All That Heaven Allows

Just perfect! An absolutely gorgeous melodrama.

Rock Hudson knows A LOT about wood.

Brilliantly conforms to the rules of melodrama while slyly subverting them, beautifully photographed in Technicolor with a keen eye for framing, and quietly but brutally obliterates middle-class notions of what's proper. And it does all this while still being a heartfelt tear-jerker. It's sometimes hard to draw the line between what's corny for the sake of irony and what's genuinely just plain corny, but that's part of the fun of watching it.

Some fine moments in a generally well-done melodrama, but some virtues claimed for it (as for Sirk in general) are, perhaps, rather easy virtues, in particular that of irony. The way in which audiences have come to Sirk retrospectively is, in my mind, somewhat suspicious: it is as if there is something about his movies which allows audiences possessing a particular kind of purported cinematic "education" to feel they are in the know. Nevertheless, contains some impressive aspects.

While gorgeously filmed, I wasn't won over totally by the melodrama. It's not bad melodrama, but it never reaches a high pitch of excitement or social relevance like, say, Almodovar's films do.