All That Heaven Allows (1955)

      All That Heaven Allows (1955) [D: Douglas Sirk. Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead] Cary Scott, a 40-ish widow (Wyman), lonely and bored a few years after husband’s death, falls in love with her hunky tree-trimmer Ron Kirby  (Hudson), whose age is not specified, but one gathers from “internal evidence” that he’s 30-ish, i.e., “much younger”. He’s also of a different class, being a rude mechanical, unlike Scott’s circle, all well-off business types who foregather at the country club and each other’s homes for cocktails. One of these acquaintances is a cad who figures Scott is easy prey. When Scott brings Kirby to one of the house parties, this cad figures she’s just slumming and tries to move in on her, whereupon Kirby belts him one. This neatly divides Scott’s group into true friends (one, possibly two) and those who disguise their envy of Scott under censorious remarks about Kirby’s gauche behaviour.
     Kirby fixes up the derelict mill on his property (he owns a tree nursery), which of course impresses Scott, and she agrees to marry him. Besides, he has free-spirit type friends, who seem much more genuine and in charge of their lives than the socially constipated circle that Scott has known so far. But when her children object, she decides to sacrifice her happiness for theirs. But she soon learns that they are too focussed on their own affairs to pay any real attention to her, so she returns to Kirby, but when he’s not home she drives off, and Kirby, waving frantically to get her attention, falls off a cliff. Scott rushes back to nurse him; when he wakes up she agrees that she has come home. Fade out.
     As you can tell, this is a slick reversal of the Harlequin Romance (which at the time was not yet the world-beating brand it later became). Here, the woman is the social superior, and it’s a masterful younger man who awakens her suppressed desires. It’s clear that Kirby has aroused feelings that she perhaps never experienced in her marriage, which seems to have been pleasant enough, and which her children wish her to reprise with a pleasant and decidedly unsexy older man of her own class. In that sense she’s the ingenue. Like any Romance heroine, she’s also virtuous, unwilling to acknowledge her feelings, and ready to stifle them in the service of maintaining her children’s respectability as they claim to understand it. This self-sacrifice is a required trope in Romance, too.
     The movie is well-made. The plot is complex enough to sustain interest, but simple enough that mild distractions such as candy or pop-corn purchases or satisfying gossip with one’s friends will not interfere with understanding it. It was aimed at women who were or wanted to be in the semi-leisured class of the comfortable (and somewhat bored) housewives whose husbands earned enough that they didn’t have to work. There were many such movies. What makes this one different was the issues of class, age difference, pointless sacrifice (the children really are selfish prigs), and of course (discreetly implied) sex. The treatment of these issues is dated, and nowadays naive viewers may well be frustrated by Scott’s self-immolation, but there’s no question that the issues were real, and that many movie-goers at that time identified with her and  may have wished they too could make the kinds of choices she made.
     Two years after this movie appeared, Betty Friedan surveyed her Smith College classmates, and in 1963 published the results in The Feminine Mystique. Most middle and upper-middle-class women felt their lives were pretty pointless. It’s not much of a stretch to read the movie as an example of how to break out of the trap of useless, boring upper-middle-class lives. Both the book and the movie presented women constrained by social attitudes that made it difficult (and often impossible) for them to live fulfilling lives. This movie offered the class-renouncing choice of following your feelings, of making decisions that were authentically your own. The free spirits that Kirby hangs out with are what a generation later evolved into hippies. Betty Friedan offered work as the solution. Using one’s talents and skills to do useful work outside the home would enable women to take control of their lives. Either way, women’s lives would no longer be wasted sacrifices on the altar of respectable matrimony.
     There have been many similar movies about bored, frustrated, unhappy women and their attempts to find meaning in their lives. Around the same time, stories and movies about men’s failures to live fulfilling lives also came to dominate literature and movies. Consider The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, made as a movie in 1956. The hero sacrifices his ethics on the altar of respectability, that is, his ability to support his family. The underlying malaise was not so much one of gender roles, but of life roles. Neither men nor women were satisfied with the effects and demands of an economic system that generated immense wealth and made comfortable lives possible, even though for a time that wealth was distributed equitably across all social classes. There’s more to life than stuff and reputation. A couple of decades later, the stories dealing with these themes would have a good deal more edge. James Updike is one of many writers who made careers of chronicling the effects of affluence on the American psyche.
     This movie is worth seeing. It’s slow, you may be tempted to laugh at some of the scenes, the dialogue is passable, the acting competent, there are too many close-ups of suffering-in-silence faces, and there’s a distinct lack of chemistry between the leads, but as documentation of a certain time in America’s social evolution it’s the first of an essential triad. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and Peyton Place (book 1956, movie1957) are the others. As a romance flick of its time, this one rates ****, as a plain old movie **½.

Edited 2023-04-29

Adam's Rib (Another Old Movie Review)

 

Adam’s Rib (1949) [D: George Cukor. Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy.] Adam Bonner (Tracy) prosecutes and Amanda Bonner (Hepburn) defends a woman who fired a gun at her husband and his mistress. An early example of a movie that argues for equal rights for women, albeit as a comedy (so it’s not a serious issue), and of course with Hepburn regretting the possible break-up of her marriage. Tracy is the one who manages to mend the breach, so Father Knows Best after all. The characters are amusing, and oddly childish: did men and women really act that way 60 years ago? The dialogue is well done, the courtroom scenes have a few moments of farce, all’s well that ends well. If you can get past the  dated notions of gender roles, you will see that the subtext is about mutual respect and the need for love. Adam and Amanda each want the other to show not only affection but respect; and both realise that loving each other matters most, whatever professional sparring they get into (or indulge in).
     Watching 60-year-old movie reminds us how much has changed. It’s not just the visible bits, the subway, the cars, the clothes (Hepburn’s clothes are very definitely fashionable), or the furniture. It’s the little things like the crew-cut on the young neighbour who puts the moves on Hepburn when her marriage appears to breaking up (and that phrase is also dated). Or the way that Amanda and Adam co-operate in getting their supper: Adam even answers the door wearing an apron. Clearly, he’s a “liberated” husband, one who considers his marriage a partnership (“contract” is the word he uses). It’s unspoken assumptions such as these that inform the dialogue and ground the jokes: the courtroom humour  breaks the unspoken code of decorous behaviour. Later on, on TV’s Night Court, it became a means of oblique comment on the shifting values of the 1970s and 80s. Here, it’s used to give point to the rivalry between husband and wife, and to point up her obliviousness to the humiliation she is visiting on him. She hasn’t grasped what feminists emphasised: the personal is political: home and work are separated not by a brick wall, not even by a fence, but by an imaginary line that’s constantly shifting.
     In short, this movie is more complex than it appears to be. Like all good social comedy, it supports, reveals, and criticises the values of the society in which the story is set. Hepburn and Tracy are a pleasure to watch working together. By this time they had been a couple for several years, they know and trust each other not only as actors but as people. I liked this movie, not despite but because of its firm cultural anchoring. The writers knew they were dealing with themes (domestic violence, marriage, gender roles) that people had begun to see as requiring reexamination. They managed to do this within the constraints of a Hollywood romantic comedy, and so created a subtly subversive work. Well done. ***

Two old movies (Review)

The Accidental Tourist (1988) [D: Lawrence Kasdan. William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Geena Davis] Macon writes travel guides for people who have to travel, and don’t really want to leave the comforts of their American home(s). His son was killed during a robbery, and he has been unable to come to terms with his grief. His wife Sarah asks for a divorce and leaves. When Macon takes his badly behaved dog to a kennel for boarding while he’s on his next assignment, he meets Muriel, who offers to train the dog. She has a son. Macon moves in with her. Eventually, Macon has to choose between the two women, and chooses Muriel. Along the way, Macon’s sister Rose meets Julian, Macon’s publisher, who falls for her. That ends with a happy marriage.

    Obviously, this is a romantic comedy, but it’s not the kind that indulges in farcical or physical humour.  The movie is slow, languid, low-key, it has the feel of one damn thing after another. Anne Tyler wrote the book; based on the few of her things I’ve read, the movie seems a faithful reproduction of her tone. Tyler is interested in the ways in which people manage to eke out some sort of happiness in lives beset with bad luck, pain, stifling habits, obligations to exasperating people, the vagaries of emotion, and the desire for connection. It dragged a bit here and there, but despite that seemed shorter than its two hours.
     There’s a lot of incident and incidental social comedy. Although set in Baltimore, it feels like a New England movie: the characters seem afraid of acknowledging their feelings, let alone expressing them. It’s Muriel’s unapologetic need for pleasure and purpose, not to say any scraps of casual income she can gather, that propels the story. Without her, Sarah and Macon would have divorced without coming up from under their stifling grief, or  understanding how and why their marriage is over. The cliche descriptor is “bitter sweet.” It fits, which might make you think the movie is a cliche, too, but it’s not. It’s one of those quiet little stories that sticks in your mind, and you don’t quite know why. ***


Crossing Delancey (1988) [D: Joan Micklin. Amy Irving, Peter Riegert] Another romantic comedy, one of many that show how one of the partners is mistaken about how to live his or her life, and must be rescued from a fate amounting to death by a wooer who appears to be everything but the right one. In this case, it’s Isabelle, a 30-something New Yorker in the book business, who has deluded herself, and Sam Posner, a third generation pickle seller, who must persist until he has won her. Isabelle’s infatuation with Anton Maes, a third-rate poet, distracts her into believing she wants an intellectual life. Then Sam tells that he saw her three years before, and he only agreed to allow a matchmaker to set him up with Isabelle because he’s been thinking about her ever since. This confession sparks an interest that slowly but surely grows into the kind of comforting passion that spells happy ever after.
     Nicely done, this movie was a pleasure to watch. I’m a sucker for romance, especially the kind where a Knight (Sam) rescues a Maiden (Isabelle) from a Dragon (Anton). ***