All That Heaven Allows

Douglas Sirk’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) are both exquisite films worthy of the highest possible recommendation. They represent the respective directors at the very peak of their powers and are widely (and for me correctly) acknowledged as masterpieces. Fear Eats the Soul is oft-described as a remake of All That Heaven Allows and I thought I’d review both here in a comparative piece which tries to look at the exact relationship between the two because for all their similarities, they are very different films. Fassbinder certainly does not copy Sirk and his film is no straightforward remake. What follows will range across both narratives and will therefore be riddled with spoilers. Don’t read if you haven’t seen.All That Heaven Allows is one of several glossy women’s melodramas that Sirk made for Universal Studios in the 1950s which used to be derided, but have now attained classic status. If Written on the Wind (1956) and Imitation of Life (1958) are widely acknowledged as the very best of these, All That Heaven Allows has also achieved a lofty position in America’s artistic heritage and was selected for preservation in the United States Film Registry in 1995. The film initially arose from Universal’s desire to cash in on the success of Magnificent Obsession (1954) by casting again that film’s stars (Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman) this time as the mis-matched couple, Cary Scott and Ron Kirby. Cary is a wealthy but lonely widow who falls in love with her gardener Ron. The film is centrally about the hornets’ nest of xenophobia, class prejudice, snobbery and materialistic greed which their affair stirs up both in society and in the family and ‘friends’ who inhabit that society. Quite deliberately set in the small New England town of Rockingham (not too far from Concorde one senses), the film transparently contrasts 50s American values with the values of the 19th century Transcendentalists deliberately citing Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in a hymn to Shakespeare’s adage from Hamlet, “To thine own self be true.” Cary realizes eventually that she has let what others think dictate her actions and the film finishes in a blaze of hope made truly intoxicating by Russell Metty’s glorious Technicolor cinematography and the simple but highly effective narrative arc in Peg Fenwick’s screenplay (adapted from a novel by Edna and Harry Lee). Sirk gave Universal what they wanted in the shape of a simple love story, but the focus of the film is actually sharply biting as he lacerates the prevailing repressive values of the day. Universal expected a celebration, but Sirk delivered a veiled excoriation and the studio execs were too dumb to realize: “The studio loved the title ‘All That Heaven Allows.’ They thought it meant you could have everything you wanted. I meant it the other way round. As far as I am concerned, heaven is stingy.” (Sirk in Sirk on Sirk)Stinginess is also central to Fear Eats the Soul, one of the high points of the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Fassbinder had come to a creative impasse brought on by the realization that his previous 9 films had not caught on with the public. Beware of a Holy Whore (1970) dramatizes his anger at this and in the 8 months of silence that followed it Fassbinder explored a possible route to an audience as lying in the melodramatic style of Sirk. He visited the old man in Switzerland, helped organize a Sirk retrospective and wrote an essay eulogizing his new-found inspiration. He based the central character of The Merchant of Four Seasons on the Robert Stack character in Written on the Wind, and in Fear Eats the Soul he takes All That Heaven Allows and reproduces the same scenario but transposed to a different cultural milieu. Small town New England becomes big city Munich, the rich older widow becomes the poor much older but equally lonely widowed cleaning lady Emmi (Brigitte Mira) and the walking personification of good old American Transcendentalist values (Ron as ‘Mr. Nature’) becomes a Moroccan gastarbeiter Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). Following Sirk, Fassbinder focuses mainly on the tight knot of xenophobia and prejudice present both within society and in the people that represent it. Friends, neighbors and family are united in their disgust as Emmi and Ali are scorned and bullied. Fassbinder refers explicitly to Sirk in the scene where the oldest son kicks in Emmi’s TV in anger at learning that she has married an Arab. In the Sirk film the son buys a TV as a substitute for the man Cary is not allowed to have and there’s a wonderful image of her reflected in the screen, imprisoned in middle age loneliness. Also as in Sirk, people come to understand and accept the central couple and love is allowed to win through in the end with both films finishing with the ladies holding the hands of their bed-ridden men with the promise of a loving future ahead of them.In outline then both films are similar, but Fassbinder’s alteration of milieu and class makes for a very different effect. We recognize Fassbinder’s interest is not in the lush, superficial coziness of a tacky love story, although he does borrow something of this. Rather, as Sirk did, Fassbinder recognizes the very essence of melodrama which is that it is about individuals (one on one) repressing each other. He saw Sirk coding this repression in a syrupy sheen in order to please the studio. In Fear Eats the Soul he scuffs up the sheen and presents the various layers of repression naked, cold and harsh. The interesting thing is this does not dissipate the glowing warmth of the central love affair at all. On the contrary, it makes it realer and even more remarkably affecting. While Cary and Ron are clearly two-dimensional movie characters molded by a studio anxious to make money, Emmi and Ali are absolutely three-dimensional characters who could be real people and their story has an integrity which accurately reflects the personal lives of everyone involved in making the film. In essence both films are products of their time. All That Heaven Allows was in effect all that Universal Studios would allow Sirk to make in terms of being a squeaky clean love story. The central couple are not real because 50s Hollywood wouldn’t allow them to be. The film’s social attack had to be coded and we have to learn how to ‘read’ it to see how biting the attack actually is. Fear Eats the Soul on the other hand is a product of the whole modernist project and reflects the new freedom the 70s brought. The attack is therefore allowed to be made very explicit. Furthermore, the attack is given a relevance which transcends time by Fassbinder’s retention of Brechtian techniques. It looks fresh and revelatory even today now that the great modernist experiment has ended and cinema everywhere has reverted back to the old universal zero-style of traditional Hollywood filmmaking.The crucial difference between these two films lies in the varying distribution of hope in the human species that each director espouses. Sirk remains centrally optimistic despite the veiled assault on 50s American values, while Fassbinder’s optimism remains qualified at best even though his film is tender innocence itself set beside the prevailing cynicism of his other films. For Sirk, the nasty bitchiness of Cary’s rich social circle etched out principally by her ‘friend’ Sara (Agnes Moorehead) who affects support but is openly pleased when Cary calls off her marriage, various gossip-mongers down at the local country club and by her two grown-up children Kay (Gloria Talbott) and especially Ned (William Reynolds), is off-set by a whole group of enlightened people based around Mick and Alida Anderson (Charles Drake and Virginia Grey) who harbor very different all-American values. Mick’s “Bible” is Thoreau’s Walden and although Ron hasn’t read it, he actually lives it without knowing. Cary is given an important scene where she reads the book, title and author clearly displayed to us: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. [What is called resignation is confirmed desperation]. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed [and in such desperate enterprise]? If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it’s because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears however measured or far away.” Ron enshrines this Transcendentalist thinking (his occupation makes him at one with nature) and gets to tell Cary various philosophical homilies like “Don’t lead your life for others,” “Home is where you are,” “Nothing’s important except us” and “[Don’t] keep up with the Joneses.” Ron is presented by Sirk as a paragon of natural virtue and Cary’s eventual decision to promise her life to him is worded as a virtual conversion to the Transcendentalist cause. As Ron lies possibly dying she says, “[He] was so secure within himself because he refused to give importance to unimportant things. Why did it take me so long to understand it?” In addition to the disciples of Transcendentalism, Sirk also shows human warmth to seep through other key characters. Kay tearfully urges Cary to marry Ron once she learns how sad her mother is, and crucially the doctor (Hayden Rorke) explains the cause of Cary’s headaches (“You’re punishing yourself…for running away from life. The headache’s nature’s way of making a protest. Do you expect me to give you a prescription to cure life? You were ready for a love affair, but not for love”) before recommending her to let Ron take care of her. The daughter’s change of heart and the doctor’s wisdom can be put down to hollow Hollywood ‘women’s weepie’ convention, but the stress on Transcendentalism is interesting for being so sincere in the sense that we have no reason to doubt Sirk’s belief in it, just as we have no reason to doubt the Christian charity lying behind Magnificent Obsession. For this director there really was an alternative lifestyle to the prevailing “desperate haste to succeed.”Fassbinder characteristically offers no positive alternative at all in Fear Eats the Soul. Sirk offers us upper middle class materialistic values mixed with further members of the upper middle class who prefer to live contrary to these values. Fassbinder offers us working class values mixed with the classless milieu of the gastarbeiter world. If the prejudice on display in the Sirk is rooted in snobbery and materialistic ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ the prejudice on display in the Fassbinder is crude racism coupled with ageism. Sirk offers a 40 year old ‘older’ woman (Wyman was actually 38) having an affair with a man in his 30s (Hudson was 30), and the age gap isn’t actually that wide. Cary’s children want her to marry, but of course to a rich widower (like Harvey) who will maintain the materialist values of their late father. The film doesn’t focus too much on Ron and we aren’t shown his loneliness (although we do hear about his father’s death and learn that he builds a home in the vague hope that Cary might live there), but certainly Cary’s loneliness is heavily stressed. In Fassbinder’s film Emmi is 60 and nobody expects, let alone accepts, her romance with a much younger man in his late 30s. The loneliness of both is strongly delineated and the film addresses the isolation of both old people and foreign people living in modern Germany. Further to that, their efforts to alleviate their loneliness by reaching out to each other only causes more pain because society simply won’t allow them to be happy. Not for nothing is the film’s epitaph: “Happiness is not always fun.”Between them Emmi and Ali espouse through action a value system which is freely accepting of everyone irrespective of class, age and race. Importantly, Emmi’s family name is Kurowski and she was married to a Pole which makes her three hypocritically xenophobic children half-foreign whether they like it or not. A fundamentally kind soul, she has always believed in relationships across social divides. The fact that Ali has chosen to work in Germany and loves Emmi also shows he is willing to accept another culture. This mutual open-mindedness is countered ominously by only one other alternative value system – that of Nazism. Emmi is kind, but she is not very intelligent. She probably has no idea about the Holocaust and thinks nothing of admitting that she was a member of the Party back in the 1930s “along with everyone else.” Her ignorance is most revealing in her wish to go to Hitler’s favorite restaurant for their celebratory wedding lunch – “I have always wanted to eat here,” she says. I don’t mean to suggest Emmi is a Nazi (her ignorance coupled with her open mind clears her of that charge), but I do think Fassbinder is drawing a connection between Munich (a traditional hotbed of Nazism) and the racism we see exhibited by all the characters around his central couple. When faced with Ali the reaction of her children says it all. In a long slow pan we see in close-up a series of faces filled with hatred, first Bruno (Peter Gauhe) then her reptilian son-in-law Eugen (Fassbinder himself), her daughter Krista (Irm Hermann) and lastly her second son Albert (Karl Scheydt). Bruno kicks in the TV and storms out speechless with anger, Albert disowns himself quickly following Bruno, and the other two also can’t leave soon enough the “pigsty” home of “a whore” (Krista’s words). We saw earlier Eugen’s dictatorial behavior in his own apartment overlooked by Jesus Christ on a giant crucifix (staunch Catholicism and Nazism are connected historically). Nastiest of all is the icy stare one of Emmi’s colleagues fixes on Ali when she meets him. She looks at him as a death camp guard might view a Jew about to be exterminated – “That woman had death in her eyes,” says Ali. Fassbinder is fully aware of the connotations a setting evokes and here nods very firmly towards Sirk. Just as New England is connected with Transcendentalism, so Bavaria is connected with Nazism. There is also a connection between ignorance and xenophobia, and this is underlined throughout in the behavior of all the characters, but especially in the last part of the film as Emmi and Ali start to repress each other. Tellingly there is only one character in the whole film who doesn’t object to Emmi and Ali – the son of the landlord named Gruber (Marquard Böhm) and even he is dismissed by Ali as “not a nice man” early on. All of this exists in stark contrast with Sirk’s comparatively fun-filled evocation of New England with its cosy Transcendentalist enclave.Also standing in contrast is the treatment of marriage in both films. Sirk stops short of allowing Cary and Ron to marry. He shows their affair, society’s disapproval, Cary’s learning of Transcendentalist values, society’s eventual tacit approval (the doctor, the daughter) and a final commitment to be married in the future. There is every chance their future marriage will be free of prejudice and that everyone will live happily ever after, in other words, marriage is the happy goal of the narrative. Fassbinder goes much deeper with his couple. He has them marry early on so that neighbors, work colleagues, the local shopkeeper, friends and family are confronted with a fait accompli which they all react against with virulent disgust. After a vacation to get away from the ferocious bad-mouthing they return to find the situation changed. Everyone accepts the couple once they realize they can use them to get something for themselves – the neighbors need someone to help move stuff in the basement and so prevail on Ali to help; the racist shopkeeper who had previously refused to serve them now acts with fawning friendliness to regain their custom; the oldest son who kicked in Emmi’s TV pays for the damage and accepts Ali because he needs Emmi to mind his kid while his wife goes to work; and in a particularly pointed scene Emmi’s work colleagues start to include her again in reaction to the arrival of a new worker, a gastarbeiter from Yugoslavia who is frozen out in exactly the same way (and in exactly the same camera shot) as Emmi was frozen out earlier. On the surface everything is fine, but underneath the xenophobia continues to seethe unabated. Unfortunately, Emmi allows herself to be bought by the fakeness and even comes to assume some of their racist attitudes. She thinks nothing of showing off Ali’s muscles to her workmates, defends her colleague who shot Ali an Auschwitz glare and finally resists cooking him couscous when he asks for it – “I don’t like couscous – why don’t you eat German food?” While being ostracized she was forced into the role of foreigner because of Ali. Now she is taken back into the fold she regains her German-ness. Most trenchant of all is the scene where Ali returns home drunk and probably suffering from his stomach ulcer. He collapses on the floor before the door of Emmi’s apartment. Emmi opens the door, watches for a moment and then coldly closes the door without so much as offering a blanket.Ali also starts to repress Emmi when they return from vacation. His reaction to being refused couscous is to go off with the bar-owner (Barbara Valentin) and when he is humiliated by having to show his muscles he responds by sleeping with the woman and sliding into heavy drinking and gambling. When Emmi is forced to look for him at the garage where he works he laughs along with his colleague’s joke that Emmi is his “Moroccan grandmother.” The couple eventually have a moving reconciliation in the very bar where they met. Both parties are genuinely sorry. He admits his adultery and she forgives him with astonishing generosity. She simply asks that they be nice to each other. At the end it is loneliness they both feel most acutely of all. For Sirk the onus is much more on romantic love in the final scene where Cary cares for Ron and a deer looks in the window behind the bed seeming to inspire Ron into waking up. Loneliness is certainly a big theme of the film, but for Sirk the love story is the thing as per the soapy corn studio remit. For Fassbinder in his final scene the absence of the deer is very telling along with the contrasting words of the two doctors. Ron’s doctor tells Cary that with plenty of tender loving care Ron will recover, whereas Ali’s doctor tells Emmi there’s no cure for his perforated ulcer. Like other gastarbeiter Ali will recover, but not allowed time to convalesce properly within 6 months he will become sick again and will return and keep returning until he dies. Emmi says she will take care of him and their marriage is still alive, but we aren’t convinced their happiness can be lasting even half as much as we are by the corresponding scene in Sirk’s film.The success of both films rests on two quite superb narrative structures. In one sense they are very similar in the way they incorporate the traditional 3 acts. In the Sirk Cary and Ron’s lyrical courtship (act 1) leads into a tempestuous breaking up as all the external pressures take their toll (act 2), and then finally (act 3) to reconciliation courtesy of warmth in key characters and a fortunate accident which wakes Cary up to her senses. In the Fassbinder a speedy courtship between Ali and Emmi (act 1) leads straight into the central marriage where the external pressures take their toll (act 2) and then (act 3) on to a relaxing of this aversion and the marriage beginning to break up from within itself. A reconciliation is reached and sickness brings the couple close together again.Within the 3-act structures the various scenes dialectically reflect on each other. In the Sirk Cary entertains two suitors in her home, first the family choice Harvey and then Cary’s choice Ron. There are two party scenes, one depicting the waspish snobbery of the country club and the other depicting the ‘bohemia’ of the Transcendentalist enclave. A third party has Transcendentalism meet xenophobic materialism where Cary introduces Ron to what until this point has been her social world. The fight that ensues in the long term marks her transition to Transcendentalism, but it’s delayed by two tearful scenes, first her son strongly objecting to Ron (“I think all you see is a good-looking set of muscles,” he says vindictively) and then her daughter who is hurt by gossip concerning her mother. There are two scenes with Xmas trees, one on the street where Cary meets Ron and is happy and then one at home where she is alone and miserable because her children have missed their train to come and see her. We notice each act is dominated by visions of Ron’s old mill. In act 1 it’s derelict and bare to reflect the inner emotional state of both Cary and Ron. In act 2 it is halfway homely with Ron preparing for Cary and himself to live there. This is the scene where Cary calls off the wedding and the emotional fallout is symbolized by Cary breaking the Wedgwood pot which Ron has so carefully repaired. Then in act 3 when Cary rushes to tend her wounded man we see the house is beautifully restored and waiting to be inhabited by the now ready couple.In the Fassbinder the dialecticism as per his Brechtian wont is more overt. The film has a cyclical structure framed as it is by two bar scenes in which Ali asks Emmi to dance, she sitting at the same table with the same music playing. There are two scenes in Emmi’s apartment separated by a temporal ellipse. In the first Ali spends the night with Emmi and in the second the two (having been living together for an unspecified time) are visited by Gruber who thinks Emmi is sub-letting. Her half-joking excuse that Ali is going to marry her leads to a real proposal and the next thing we know they are married. We see Krista and Eugen twice, once before Emmi is married and once to introduce her husband, and we see her son Bruno twice, once at that introduction where he kicks in her TV and then later when he visits to ask Emmi to mind his kid. Indeed, Fassbinder makes society’s attack and society’s acceptance mirror each other dialectically across the boundary between acts 2 and 3 when they go on vacation. Scenes with the shopkeeper has him attacking and then fawning for their trade, the neighbors attack and then accept, Emmi’s colleagues first exclude and then include, but only when they find someone else (the Yugoslav gastarbeiter) to exclude. There are two restaurant scenes, one (in Hitler’s favorite joint) where they are happy and then one (in a park café) where they are sad; and there are two breakfast scenes, one where they are happily in love and the other when they are miserable. Ali collapses twice because of his stomach ulcer, the first time Emi coldly ignores him and the second time she reacts with genuine loving concern.I said Fassbinder’s Brechtian predilection makes the dialecticism more overt in his film. Actually, the artificiality of structural concerns (the way the narrative develops) is made visual wholly along the lines of Brecht’s idea (outlined in a 1930 essay) of ‘Epic Theatre,’ something which contrasts completely with the ‘Dramatic Theatre’ we see exemplified by Sirk’s film. In All That Heaven Allows there is a clear plot in which the spectator is implicated in the situation of Cary and Ron. We give in to the sensations that are evoked which involve us in the story of these people. The social critique is suggested so as to preserve our instinctual feelings as we are placed squarely in the middle of the experience. The plot sweeps forward with all eyes on the finish, one scene leading into another with a linear development which mirrors (mimics) natural evolution. All the time we are encouraged to feel as opposed to reason and are eventually fed the happy end we all want and expect. In the ‘Epic Theatre’ of Fear Eats the Soul plot is exchanged for narrative which turns the spectator into an observer placed outside the story of Emmi and Ali. We are alienated from the narrative so that we are forced to take decisions and judge what we see. Emmi and Ali are objects of an inquiry so that the social critique is placed at the center of the argument, our instinctual feelings are disregarded and our intellectual capacity for action is aroused. The narrative advances in jumps and curves in a series of jarring tableaux with all eyes on the process rather than the finish.Interestingly, the visual schemes of both films rely on the use of frames within frames, characters always framed within doorways, staircases, arches, through windows, through screens, reflected in mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Sirk and Fassbinder both use these images to voice their social critique, but where Sirk merely suggests his attack (Cary imprisoned behind latticed windows watching carol singers, or trapped as a reflection in her wretched TV screen), Fassbinder states his attack strongly and clearly, his frames actually stopping his film momentarily to force us to think through what we see. As per ‘Dramatic Theatre’ Sirk’s frames never impede the onward flow of the mimetic plot, the framing actually aiding the fluidity of the story-telling. A good example comes at the beginning just after Cary is attracted to Ron. She puts a vase of tree cuttings given to her by Ron on her dressing table and regards it, her image captured in a mirror. We sense the romantic attachment continuing on from the previous scene in a smooth transition, but her children enter her room with their reflection in the mirror coming between Cary and the vase. We are given the rationale for the whole film in a single shot, her children (and others) coming between Cary and the man she loves. The seamless storytelling is breathtaking as the film flows swift and true as we are involved completely in Cary’s situation.Contrast Sirk with Fassbinder. Early on Emmi is talking to her colleagues in a stairway while they have lunch. She has just spent the night with Ali and is still excited. She tries talking about it, but in code. Ali becomes a foreigner who touches her in the bus on the way to work. This unleashes a ferocious torrent of racist comments from her colleagues which places Emmi in a moral quandary. From the start Fassbinder frames the group in the stair-well which is in turn framed by a window. At the end of the conversation the ladies go back to work and Emmi moves into close-up, the camera dollying in to frame her exactly in the wooden frame of the window. Then Brigitte Mira stops acting and simply freezes in a tableau for about 7 seconds (a long time on film). We register in the conversation that she is thinking about Ali, but with this frozen tableau Fassbinder is asking us to evaluate her emotions and evaluate our emotions to her emotions. These frozen tableaux punctuate the film at regular intervals and is especially interventionist when groups of people stare unnaturally. In the film’s very first scene the gastarbeiter community all stare at Emmi who has just come into the bar to escape the rain. Emi’s family all stare at Ali as he is introduced as their new father-in-law. A waiter stares at Emmi and Ali in Hitler’s restaurant before the couple stop acting and simply sit there frozen, framed in a doorway. What do we think about them eating here? Most moving of all is the scene in the park café where the couple are sitting framed by empty tables. It is the film’s highest point of pathos with Emmi crying at everyone hating them. They declare their love to each other and we are moved, but two things distance us, objectifying our response. First the entire café staff stand in a group staring at them, and second as Fassbinder’s camera tracks away, the couple stop acting and freeze again. The frames within frames and the frozen tableaux impede the natural flow of the narrative, making us aware that we are watching a film, not real life. Fassbinder factors in two other distancing devices – the unlikely notion of a 60 year old ex-Nazi party member marrying a 38 year old black Arab, and the casting of two not exactly beautiful actors in the main roles. Sirk follows convention in making his couple younger and using popular good-looking stars who have faces which have screen charisma. But what we see in Fear Eats the Soul is much closer to real life. The constant distancing paradoxically brings us closer to the central characters, especially when they played as marvelously as they are by Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem. Mira in particular lights up the screen with an inner luminosity which is truly touching.The acting for Sirk is equally accomplished within the set limits of 50s melodrama. Wyman and Hudson give identical performances to those they gave in Magnificent Obsession – that’s what audiences wanted and that’s what they got (so goes commercial studio logic!). In essence, Sirk’s film is pure Hollywood melodrama in which repression and suffering gives way in the end to a higher, more lasting peace. Fassbinder realized the falsity of this notion. While society is divided by class and dependent on the exploitation of one group by another, lasting peace is impossible. So what he does in Fear Eats the Soul (and in virtually every subsequent film right through to Veronika Voss [1982]) is he uses melodrama to suck the spectator in, offers them gratification on a certain level (Fear Eats the Soul is one of cinema’s supremely eloquent love stories, let us be clear about that), but constantly punctures this comfort with his alienation devices which force us to stand back and assess the emotions of the characters and our reaction to these emotions. Sirk realized the falsity of the melodrama he was forced to make (after all he had originally wanted Ron to die at the end), but ultimately he had to operate under studio constraints. Both films under discussion are quite simply the best prevailing conditions would allow and are both masterpieces of their type.

Douglas Sirk’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) are both exquisite films worthy of the highest possible recommendation. They represent the respective directors at the very peak of their powers and are widely (and for me correctly) acknowledged as masterpieces. Fear Eats the Soul is oft-described as a remake of All That Heaven Allows and I thought I’d review both here in a comparative piece which tries to look at the exact relationship between the two because for all their similarities, they are very different films. Fassbinder certainly does not copy Sirk and his film is no straightforward remake. What follows will range across both narratives and will therefore be riddled with spoilers. Don’t read if you haven’t seen.All That Heaven Allows is one of several glossy women’s melodramas that Sirk made for Universal Studios in the 1950s which used to be derided, but have now attained classic status. If Written on the Wind (1956) and Imitation of Life (1958) are widely acknowledged as the very best of these, All That Heaven Allows has also achieved a lofty position in America’s artistic heritage and was selected for preservation in the United States Film Registry in 1995. The film initially arose from Universal’s desire to cash in on the success of Magnificent Obsession (1954) by casting again that film’s stars (Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman) this time as the mis-matched couple, Cary Scott and Ron Kirby. Cary is a wealthy but lonely widow who falls in love with her gardener Ron. The film is centrally about the hornets’ nest of xenophobia, class prejudice, snobbery and materialistic greed which their affair stirs up both in society and in the family and ‘friends’ who inhabit that society. Quite deliberately set in the small New England town of Rockingham (not too far from Concorde one senses), the film transparently contrasts 50s American values with the values of the 19th century Transcendentalists deliberately citing Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in a hymn to Shakespeare’s adage from Hamlet, “To thine own self be true.” Cary realizes eventually that she has let what others think dictate her actions and the film finishes in a blaze of hope made truly intoxicating by Russell Metty’s glorious Technicolor cinematography and the simple but highly effective narrative arc in Peg Fenwick’s screenplay (adapted from a novel by Edna and Harry Lee). Sirk gave Universal what they wanted in the shape of a simple love story, but the focus of the film is actually sharply biting as he lacerates the prevailing repressive values of the day. Universal expected a celebration, but Sirk delivered a veiled excoriation and the studio execs were too dumb to realize: “The studio loved the title ‘All That Heaven Allows.’ They thought it meant you could have everything you wanted. I meant it the other way round. As far as I am concerned, heaven is stingy.” (Sirk in Sirk on Sirk)Stinginess is also central to Fear Eats the Soul, one of the high points of the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Fassbinder had come to a creative impasse brought on by the realization that his previous 9 films had not caught on with the public. Beware of a Holy Whore (1970) dramatizes his anger at this and in the 8 months of silence that followed it Fassbinder explored a possible route to an audience as lying in the melodramatic style of Sirk. He visited the old man in Switzerland, helped organize a Sirk retrospective and wrote an essay eulogizing his new-found inspiration. He based the central character of The Merchant of Four Seasons on the Robert Stack character in Written on the Wind, and in Fear Eats the Soul he takes All That Heaven Allows and reproduces the same scenario but transposed to a different cultural milieu. Small town New England becomes big city Munich, the rich older widow becomes the poor much older but equally lonely widowed cleaning lady Emmi (Brigitte Mira) and the walking personification of good old American Transcendentalist values (Ron as ‘Mr. Nature’) becomes a Moroccan gastarbeiter Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). Following Sirk, Fassbinder focuses mainly on the tight knot of xenophobia and prejudice present both within society and in the people that represent it. Friends, neighbors and family are united in their disgust as Emmi and Ali are scorned and bullied. Fassbinder refers explicitly to Sirk in the scene where the oldest son kicks in Emmi’s TV in anger at learning that she has married an Arab. In the Sirk film the son buys a TV as a substitute for the man Cary is not allowed to have and there’s a wonderful image of her reflected in the screen, imprisoned in middle age loneliness. Also as in Sirk, people come to understand and accept the central couple and love is allowed to win through in the end with both films finishing with the ladies holding the hands of their bed-ridden men with the promise of a loving future ahead of them.In outline then both films are similar, but Fassbinder’s alteration of milieu and class makes for a very different effect. We recognize Fassbinder’s interest is not in the lush, superficial coziness of a tacky love story, although he does borrow something of this. Rather, as Sirk did, Fassbinder recognizes the very essence of melodrama which is that it is about individuals (one on one) repressing each other. He saw Sirk coding this repression in a syrupy sheen in order to please the studio. In Fear Eats the Soul he scuffs up the sheen and presents the various layers of repression naked, cold and harsh. The interesting thing is this does not dissipate the glowing warmth of the central love affair at all. On the contrary, it makes it realer and even more remarkably affecting. While Cary and Ron are clearly two-dimensional movie characters molded by a studio anxious to make money, Emmi and Ali are absolutely three-dimensional characters who could be real people and their story has an integrity which accurately reflects the personal lives of everyone involved in making the film. In essence both films are products of their time. All That Heaven Allows was in effect all that Universal Studios would allow Sirk to make in terms of being a squeaky clean love story. The central couple are not real because 50s Hollywood wouldn’t allow them to be. The film’s social attack had to be coded and we have to learn how to ‘read’ it to see how biting the attack actually is. Fear Eats the Soul on the other hand is a product of the whole modernist project and reflects the new freedom the 70s brought. The attack is therefore allowed to be made very explicit. Furthermore, the attack is given a relevance which transcends time by Fassbinder’s retention of Brechtian techniques. It looks fresh and revelatory even today now that the great modernist experiment has ended and cinema everywhere has reverted back to the old universal zero-style of traditional Hollywood filmmaking.The crucial difference between these two films lies in the varying distribution of hope in the human species that each director espouses. Sirk remains centrally optimistic despite the veiled assault on 50s American values, while Fassbinder’s optimism remains qualified at best even though his film is tender innocence itself set beside the prevailing cynicism of his other films. For Sirk, the nasty bitchiness of Cary’s rich social circle etched out principally by her ‘friend’ Sara (Agnes Moorehead) who affects support but is openly pleased when Cary calls off her marriage, various gossip-mongers down at the local country club and by her two grown-up children Kay (Gloria Talbott) and especially Ned (William Reynolds), is off-set by a whole group of enlightened people based around Mick and Alida Anderson (Charles Drake and Virginia Grey) who harbor very different all-American values. Mick’s “Bible” is Thoreau’s Walden and although Ron hasn’t read it, he actually lives it without knowing. Cary is given an important scene where she reads the book, title and author clearly displayed to us: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. [What is called resignation is confirmed desperation]. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed [and in such desperate enterprise]? If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it’s because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears however measured or far away.” Ron enshrines this Transcendentalist thinking (his occupation makes him at one with nature) and gets to tell Cary various philosophical homilies like “Don’t lead your life for others,” “Home is where you are,” “Nothing’s important except us” and “[Don’t] keep up with the Joneses.” Ron is presented by Sirk as a paragon of natural virtue and Cary’s eventual decision to promise her life to him is worded as a virtual conversion to the Transcendentalist cause. As Ron lies possibly dying she says, “[He] was so secure within himself because he refused to give importance to unimportant things. Why did it take me so long to understand it?” In addition to the disciples of Transcendentalism, Sirk also shows human warmth to seep through other key characters. Kay tearfully urges Cary to marry Ron once she learns how sad her mother is, and crucially the doctor (Hayden Rorke) explains the cause of Cary’s headaches (“You’re punishing yourself…for running away from life. The headache’s nature’s way of making a protest. Do you expect me to give you a prescription to cure life? You were ready for a love affair, but not for love”) before recommending her to let Ron take care of her. The daughter’s change of heart and the doctor’s wisdom can be put down to hollow Hollywood ‘women’s weepie’ convention, but the stress on Transcendentalism is interesting for being so sincere in the sense that we have no reason to doubt Sirk’s belief in it, just as we have no reason to doubt the Christian charity lying behind Magnificent Obsession. For this director there really was an alternative lifestyle to the prevailing “desperate haste to succeed.”Fassbinder characteristically offers no positive alternative at all in Fear Eats the Soul. Sirk offers us upper middle class materialistic values mixed with further members of the upper middle class who prefer to live contrary to these values. Fassbinder offers us working class values mixed with the classless milieu of the gastarbeiter world. If the prejudice on display in the Sirk is rooted in snobbery and materialistic ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ the prejudice on display in the Fassbinder is crude racism coupled with ageism. Sirk offers a 40 year old ‘older’ woman (Wyman was actually 38) having an affair with a man in his 30s (Hudson was 30), and the age gap isn’t actually that wide. Cary’s children want her to marry, but of course to a rich widower (like Harvey) who will maintain the materialist values of their late father. The film doesn’t focus too much on Ron and we aren’t shown his loneliness (although we do hear about his father’s death and learn that he builds a home in the vague hope that Cary might live there), but certainly Cary’s loneliness is heavily stressed. In Fassbinder’s film Emmi is 60 and nobody expects, let alone accepts, her romance with a much younger man in his late 30s. The loneliness of both is strongly delineated and the film addresses the isolation of both old people and foreign people living in modern Germany. Further to that, their efforts to alleviate their loneliness by reaching out to each other only causes more pain because society simply won’t allow them to be happy. Not for nothing is the film’s epitaph: “Happiness is not always fun.”Between them Emmi and Ali espouse through action a value system which is freely accepting of everyone irrespective of class, age and race. Importantly, Emmi’s family name is Kurowski and she was married to a Pole which makes her three hypocritically xenophobic children half-foreign whether they like it or not. A fundamentally kind soul, she has always believed in relationships across social divides. The fact that Ali has chosen to work in Germany and loves Emmi also shows he is willing to accept another culture. This mutual open-mindedness is countered ominously by only one other alternative value system – that of Nazism. Emmi is kind, but she is not very intelligent. She probably has no idea about the Holocaust and thinks nothing of admitting that she was a member of the Party back in the 1930s “along with everyone else.” Her ignorance is most revealing in her wish to go to Hitler’s favorite restaurant for their celebratory wedding lunch – “I have always wanted to eat here,” she says. I don’t mean to suggest Emmi is a Nazi (her ignorance coupled with her open mind clears her of that charge), but I do think Fassbinder is drawing a connection between Munich (a traditional hotbed of Nazism) and the racism we see exhibited by all the characters around his central couple. When faced with Ali the reaction of her children says it all. In a long slow pan we see in close-up a series of faces filled with hatred, first Bruno (Peter Gauhe) then her reptilian son-in-law Eugen (Fassbinder himself), her daughter Krista (Irm Hermann) and lastly her second son Albert (Karl Scheydt). Bruno kicks in the TV and storms out speechless with anger, Albert disowns himself quickly following Bruno, and the other two also can’t leave soon enough the “pigsty” home of “a whore” (Krista’s words). We saw earlier Eugen’s dictatorial behavior in his own apartment overlooked by Jesus Christ on a giant crucifix (staunch Catholicism and Nazism are connected historically). Nastiest of all is the icy stare one of Emmi’s colleagues fixes on Ali when she meets him. She looks at him as a death camp guard might view a Jew about to be exterminated – “That woman had death in her eyes,” says Ali. Fassbinder is fully aware of the connotations a setting evokes and here nods very firmly towards Sirk. Just as New England is connected with Transcendentalism, so Bavaria is connected with Nazism. There is also a connection between ignorance and xenophobia, and this is underlined throughout in the behavior of all the characters, but especially in the last part of the film as Emmi and Ali start to repress each other. Tellingly there is only one character in the whole film who doesn’t object to Emmi and Ali – the son of the landlord named Gruber (Marquard Böhm) and even he is dismissed by Ali as “not a nice man” early on. All of this exists in stark contrast with Sirk’s comparatively fun-filled evocation of New England with its cosy Transcendentalist enclave.Also standing in contrast is the treatment of marriage in both films. Sirk stops short of allowing Cary and Ron to marry. He shows their affair, society’s disapproval, Cary’s learning of Transcendentalist values, society’s eventual tacit approval (the doctor, the daughter) and a final commitment to be married in the future. There is every chance their future marriage will be free of prejudice and that everyone will live happily ever after, in other words, marriage is the happy goal of the narrative. Fassbinder goes much deeper with his couple. He has them marry early on so that neighbors, work colleagues, the local shopkeeper, friends and family are confronted with a fait accompli which they all react against with virulent disgust. After a vacation to get away from the ferocious bad-mouthing they return to find the situation changed. Everyone accepts the couple once they realize they can use them to get something for themselves – the neighbors need someone to help move stuff in the basement and so prevail on Ali to help; the racist shopkeeper who had previously refused to serve them now acts with fawning friendliness to regain their custom; the oldest son who kicked in Emmi’s TV pays for the damage and accepts Ali because he needs Emmi to mind his kid while his wife goes to work; and in a particularly pointed scene Emmi’s work colleagues start to include her again in reaction to the arrival of a new worker, a gastarbeiter from Yugoslavia who is frozen out in exactly the same way (and in exactly the same camera shot) as Emmi was frozen out earlier. On the surface everything is fine, but underneath the xenophobia continues to seethe unabated. Unfortunately, Emmi allows herself to be bought by the fakeness and even comes to assume some of their racist attitudes. She thinks nothing of showing off Ali’s muscles to her workmates, defends her colleague who shot Ali an Auschwitz glare and finally resists cooking him couscous when he asks for it – “I don’t like couscous – why don’t you eat German food?” While being ostracized she was forced into the role of foreigner because of Ali. Now she is taken back into the fold she regains her German-ness. Most trenchant of all is the scene where Ali returns home drunk and probably suffering from his stomach ulcer. He collapses on the floor before the door of Emmi’s apartment. Emmi opens the door, watches for a moment and then coldly closes the door without so much as offering a blanket.Ali also starts to repress Emmi when they return from vacation. His reaction to being refused couscous is to go off with the bar-owner (Barbara Valentin) and when he is humiliated by having to show his muscles he responds by sleeping with the woman and sliding into heavy drinking and gambling. When Emmi is forced to look for him at the garage where he works he laughs along with his colleague’s joke that Emmi is his “Moroccan grandmother.” The couple eventually have a moving reconciliation in the very bar where they met. Both parties are genuinely sorry. He admits his adultery and she forgives him with astonishing generosity. She simply asks that they be nice to each other. At the end it is loneliness they both feel most acutely of all. For Sirk the onus is much more on romantic love in the final scene where Cary cares for Ron and a deer looks in the window behind the bed seeming to inspire Ron into waking up. Loneliness is certainly a big theme of the film, but for Sirk the love story is the thing as per the soapy corn studio remit. For Fassbinder in his final scene the absence of the deer is very telling along with the contrasting words of the two doctors. Ron’s doctor tells Cary that with plenty of tender loving care Ron will recover, whereas Ali’s doctor tells Emmi there’s no cure for his perforated ulcer. Like other gastarbeiter Ali will recover, but not allowed time to convalesce properly within 6 months he will become sick again and will return and keep returning until he dies. Emmi says she will take care of him and their marriage is still alive, but we aren’t convinced their happiness can be lasting even half as much as we are by the corresponding scene in Sirk’s film.The success of both films rests on two quite superb narrative structures. In one sense they are very similar in the way they incorporate the traditional 3 acts. In the Sirk Cary and Ron’s lyrical courtship (act 1) leads into a tempestuous breaking up as all the external pressures take their toll (act 2), and then finally (act 3) to reconciliation courtesy of warmth in key characters and a fortunate accident which wakes Cary up to her senses. In the Fassbinder a speedy courtship between Ali and Emmi (act 1) leads straight into the central marriage where the external pressures take their toll (act 2) and then (act 3) on to a relaxing of this aversion and the marriage beginning to break up from within itself. A reconciliation is reached and sickness brings the couple close together again.Within the 3-act structures the various scenes dialectically reflect on each other. In the Sirk Cary entertains two suitors in her home, first the family choice Harvey and then Cary’s choice Ron. There are two party scenes, one depicting the waspish snobbery of the country club and the other depicting the ‘bohemia’ of the Transcendentalist enclave. A third party has Transcendentalism meet xenophobic materialism where Cary introduces Ron to what until this point has been her social world. The fight that ensues in the long term marks her transition to Transcendentalism, but it’s delayed by two tearful scenes, first her son strongly objecting to Ron (“I think all you see is a good-looking set of muscles,” he says vindictively) and then her daughter who is hurt by gossip concerning her mother. There are two scenes with Xmas trees, one on the street where Cary meets Ron and is happy and then one at home where she is alone and miserable because her children have missed their train to come and see her. We notice each act is dominated by visions of Ron’s old mill. In act 1 it’s derelict and bare to reflect the inner emotional state of both Cary and Ron. In act 2 it is halfway homely with Ron preparing for Cary and himself to live there. This is the scene where Cary calls off the wedding and the emotional fallout is symbolized by Cary breaking the Wedgwood pot which Ron has so carefully repaired. Then in act 3 when Cary rushes to tend her wounded man we see the house is beautifully restored and waiting to be inhabited by the now ready couple.In the Fassbinder the dialecticism as per his Brechtian wont is more overt. The film has a cyclical structure framed as it is by two bar scenes in which Ali asks Emmi to dance, she sitting at the same table with the same music playing. There are two scenes in Emmi’s apartment separated by a temporal ellipse. In the first Ali spends the night with Emmi and in the second the two (having been living together for an unspecified time) are visited by Gruber who thinks Emmi is sub-letting. Her half-joking excuse that Ali is going to marry her leads to a real proposal and the next thing we know they are married. We see Krista and Eugen twice, once before Emmi is married and once to introduce her husband, and we see her son Bruno twice, once at that introduction where he kicks in her TV and then later when he visits to ask Emmi to mind his kid. Indeed, Fassbinder makes society’s attack and society’s acceptance mirror each other dialectically across the boundary between acts 2 and 3 when they go on vacation. Scenes with the shopkeeper has him attacking and then fawning for their trade, the neighbors attack and then accept, Emmi’s colleagues first exclude and then include, but only when they find someone else (the Yugoslav gastarbeiter) to exclude. There are two restaurant scenes, one (in Hitler’s favorite joint) where they are happy and then one (in a park café) where they are sad; and there are two breakfast scenes, one where they are happily in love and the other when they are miserable. Ali collapses twice because of his stomach ulcer, the first time Emi coldly ignores him and the second time she reacts with genuine loving concern.I said Fassbinder’s Brechtian predilection makes the dialecticism more overt in his film. Actually, the artificiality of structural concerns (the way the narrative develops) is made visual wholly along the lines of Brecht’s idea (outlined in a 1930 essay) of ‘Epic Theatre,’ something which contrasts completely with the ‘Dramatic Theatre’ we see exemplified by Sirk’s film. In All That Heaven Allows there is a clear plot in which the spectator is implicated in the situation of Cary and Ron. We give in to the sensations that are evoked which involve us in the story of these people. The social critique is suggested so as to preserve our instinctual feelings as we are placed squarely in the middle of the experience. The plot sweeps forward with all eyes on the finish, one scene leading into another with a linear development which mirrors (mimics) natural evolution. All the time we are encouraged to feel as opposed to reason and are eventually fed the happy end we all want and expect. In the ‘Epic Theatre’ of Fear Eats the Soul plot is exchanged for narrative which turns the spectator into an observer placed outside the story of Emmi and Ali. We are alienated from the narrative so that we are forced to take decisions and judge what we see. Emmi and Ali are objects of an inquiry so that the social critique is placed at the center of the argument, our instinctual feelings are disregarded and our intellectual capacity for action is aroused. The narrative advances in jumps and curves in a series of jarring tableaux with all eyes on the process rather than the finish.Interestingly, the visual schemes of both films rely on the use of frames within frames, characters always framed within doorways, staircases, arches, through windows, through screens, reflected in mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Sirk and Fassbinder both use these images to voice their social critique, but where Sirk merely suggests his attack (Cary imprisoned behind latticed windows watching carol singers, or trapped as a reflection in her wretched TV screen), Fassbinder states his attack strongly and clearly, his frames actually stopping his film momentarily to force us to think through what we see. As per ‘Dramatic Theatre’ Sirk’s frames never impede the onward flow of the mimetic plot, the framing actually aiding the fluidity of the story-telling. A good example comes at the beginning just after Cary is attracted to Ron. She puts a vase of tree cuttings given to her by Ron on her dressing table and regards it, her image captured in a mirror. We sense the romantic attachment continuing on from the previous scene in a smooth transition, but her children enter her room with their reflection in the mirror coming between Cary and the vase. We are given the rationale for the whole film in a single shot, her children (and others) coming between Cary and the man she loves. The seamless storytelling is breathtaking as the film flows swift and true as we are involved completely in Cary’s situation.Contrast Sirk with Fassbinder. Early on Emmi is talking to her colleagues in a stairway while they have lunch. She has just spent the night with Ali and is still excited. She tries talking about it, but in code. Ali becomes a foreigner who touches her in the bus on the way to work. This unleashes a ferocious torrent of racist comments from her colleagues which places Emmi in a moral quandary. From the start Fassbinder frames the group in the stair-well which is in turn framed by a window. At the end of the conversation the ladies go back to work and Emmi moves into close-up, the camera dollying in to frame her exactly in the wooden frame of the window. Then Brigitte Mira stops acting and simply freezes in a tableau for about 7 seconds (a long time on film). We register in the conversation that she is thinking about Ali, but with this frozen tableau Fassbinder is asking us to evaluate her emotions and evaluate our emotions to her emotions. These frozen tableaux punctuate the film at regular intervals and is especially interventionist when groups of people stare unnaturally. In the film’s very first scene the gastarbeiter community all stare at Emmi who has just come into the bar to escape the rain. Emi’s family all stare at Ali as he is introduced as their new father-in-law. A waiter stares at Emmi and Ali in Hitler’s restaurant before the couple stop acting and simply sit there frozen, framed in a doorway. What do we think about them eating here? Most moving of all is the scene in the park café where the couple are sitting framed by empty tables. It is the film’s highest point of pathos with Emmi crying at everyone hating them. They declare their love to each other and we are moved, but two things distance us, objectifying our response. First the entire café staff stand in a group staring at them, and second as Fassbinder’s camera tracks away, the couple stop acting and freeze again. The frames within frames and the frozen tableaux impede the natural flow of the narrative, making us aware that we are watching a film, not real life. Fassbinder factors in two other distancing devices – the unlikely notion of a 60 year old ex-Nazi party member marrying a 38 year old black Arab, and the casting of two not exactly beautiful actors in the main roles. Sirk follows convention in making his couple younger and using popular good-looking stars who have faces which have screen charisma. But what we see in Fear Eats the Soul is much closer to real life. The constant distancing paradoxically brings us closer to the central characters, especially when they played as marvelously as they are by Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem. Mira in particular lights up the screen with an inner luminosity which is truly touching.The acting for Sirk is equally accomplished within the set limits of 50s melodrama. Wyman and Hudson give identical performances to those they gave in Magnificent Obsession – that’s what audiences wanted and that’s what they got (so goes commercial studio logic!). In essence, Sirk’s film is pure Hollywood melodrama in which repression and suffering gives way in the end to a higher, more lasting peace. Fassbinder realized the falsity of this notion. While society is divided by class and dependent on the exploitation of one group by another, lasting peace is impossible. So what he does in Fear Eats the Soul (and in virtually every subsequent film right through to Veronika Voss [1982]) is he uses melodrama to suck the spectator in, offers them gratification on a certain level (Fear Eats the Soul is one of cinema’s supremely eloquent love stories, let us be clear about that), but constantly punctures this comfort with his alienation devices which force us to stand back and assess the emotions of the characters and our reaction to these emotions. Sirk realized the falsity of the melodrama he was forced to make (after all he had originally wanted Ron to die at the end), but ultimately he had to operate under studio constraints. Both films under discussion are quite simply the best prevailing conditions would allow and are both masterpieces of their type.

This beautiful movie thie Douglas Sirk 'weepie' is one of my all time favourites, a romance from the 50s that dissects the hypocrisy of small town America, and of the age itself. Rock Hudson at his most handsome, Jane Wyman heartbreaking in her struggles against the gossips and the opinions of her narrow minded children, and a superbly chosen supporting cast. With a gorgeous music score added to the mix, I defy anyone not to well up at the ending!The Criterion Blu Ray restoration looks absolutely beautiful, with rich and vibrant colours. There are some terrific extras, including a profile of Rock Hudson made with wit and style, and a bio of Douglas Sirk. Informamtive booklet is enclosed with the discs, which includes a DVD too. Worth every penny.

This truly stunning transfer of Sirk's splendid and subversive melodrama is however region A locked and so will not work on most UK blu ray players. That said it is of reference quality in all departments and even better than Criterion's splendid DVD release of a few years ago. I cannot recommend this disc too strongly!

Wonderful fayre! Douglas Sirk created a truly colourful picture of the trials and tribulations of life, dealing with some ticklish issues of the time, such as class discrimination, with his masterly ability. Performances from the entire cast were absolutely spot-on, as was the pairing of Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson. First class sound and unbeatable picture quality.

Purchased this dvd for the love of my life, and she and my sister spent a tearful couple of hours watching it. Excellent film. Arrived on time and in condition as stated (new). Very pleased with this purchase, and would recommend seller.

Very good