to Mark Griffin’s All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson. Greg Berlanti is to direct.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3434

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/