“All That Heaven Allows,” which I discuss in the clip above, is one of the great films that the German-born director Douglas Sirk made in Hollywood. He directed religious dramas, war films, murder mysteries, small-town comedies, a swashbuckler, a toga film, and even a Western, but his name is synonymous with the melodrama, the genre that gave rise to his most distinctive flourishes of style and that he invested with a particular personal passion and an unusual philosophical significance. And the actor at the start and the core of the series of melodramas that he directed in the fifties is Rock Hudson.
In “Magnificent Obsession,” from 1954, Hudson’s graceful strength and calm passion lent the conversion of a frivolous playboy into a brain surgeon a quasi-religious pathos. In “All That Heaven Allows,” from 1955, Sirk makes Hudson the immutable core of the action: he plays a gardener and tree farmer who begins a romantic relationship with an upper-middle-class widow (Jane Wyman) whose property he maintains. In both movies, Sirk turns to philosophy itself—in the earlier one, a spiritual thinker on an ethical quest; in the latter, Thoreau’s “Walden,” which provides the watchwords for a set of small-town freethinkers—to lay bare the thought behind the action. Yet Sirk derives his deepest inspiration not from these grafted references but from the nature and essence of melodrama itself—and, in particular, from its audacious proximity to the ridiculous. Melodrama decks out the ordinary in the grand trappings of tragedy, except when it roots tragedy in the risible trivia of daily life. As such, it risks, even invites, laughter at the moments of greatest passion; those moments when laughter threatens are the triumph of the genre, because they’re proof that the regular folk in the story take their emotional lives deeply seriously—and that their director does the same. That’s why melodrama is the most inherently democratic genre. So it’s no surprise that Sirk, who came here as war raged and who revealed an extraordinary tenderness for Americana, found his calling here.
P.S. For that matter, the best comedies are always just a few jokes’ subtraction from the dark intensity of melodrama—this is true, for instance, of Paul Feig’s remarkable comedy “Bridesmaids,” which Tad Friend writes about in his profile of Anna Faris and which comes out next month.
