All That Heaven Allows

Saw All That Heaven Allows, a drama from the 50s about a widow who falls in love with a younger man who is her gardener. It's very precious and the gardener is this very clench-jawed attractive man who, despite his unspeakably low birth, is the perfect gentleman, a sort of outdoorsy-type who paints landscapes and pictures of ducks in his spare time. Anyway, this being the 50s, the news of this love affair is greeted in the town (which is of course a small town) with gasps and arched eyebrows. The protagonist woman cannot bear the opprobrium of the town and of even her own children but she cannot be without her backwoods poet. Will she? Won't she?

This film is a sort of morality play about the terrible effects of the scorn of small-minded society which, being a part of, we accept as righteous, even as we intellectually know that it's absurd. Set in opposition to the scandalously young backwoodsman we have television, a tawdry, fake spectacle which symbolizes the kind of dreary living death that awaits respectable old women. Her children and high-society girlfriends are always pushing her to get a TV set and indeed when her children are first introduced, they're framed inside of a mirror, as though on a television set, setting them up as fake, unfeeling, television-type people; antagonists.

This sort of film has been done many times since, the story of a woman falling in love with a man and society not approving. It's been pointed out by others that it's never the other way around, with an older man falling in love with a young woman, but even Hollywood, bastion of fearless truth-telling, has its limits. Curiously (or perhaps not so curiously) these films seem to attract homosexual talent. Off the top of my head, I know Ali: Fear Eats the Soul has a similar plot and was directed by the bisexual director Rainer Fassbinder. This film stars Rock Hudson as the gardener and the sort-of-related Gods and Monsters not only stars Ian McKellen but is about the life of homosexual director James Whale.

Anyway, the film is good social commentary picture, frustrating but ultimately pleasing.