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A wealthy young wastrel, Bob Merrick, cracks up his speedboat and almost dies, to be saved at the last minute by a resuscitator borrowed from the home of a famous surgeon who lives nearby. In the meantime the surgeon himself has suffered an attack, and, with his equipment out on loan, dies before he can be revived. The guilt-ridden Bob clumsily tries to make amends by romancing the surgeon’s young widow, Helen, but only causes further tragedy…Read More »
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Clifford Groves, toy manufacturer, is in full charge at the factory but feels left out and taken for granted by his wife and children at home. Alone and depressed, he meets old flame Norma, and one thing leads to another. While their relationship is still fairly innocent, his son Vinnie sees them together and suspects the worst. It’s time for tortured souls behind rain-streaming windows…Read More »
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When the adulterous Naomi Murdoch (Barbara Stanwyck) returns to the family she abandoned years before, her arrival is rendered all the more difficult by the appearance of her former lover, Dutch (Lyle Bettger), anxious to rekindle the flames of their previous affair. As she tries to re-acquaint herself with the children she left for a life on the stage, Naomi must endure the bitterness of her eldest daughter, Joyce (Marcia Henderson), the misplaced admiration of her younger daughter Lily (Lori Nelson) and the reluctance of her school principal husband, Henry (Richard Carlson), to embrace her return. In early 20th century America, Naomi’s flamboyant style and perceived louche morality set the cat among the pigeons for the gossipy Riverdale, Wisconsin, townspeople.Read More »
Encouraged by Fassbinder, with whom he became friendly after the then-enfant terrible of the German cinema visited him in Lugano, Sirk also did some teaching during the late 1970s at the film school in Munich, where he made three short films with his students. Read More »
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Douglas Sirk once said: “This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” When All That Heaven Allows was released by Universal Pictures in 1955, it was just another critically unnoticed Hollywood genre product, designed to appeal to the trashy “women’s weepie” audience. Now, in retrospect, it is considered to be closer to the art side of Sirk’s dialectic, and one of his key films. But this is part of a wider process of critical reevaluation in which his entire body of work has been rediscovered and reappraised by successive generations of filmmakers and historians.Read More »