All That Heaven Allows
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All That Heaven Allows is a 1955 drama and May-September romance in which a well-to-do widow (Jane Wyman), living in a small town, decides to marry a handsome younger man (Rock Hudson) who owns a small landscaping business. The two lead very different lives: after a period of mourning, she is gradually re-entering a social life amongst her mostly dull country-club peers, with her only apparent enjoyment in life coming from weekend visits from her college-age children; he "hears a different drummer" and enjoys a life focused on nature and deliberately undistracted by what he considers unimportant, particularly the gossipy opinions of others.
The film costars Agnes Moorehead, Conrad Nagel and Virginia Grey. It was written by Peg Fenwick from a story by Edna L. Lee and Harry Lee.
The film was directed by Douglas Sirk. At the time of its release, All That Heaven Allows was mostly panned by the movie critics of the time. However in later years, it was one of a number of his melodramas which were re-evaluated favorably by critics and held in regard by a subsequent generation of directors, including Pedro Almodóvar, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, John Waters, and more recently, Quentin Tarantino. Among other comments, some cite this film as an example of how to transcend the formulaic constraints of the studio system. Universal-International Pictures just wanted to follow up on the pairing of Wyman and Hudson from Magnificent Obsession, but Sirk was able to restructure the "rather impossible script" and use the big budget to film and edit the work exactly as he wanted.
The film was placed in the United States' National Film Registry in 1995.
All That Heaven Allows was the inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) in which a mature woman falls in love with an Arab man. Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven (2002) is an homage to Sirk's work, in particular All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life.
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