All That Heaven Allows

"I don't think this is a very flattering picture, Rock. I mean, the lack of color fails to bring out the flannel's true potential."

The last two films watched in our film class, Blonde Venus and Stella Dallas, were not films I had a great deal to say about. Blonde Venus was pretty dull and formulaic, Stella Dallas entertaining but rather forgettable I thought, Barbara Stanwyck's performance notwithstanding. So it is with great pride that I return to my once-weekly film class column with a film decidedly worthy of note: The Deer Story!

Oh wait, it's All That Heaven Allows: A Deer Story. Mea culpa.

Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a widow living in a small town. She is pretty much resigned to her lot in life, with her kids fully grown (and golly gee, they sure are swell at annoying the shit out of everyone in the audience!) and a few friends at the exclusive, gossipy Country Club. But this was before she paid attention to Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson). Yes, Ron Kirby. The quintessential Man's Man. Studly, handsome, secretly gay and always wearing flannel shirts, he's many degrees removed from the high-society types she usually hangs with. Cary falls in love with this younger, flannel-wearing Stud Muffin who is the rugged manly type who doesn't talk much, reads Henry David Thoreau, lives in a shack in the woods, and is so in harmony with Nature that he not only wears flannel (the epitome of Manly Toughness) and pets wild deer, but shoots geese as well. Unfortunately, he's not a member of the Upper Class, and he's younger than Cary, so when she begins a relationship with him, everyone in town from the fuddy-duddies to her obnoxious cildren take issue. Cary drops him like a hot potato as a result, only to find that sacrificing her love for her community ain't all it's cracked up to be. Then there's some contrived, gushy ending which is supposed to make us feel happy and warm, but then makes us laugh so hard our appendixes explode. Er, or something like that.

So, here is a Douglas Sirk film. With a name like Sirk, you've gotta make Crap!

Actually, this is my first Sirk movie, although I've heard a great deal about them beforehand. And boy, I was expecting a cheesefest, but this exceeded my wildest possible imagination. Nowhere in the recesses of my quite imaginative mind, the one who used to watch Days of Our Lives on a daily basis and who willingly sat through 4 Leprechaun movies and The Sound Barrier, could I have ever imagined the Hell wrought by Mr. Sirk.

Here is a movie, quite frankly, that drips syrup out of every frame. Overwrought emotion. My irrational paranoid fears about diabetes are given extraordinary credence after watching this movie; it was so syrupy sweet that my pancreas just died on me. (Which means this may be the last entry for this blog ever. Come back guys, I was just making a tasteless joke.) It's not even the cheesiness that bothers me, really. It's the way the film is made, making everything so bloody obvious to the audience - spelling it out every letter for us. It's not enough to have a broken vase show up fixed - you have to talk about it (and then break it again, and then fret about how much effort went into it before it was broken). You can't have people put down without having them then talk amonst themselves. And certainly you can't have them break up, have Cary experience the emptiness which has occurred from this, and want to go back to him, without having her explain all this to the audience. I mean, really. The only good that comes out of all this long-winded exhortation is the cinematography with its wonderfully florid, exaggerated, almost surreal color palette. Either Sirk is a master satirist, or he's assuming that his target audience were rock-stupid. Maybe both.

The characters are even more fun to think about. Cary is like Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, only without the accent. And the depth. And the humanity. And the intelligence. And the... Okay, she maintains a bit of dignity, thanks to Ms. Wyman, but she's still a cypher no matter how you slice it. At least she has a sliver of humanity compared to Rod, who as played by Rock Hudson is a wooden stump. He may be hot but he can't act any better than the star of a Coleman Francis film - at least not here. No matter how many tough, manly attributes you wish to give him, he's still just a line on a script. The hysterically obnoxious gossipy associates barely rate a mention, except to say that they're the most realisitic characters in the movie. I've known enough horrible people in elementary and high school to know that bitch Mona is a very frightening reality.

Oh, but her children. Son Doug is just a jackass, pure and simple, who feels that something has come between him and his mother - not Rod, but the door that is quite literally in between them on the camera. (Gee, Mr. Sirk, thanks for making literal that metaphor at the same time you are talking about it!!!) And then, at the end he ditches her for a job in Iran. See, this is what being a good parent gets you: you sacrifice your one true love for the sake of your children, and your son runs off to do wet jobs for the CIA. Nice.

As for daughter Kay? At first, with her thin figure, long brown hair, and dorky glasses, I thought she looked like a mousy Sabrina-era Audrey Hepburn, but after listening to some of her never-ending stream-of-consciousness rants about Freudian psychology (as my friend Troy Steele would say, "What.") in an irritating voice, I realized who she reminded me of...

Okay. Imagine that spouting off Freudian psychobabble for an hour and a half. Yikes.

And then there's that damned deer who pops up at the end. I mean, really, what can you say to that? The entire class laughed at the deer, who conveniently pops up to be backgrounded during our leads' reconcilation. If all we wanted were deer, we'd have watched Bambi instead. I'm sure it's a symbol of romance or Ron's rugged MANLY! nature persona, but it's also stupid. And cheesy. But don't take my word for it:

So, is this movie really that corny, or is it actualy a brilliant satire, a scathing mockery of these very sort of films? I hope it's not out of line for me to say that Revisionist Critics need to get a grip on themselves and stop masturbating over how "original" they are for coming up with such concepts. Because really, they're just being thick clods. For yes, I do truly think that Douglas Sirk intended this movie to be that stupid. You can do melodrama and make it interesting, so I choose to believe that Douglas Sirk just plain sucks. I'm simply too tired to consider other possibilities. Besides, if that were true, I'd have to throw this whole review out and start from scratch, wouldn't I?

(Note: I'm classifying this a bad movie simply because it sucks. I'd worry about pissing off a reader or two, but as there aren't very many around as of yet, I'm sure I'll sleep soundly giving it such a classification.)

Rating: 4/10 - Avoid