rock hudson

My Christmas Wish: Treat Yourself to All That Heaven Allows (1955) This Year

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Last year, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows made it to number 24 on Swampflix’s Top 100 films, so naturally I spent the evening of last Christmas Eve closing that blind spot. If you’re a weirdo like I/we am/are (and if you’re on this site, that’s probably the case), you’ll likely find yourself recognizing the plot from its contours, because what Star Wars is to Spaceballs, this movie is to John Waters’s Polyester. Since Brandon had already written a review years earlier, I repurposed the review I couldn’t stop myself from writing to save for this year as an earnest recommendation to spend some part of your Christmas season with Sirk too, on the 70th anniversary of Heaven’s release. 

Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a well-off widow in New England. Her life is quiet, with visits from her two college-aged children Kay (Gloria Talbott) and Ned (William Reynolds) growing fewer and further between. Her best friend, Sara Warren (Agnes Moorhead), takes her out socially; attempts to get her to pair off with older widowers in their social circle are unsuccessful, as she feels no spark with any of them. One day, she realizes that some new hunk is tending to her landscaping, and he introduces himself as Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), the son of the late Mr. Kirby who was previously engaged as the Scott family’s arborist. When she visits him at his home, she learns that he sleeps on a cot in a room attached to the greenhouse, and when he mentions planning to tear down the old mill on the property, she cajoles him into giving her a tour of the long-abandoned building, and she encourages him to convert it into a livable home instead. As their romance burgeons, their love is represented in ongoing changes to the mill house, which comes to resemble a livable home more and more. Ron takes Cary to meet some of his friends, a couple who have given up on the lifestyle of trying to keep up with the Joneses in New York and now instead tend a tree farm. As the night goes on, a party erupts, and the couple introduces Cary to their bohemian friends: birdwatchers, beekeepers/artists, cornbread masters, and lobster-catchers. 

Cary has a wonderful, uninhibited time, but there’s trouble around the corner; her high society friends are rather snooty about her relationship, as are her children. When she mentions selling the house and moving in with Ron (post nuptials, of course), Ned becomes quite upset about his mother selling his childhood home and tells her that the “scandal” she’s bringing upon the family by dating someone who’s merely (upper) middle class could jeopardize his career options. The local gossip hound starts a rumor that Cary and Ron had been an item since before her husband died, which deeply upsets Kay, as she begs her mother to break things off with Ron. Everyone also seems to be utterly scandalized by their dramatically different ages. (Hudson was 30 and Wyman 38 at the time, and those are the ages that they appear to be to me, but the film may be trying to imply a greater disparity.) She acquiesces to the demands of her fairweather socialite friends and her ungrateful children, only to learn some months later that her sacrifice was in vain. Both of her children delay their Christmastime return to their hometown, and when they arrive, they reveal their own new life plans; Kay will be getting married to her beau in February when he graduates, and Ned will be leaving straight from his own graduation to take a position in Europe that will last, at minimum, a year. They present her with a Christmas gift that she doesn’t want (more on that in a minute), and Ned even suggests that they sell the house, since the kids won’t be needing it as their “home” any longer. Via a simple misunderstanding, Cary comes to believe that Ron is getting married to another woman, and the melodrama only unfolds further from there. 

Sirk is a Technicolor artist, and this is a gorgeous movie, and a very funny one at that. One of the things that I really loved about this cast was the opportunity to see Agnes Moorhead play a kinder, more sympathetic role. Just a couple days after watching this one I caught her name in the opening credits of Dark Passage and thought to myself, aloud, “That woman was working.” And, wouldn’t you know it, I tuned into the New Year’s Twilight Zone marathon on H&I just in time to catch her episode of that: 

Moorhead’s Sara Warren is the only real friend that Cary has, as she’s the one who encourages her to get back together with Ron when she sees just how heartbroken her friend is. We learn this in a scene that’s perfectly framed and is one of many pointed social critiques that the film makes. We cut to a shot of a housekeeper vacuuming a carpet, as the camera dollies backward through the doorway to the room in which Sara and Cary are talking, and Sara closes the door to shut out the noise so that the two women can converse. It’s a neat gag, but it plays into the overall social critique of the movie, in which even the most sympathetic member of the bourgeoisie is still an aristocrat shutting out her social inferiors, despite her softening her heart towards her friend’s desire to date a blue collar business owner. There’s also a great contrast between the country club cocktail party that Cary attends near the film’s opening scene and the lobsterfest that happens at Ron’s friends’ house, where the upper class is presented undesirably. A married man makes a pass at Cary, kissing her; a potential romantic interest tells her that there’s little need for passion at their age, to which she (rightfully) takes some offense; the town gossip queen is there to do her thing. Ron’s group’s party is a lively place, where he plays the piano and sings boisterously, and people dance with great fervor. It’s never commented upon, but it is present throughout. 

Another fun little tidbit about this one is its distaste for television. Early on in the film, Sara suggests that Cary get a television to keep her company now that the house is empty, which Cary finds to be a contemptible suggestion. When a television salesman sent by Sara calls upon the Scott household, Cary shoos him away in a huff. In the final insult, however, Cary receives a television set as a gift from her children for Christmas. Ned even reiterates that Cary will be lonely and unfulfilled without her children and should have something in the house to distract her from her pitiful solitude, as if he and his sister hadn’t done everything in their power to sabotage her relationship with Ron. After the children have gone off to do their own things, their mother is left alone in the house, lit only by the lights of the Christmas tree and a duplicate fire: one in the hearth and its mirror in the flat TV screen — the giver of warmth and its cold reflected image. It’s striking and memorable, and the relatively tiny window that the TV might give of the world is visually contrasted with the vivid Technicolor world just on the other side of the panoramic windows that Ron has installed into the home he built to share with Cary. It’s good stuff. 

The film doesn’t demand a winter or Christmas time frame to be viewed, but I think it works best in that context. I’m getting the word out now so you can put it on the calendar before we all get Christmas brained. And, while you’re at it, when was the last time you watched Polyester?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Pillow Talk (1959)

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Rock Hudson was an enormous presence in Old Hollywood, and I don’t just mean as the personification of movie star handsomeness or as an archetype of “open secret” closeted gay celebrity.  He was physically enormous, towering over his co-stars at 6’5″ with a burly lumberjack build to match his cartoonishly square jaw.  Somehow, that imposing figure never really stood out to me in the romantic dramas of Hudson’s prime, starring opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Giant or Jayne Wyman in All that Heaven Allows.  Where he becomes most glaringly imposing is in his career-pivot to comedy in 1959’s Pillow Talk, which features several gags about his gigantic build.  Pillow Talk gawks at Hudson’s enormous body as he struggles to squeeze it into bathtubs and sportscars that were designed to house mere mortals, then concludes on a gag where he carries co-star Doris Day’s pajama-clad body through New York City streets like a firefighter rescuing a small child while she kicks her feet in petulant protest.  Tony Randall looks even mousier in comparison with that towering wall of beef as his ill-equipped romantic rival, posing next to him like a civilian fan taking photos with their favorite professional wrestler – physically mismatched to great comedic effect.

Hudson plays a jolly fuckboy giant in Pillow Talk, a skyscraper cad.  His meet-cute with Day involves a shared partyline between the two mismatched lovers’ NYC apartments, which Day is never able to use because Hudson is constantly tying up the line wooing a bevy of short-term lovers.  That partyline etiquette premise is just as relatable to kids today as their absurd romcom-trope professions: Broadway songwriter & interior decorator, respectively.  Day is understandably annoyed by Hudson’s playboy antics, describing him as a “sex maniac” in her request to the phone company to break up their partyline.  Meanwhile, Hudson is frustrated by Day’s immunity to his fuckboy charms, diagnosing her with “bedroom problems” during one of their shared-line squabbles.  According to romcom law, the pair are obviously destined to couple up by the end credits, but it takes some Three’s Company-style sitcom hijinks on Hudson’s behalf to make that happen.  He invents a flimsy naïve-Texan-in-the-big-city persona so that he can date her in person, which mostly amounts to Hudson doing a half-assed John Wayne impersonation while “aw, shucks”ing his way through several low-stakes dates.  Meanwhile, Day experiments with being overtly sexy onscreen for the first time in her career while maintaining a sense of cocktail-hour class, which is mirrored in her character’s struggles to loosen up enough to finally solve her “bedroom problems” once & for all.  Tony Randall also hangs around as their ineffectual third wheel, landing none of the successful smooches but most of the successful punchlines.

Pillow Talk precariously teeters between a more buttoned-up, euphemistic era of Hollywood screenwriting where characters are described as “bothered” instead of “horny” and the looser-morals Hollywood to follow where characters brag about bedding & marrying “strippers” in free-wheeling locker room talk.  If it were directed by Frank Tashlin in the mode of Rock Hunter or The Girl Can’t Help It, it might’ve been a perfectly anarchic, amoral comedy, but workman director Michael Gordon keeps it all at an even keel (likely just happy to be working again after being blacklisted for Communist ties).  In our collective memory, it’s lingered as cutesier and tamer than what Gordon delivered in reality, as evidenced by its ironic, post-modern homage in Peyton Reed’s 90s send-up Down with Love.  Like most comedies, a lot of Pillow Talk‘s individual punchlines have not aged well politically, especially when punching down at date-rape victims, racist stereotypes, and fat-bodied uggos.  Still, its willingness to offend leads to one of its more metatextually interesting gags, when Rock Hudson briefly indicates that he is a closeted homosexual so that Doris Day will up the stakes of their sexual contact to test his orientation.  In that moment, he’s a known-to-be-closeted actor playing a hyper-straight himbo slut who’s only pretending to be closeted so he can bed even more women.  The open discussion of that perceived queerness feels wildly out of sync with the Hays Code-era Hollywood glamor of the film’s Cinemascope extravagance, which twinkles in every one of Doris Day’s gowns & jewels, as spotlighted in the opening credits.

The segmented comic book framing of Pillow Talk‘s 1st-act phone calls conveys a modern, chic playfulness, while every one of its punchlines are underscored by stale, goofball sound-effects.  During a dual bathtub scene, its two near-nude stars play footsy at the barrier between their respective frames, so that you get a full view of their muscular gams, and yet they’re not allowed to consummate that mutual desire until they agree to marry at the end.  It’s a 1960s sex comedy made within the bounds of a 1950s romcom that’s not allowed to openly joke about sex.  None of this truly matters, though, since the main selling point is the spectacle of its two main stars.  Doris Day’s uncomfortable transformation into a Hollywood sex symbol makes for great comedic tension against Hudson’s rock-hard leading man physique.  Meanwhile, Hudson’s massive body is a spectacle unto itself, one that every woman onscreen instantly swoons over . . . Except, of course, for the one he loves.  It’s a dynamic so charming that it led to two more romcom pairings of those stars in Send Me No Flowers and Lover Come Back, both of which brought Tony Randall along for the ride to ensure no chemistry was lost.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: A Place in the Sun (1951)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1951’s A Place in the Sun, is a high-emotions noir about a desperate social climber who drowns his pregnant girlfriend so she doesn’t get in the way of his wealthier, prettier romantic prospect.  In essence, it’s an epic-fuckboy melodrama about the moral crimes young men were willing to commit for the chance to be with Elizabeth Taylor.  She was the most marriageable woman of all time, after all, apparently lethally so.  At the time, Taylor was just starting to make the transition from child star to adult romantic lead, and A Place in the Sun doesn’t ask her to do much other than to look elegant while modeling classic gowns designed by Edith Head.  Most of the film’s more serious brooding is left to Taylor’s costars Montgomery Clift & Shelley Winters as the factory-worker couple who’re undone by her natural glamor. 

Elizabeth Taylor’s onscreen transformation into a convincingly mature actress did not begin & end with A Place in the Sun.  It was a gradual rebranding over several projects under her studio-system contract with MGM.  If you’re curious to track her progress through this transitional era, here are a few more titles to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

Conspirator (1949)

Elizabeth Taylor’s first role as an adult character was co-lead of the Cold War espionage thriller Conspirator, starring opposite Robert Taylor.  Elizabeth plays Robert’s 18-year-old bride but was only 16 at the time of shooting, while her co-star was more than double her age, in his late 30s.  That might sound like a gross, old-fashioned approach to Old Hollywood romance—and maybe it is—but it’s at least acknowledged & addressed in the text.  Elizabeth plays a young, bratty teenager who has no business getting married, while Robert plays a Soviet spy posing as a British officer who’s attracted to her because she’s naive and easy to manipulate.  There’s some sly humor to the way the pair star in entirely separate movies for the first half of Conspirator.  Elizabeth is playing girlish, flirty games while Robert is plotting to subvert the Western Bloc, often undermined by his young wife’s immature antics.  That tension slowly deflates once the bride is fully clued into her husband’s true allegiances, but the path to that reveal is more fun than you might expect.

Of course, the teenage Taylor radiates pure movie star glamor in this otherwise mediocre Red Scare noir — the same natural glamor that she echoes in the soon-to-come A Place in the Sun.  There’s something incredibly charming about her character’s insistence on being treated like an adult, while also being too scared to sleep alone during thunderstorms and waiting around like a puppy for her crush to call on the telephone.  Conspirator is far from her best onscreen work, but it is a clear marker of her transition into being seen as an adult by her audience, almost to the point of it being her character’s arc.  In a third-act argument with her Filthy Commie husband, he remarks, “You’ve grown up, haven’t you?”, and she spits back “You can’t lie to me anymore, if that’s what you mean.”  The couple’s age gap may make for an uncomfortable pairing, but the movie clearly knows what it’s doing with it; the paranoid anti-Communist politics on the other hand . . .

Father of the Bride (1950)

Vincent Minnelli’s original adaptation of the 1949 novel Father of the Bride is just as bubbly & fluffy as its later adaptations in Norah Ephron’s 1991 version and the most recent straight-to-HBO-Max remake.  Like in A Place in the Sun, Taylor isn’t asked to do much in the picture besides look elegant in her couture gowns, this time including an iconic wedding dress (that ironically telegraphs of her many tabloid-covered weddings decades down the line).  Most of the film’s psychological grit defaults to the titular father (Spencer Tracy), who narrates his neurotic breakdown as he watches Daddy’s Little Girl prepare to walk down the wedding aisle, struggling to reconcile how he sees her vs her actual, adult autonomy.  In that way, it’s a perfect role for the teenaged Taylor, who was asking audiences to stop looking at her like a little girl and start seeing her as an adult.  It’s also a strange, upsetting reflection of macho insecurities lurking just under the surface of every American dad’s Neanderthalic skull.

The 1950 Father of the Bride might be light-hearted fluff, but it’s still high-quality fluff when compared to the mawkish sentimentality of its two remakes.  At the very least, its surrealistic nightmare sequence in which Tracy sinks into the floor while walking Taylor down the aisle is the high-water mark for the series as visual art.  More importantly, there’s something about the promo shots of Tracy spanking Taylor in her wedding dress that gets to the core of this series’ Suburban Dad Psychosis more than anything that happens in the actual films.  This is fundamentally a comedy about how fathers infantilize their daughters for as long as they can get away with it, so there’s something apt about casting a young actor who was pleading to no longer be infantilized by her audience as a child star.

Giant (1956)

Taylor didn’t fully come into her own as a lead actor playing adult characters until she reunited with A Place in the Sun director George Stevens for the sprawling Texas family drama Giant.  Specifically, it happens about halfway into the epic melodrama, just when my borrowed library DVD prompted me to flip the disc over to Side B.  In the first 100 minutes on Side A, Taylor plays a defiant but romantic teenager who’s swept off her feet by a Texas cattle rancher (Rock Hudson), only to discover that her handsome, charming husband is also a raging racist & misogynist in most social settings, as is the way of his home state.  At the start of Side B, she’s shown knitting in the family parlor, her hair pasted grey for an unconvincing geriatric stage-drama effect.  Decades into her marriage to an old-fashioned, uptight cowboy, she’s still a progressive do-gooder who challenges his Conservative views on women and the Mexican servant class every chance she gets, which means she has a lot more to chew on here than she has in Conspirator, Father of the Bride, or even A Place in the Sun.  Giant is the kind of well-meaning, anti-racist drama that’s just old & creaky enough to undercut its point by casting white actors in brownface for the minor roles, but it’s still surprisingly left of center for a studio production of this epic scale, and Taylor is the main mouthpiece for its political messaging.

I’m tempted to pitch Giant as what might happen if Douglas Sirk guest-directed a season of Yellowstone, but the existence of Sirk’s Written on the Wind (released the same year, also starring Hudson) makes that comparison somewhat redundant.  Stevens was a formidable contemporary of Sirk’s, but there’s nothing especially stylish or personal about his filmmaking craft that makes Giant more essential viewing than Written on the Wind or Imitation of Life, which combine to cover a lot of the same thematic territory.  He was a talented workman director within the studio system, most reliable for his ability to manage large-scale productions without them spiraling out of control.  It’s not a flashy, auteurist approach to directing, but it does allow for the Old Hollywood dream factory to do its work at peak efficiency.  If nothing else, Giant is worth seeing for the spectacle of its cast.  It almost seems impossible that a single movie could gather Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Carroll Baker, Dennis Hopper and Sal Mineo all in one picture, but when you stretch your runtime out 3.5 hours and your setting over multiple decades, you have the space for that kind of feat.  Taylor & Hudson are the white-hot center of the drama, though, and they’re the main reason to clear an evening to watch it in full.  When Hudson first spots a teenage Taylor on her family farm, she’s riding a wild, misbehaved horse and he absentmindedly calls her a “beautiful animal” in a way that equates the two.  Years into their marriage, that wild streak never fades, and the adult version of Taylor’s character is given plenty open land to run free and buck Texas social conventions, to her husband’s fury & frustration.  It was a career-making role for her, one that cleared a path to the even juicier roles in Tennessee Williams & Edward Albee adaptations that were just over the horizon. 

-Brandon Ledet

All That Heaven Allows (1955)

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German filmmaker Douglas Sirk has dozens of titles to his name as a director, but the influence of his career is often condensed down to his handful of Technicolor melodramas produced by Universal-International Pictures in the 1950s. I had never seen a Sirk film in my life until recently, but the cultural impact of those Technicolor pictures was so significant that I could easily recognize their echoes in works as disparate as Far from Heaven, The Fly (1958), Polyester, and Gods & Monsters. Perhaps the most iconic title among Sirk’s most well-known American works is the Rock Hudson/Jane Wyman melodrama All That Heaven Allows. Dismissively categorized at its time of release as a “woman’s picture,” All That Heaven Allows may not have been fully appreciated in its initial run the way Sirk’s Imitation of Life eventually was just a few years later, but its reputation as an intricately constructed art piece has only grown in the decades since. I can only report that even after having seen its visual aesthetic assimilated & absorbed in a countless number of films throughout my life, All That Heaven Allows still makes for an intense, powerful first-time watch as a modern viewer. I’m in awe of its craft & its efficiency and still a little tipsy as I’m writing this from drinking in its lush, color-soaked artistry. I think I’m an instant Sirk fan, an immediate convert.

The story told here isn’t necessarily what’s important to the film’s appeal. Despite being 38 years old at the time of production, Jane Wyman plays a middle aged widow worried that her life is heading towards a lonely end. Her social circle of sycophantic elbow-rubbers & town gossips can only offer her calculated cocktail parties & polite company. Her bratty children, a Freudian scholar daughter & a brutish meathead son, selfishly plot for her to live a life alone in front of the television, described in-film as “the last refuge of a lonely woman.” Everyone seems to have concrete ideas about what the widow should do with the rest of her life and they circle around her, ready to pounce on any misstep she makes in choosing her path. Imagine their shock, then, when the woman allows herself to be seduced across class lines by her much younger gardener, played by the movie star handsome (and famously closeted) Rock Hudson. Will she leave behind her life of stuffy cocktails in the parlor for the raucous lobster boils her young beau shares with his equally money-ambivalent friends? She wants to value romance over social status, but the town’s prying eyes & her selfish kids’ disapproval make the decision difficult. The hot young landscaper offers her a more natural, fulfilling life than the self-conscious one she leads and the film’s central conflict lies in whether she’ll have the courage to accept the offer before it’s too late.

Keeping the story a thinly structured narrative frame is a smart choice, as it allows plenty of room to focus on the film’s real draw: a nonstop visual feast. Sirk lights his interiors with only the harshest, deep cold blues clashed against the most breathtaking yellow warmth. It’s like watching giallo, except with romance instead of murder driving its central mystery. Just watching a character transition from a candlelit parlor to ice cold moonlight, the lighting swapping roles between those spaces to match their movements, is enough to make you gasp. Sirk’s eye for exterior settings & Nature is just as hyper-real. Studio lot suburbia (sets that were later reused for episodes of Leave It to Beaver) looks like impressionistic paintings. Rock Hudson serves as our gateway to this Natural dreamworld, hand-feeding deer in his own backyard and drawing the audience’s attention to the trees that populate his impossible, artificial landscape. I haven’t seen colors this breathtakingly deep and sets this cinematically dreamlike since I first witnessed the Criterion restoration of The Red Shoes. It’s truly a marvel and Sirk’s camera knows how to frame & capture its most savory pleasures. By the time All That Heaven Allows was over, I felt as if I were drunk. Not too bad for “a woman’s picture,” huh?

It’s so easy to get swept up in this film’s beautiful homes, costuming, and interior lighting that time begins to take on a different pace altogether. All That Heaven Allows flew by for me. It worked like a quickly-paced seduction montage set to a sweeping orchestral score, as if Rock Hard Hudson were sweeping the entire audience off its feet, not just the hot to trot widow he takes a fancy to. It’s tempting to attribute a lot of the film’s entertainment value to its production design & its intense Technicolor dreaminess, but Sirk shows a masterful hand in matching that cinematic artifice to a concisely told, rapidly paced, delicately tragic seduction story. All That Heaven Allows is a perfect object, the ideal version of what it sets out to achieve. I doubt that’s the last time I’ll say that about a Douglas Sirk film, but it’s still an inarguable fact.

-Brandon Ledet