Just perfect...

Expected more

Boring

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

I had never heard of this film until discovering and watching it a couple of days ago and I wonder why? This film I found to be so current, any mother would have experienced very similar emotions to what Cary experiences in this film, unusual subject matter, not often tackled in film. How many mothers have put their lives on hold, thinking of their children first, what would make the kids happy, whilst putting herself last. I know of couples who have bought large holiday homes at great expense, "for when the kids come to visit" and the kids don't or don't come anywhere near as often as mum and dad for that matter was expecting or hoping! You can't win, you bring your children up to be independent humans and you are devastated when they are! Grown children only want you when they want you, which was perfectly shown in this film. Cary had to experience heartbreak before she released that it was time for her to put herself and her new man first, even over her grown children's needs and selfish wants! When you get to a certain age,you are blatantly aware that time is running out and you had better decide to look after yourself and put yourself first, often for the first time since you were young, or perhaps maybe ever, before your time when you are in charge of decisions for yourself, runs out. I also loved, the casting of these not usually seen together actors. Loved the difference between the two central characters, their love should not have happened, being from different worlds, but it did and it was portrayed beautifully. A special film to me, I will recommend it to my friends and my children and look forward to watching it again.

Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows is a very well done romantic movie that tells the story about a woman named Cary (played by Jane Wyman) who falls in love with a much younger man named Ron Kirby (played by Rock Hudson) with a chorus of disapproval by her friends, as well as her children because they don't think it is right to move away from a house that they have lived in for many years, mainly because of their age difference. The movie in my opinion is one of the best romance movies ever made, especially the performances by Wyman and Hudson are very convincing. Sirk really does know how to execute a wonderful romance movie like this one but it is certainly not the best to put it that way.The movie also features an excellent supporting cast which includes Agnes Moorehead as Cary's best friend Sara who is very skeptical about the marriage at first but then says it is up to Cary to decide for herself, Gloria Talbot and William Reynolds as Cary's two children who disapprove of the marriage the most even more than Cary's peers combined. But in the end it is till a great movie that should be watched, treasured, and never forgotten by all movie lovers.

Douglas Sirk eschews the need for the banal, stilted dialogue provided by Peg Fenwick's screenplay (from a story by Edna L. Lee and Harry Lee), instead focusing on lighting and point of view to express his disgust with the shallow and moralistic society that condemns a May-December romance between soft-spoken gardener Rock Hudson and widow Jane Wyman. Sirk's world is harsh, austere and fraudulent: images of caroling children in sleighs are offset by dark arguments between Wyman and her son (William Reynolds) and the gossiping and infidelities by members of her country club. It's to his credit that the film makes sense in the context of these images; his frequent apple-red lighting of Wyman highlights her shame under the glare of a Puritan God peering down from the church steeple in the center of town. A good film.

It might not be a masterpiece of visual storytelling - most of it comes from plot and acting - but emotionally it's top notch, especially in the second half the film gains a seemingly unstoppable momentum. This being said it's certainly a nice-looking film with vibrant colors and surprisingly much shadow work that in films from this period one usually only sees in film noirs (which most of the time were in black and white). But one memorable visual cue is Cary's (Jane Wyman) reflection in the TV set (a gift from her children) which is effectively used as it traps her into a box and recalls what Cary's daughter said earlier about wives in Ancient Egypt getting put into a tomb together with their deceased husbands. Funnily in RWF's 'Ali: Fear Eats the Soul' the son kicks in the mother's TV set when she introduces the children to the man she intends to marry.Amidst all the melodrama there also is much humor, even up to the last frame with the deer in the window, though none of it suggested to me that Sirk was just a hipster who never actually meant anything what he put on screen, he just keeps things humorous, so I thought the giggles in the theater were mostly justified.Sirk, who made melodramas for Universal, where most films of its ilk eventually could probably be seen as confirming to consumerism and generally to what might be called the "American way of life", didn't subscribe to those things. Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) is an outsider who found his own way in 50's America and Cary eventually follows him, mostly for his sake, but she is attracted to his way of life as well. Not to mention that most of Cary's friends and her children are pretty much exemplary Americans in theory, yet what shines the brightest in the film is their ignorance, their selfishness, and their compulsion to follow the herd by reacting the way they think they are supposed to react out of fear not to fit in. Those are probably not the first things one thinks of when one is invested in the romance that concludes with an emotionally satisfying happy ending. I'm not sure that this makes Sirk's work a prime example of subversive cinema, but likely a prime example of subversive works produced within the studio system.When Cary picked up Henry David Thoreau's book Walden my eyes almost fell out of my skull, just two days ago 'Upstream Color' brought the book to my attention and now again it was an important part of a film that again didn't fail to quote from it.I liked most of what I have seen from Sirk and I wouldn't say that 'All That Heaven Allows' is necessarily his crowning achievement but I had nothing to complain about and it's certainly up there with his best work, it sure is an excellent film and representative of Sirk's oeuvre at large.