Like so many '50's movies that came out of Hollywood "All That Heaven Allows" was dismissed by the critics as just another 'women's picture' and so much romantic mush before being discovered by the Cahiers crowd. It's now rightly regarded as a masterpiece and one of the most biting critiques of American manners ever put on film. Fassbender paid tribute to it in "Fear Eats the Soul" and Todd Haynes virtually remade it as "Far From Heaven".
In this version, a widow in early middle-age, (Jane Wyman, superb), falls in love with her younger gardener, (a surprisingly good Rock Hudson), causing no end of scandal in the narrow-minded small town in which they live. It's a film about class and prejudice and the passing of time and, of course, it's also a great love story. For producer Ross Hunter, it probably was just 'romantic mush' but director Douglas Sirk turned into something genuinely subversive, finding the worm in the apple, (an what an apple, photographed by the great Russell Metty in colours that seem at times positively psychedelic).
Haynes, of course, took it a step further. The gardener was black and the woman at the centre had a husband who was homosexual, (was this a direct reference on Haynes' part to Hudson's homosexuality or was it simply that by the time "Far From Heaven" came out such things were no longer taboo?). Of course, it's also easy to take it at face value but read between the lines, paying attention to Sirk's 'mirror' shots, (is what we're seeing simply a reflection of a way of life?), and you will have found one of the great American films of its time.
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