Just what I need in my life — a Criterion Bluray of a 1955 Douglas Sirk soap opera in which 29 year-old Rock Hudson, whose performances cannot be watched these days without contemplating where he was really coming from appetite-wise, “falls in love” with 38 year-old Jane Wyman, playing a mousey, past-her-Johnny Belinda-prime spinster who seems all but smothered in 1950s propriety and was at the time probably the least attractive actress to play a romantic lead in motion picture history. Four years ago I noted that Sirk was mostly dismissed by critics of the ’50s and early ’60s for making films that were no more and no less than what they seemed to be — i.e., emotionally dreary, visually lush melodramas about repressed women suffering greatly through crises of the heart as they struggled to maintain tidy, ultra-proper appearances. This perfectly describes All That Heaven Allows, one of the most air-less and joyless films ever made by an admittedly skilled and accomplished director who flourished within the Hollywood system of the ’50s. Outside of the dweeb-critic realm it is comforting to know that Sirk has begun to be re-appreciated as a director of mopey, snail-paced dramas about dull, rule-following people who can’t let their feelings out.
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