This is my second Douglas Sirk movie. Enormous fun, with a few excruciating moments, but not nearly as affecting as Imitation of Life. It's visually amazing of course. Sort of Norman Rockwell meets Edward Hopper - so I couldn't resist posting tons of stills.
Here's a brief synopsis with a few asides: A lonely widow defies small-town gossip when she falls for a younger man. Not just any young man though. The hysterically handsome Rock Hudson - if you like that whole square jaw thing - plays the widow's gardener. Shock! Horror! On the surface it reads as some sort of class-based fable, with some good 'march to the beat of your own drum' individualism bringing up the rear. There's also this really funny and explicit criticism of television which is odd. There's a brilliant scene of the widow staring blankly into a brand new television her children have foisted on her, just as she realizes that her country club life is empty and meaningless. It's weird how much more attractive Rock is. Poor old Jane Wyman, with a very blunt, square fringe, is an enigma. How on earth this handsome, rugged individualist falls for the personality-less widow is beyond the film.
Here's Criterion's more disciplined synopsis: Jane Wyman (ex-wife of Ronald Reagan!) is a repressed wealthy widow and Rock Hudson is the hunky Thoreau-following gardener who loves her in Douglas Sirk’s heartbreakingly beautiful indictment of 1950s small-town America. Sirk utilizes expressionist colors, reflective surfaces, and frames-within-frames to convey the loneliness and isolation of a matriarch trapped by the snobbery of her children and the gossip of her social-climbing country club chums.
It's not all just fluff though - 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.” Jeepers. Here's an intelligent, if not very penetrating essay by my wonderful ex-lecturer Laura Mulvey.
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