What heaven allows

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Movie
German title What heaven allows
Original title All That Heaven Allows
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1955
length 89 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Douglas Sirk
script Peg Fenwick
production Ross Hunter for
Universal Pictures
music Frank Skinner
camera Russell Metty
cut Frank Gross
occupation
synchronization

What Heaven Allows (Original title: All That Heaven Allows ) is an American melodrama by Douglas Sirk from 1955 , in which Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson play the leading roles. The film is based on the novel All That Heaven Allows by Edna and Harry Lee, which was published in 1952.

action

Widowed for some time, Cary Scott walls up in her grief. She has girlfriends, mostly Sarah Warren, and an aged partner named Harvey, but love seems to be gone from her life. Her only consolation is her two already studying children, precocious Kay and conventional Ned. That changes with Ron Kirby, who tends and prunes the trees in Cary's garden. He is much younger than her and as a gardener and tree nursery owner does not belong to her social class. Ron's circle of friends is simple, natural and nature-loving; there Thoreau is read and celebrated with warm friendliness.

Cary falls in love with Ron and he with her. He soon proposes marriage to her and begins to expand an old mill that belongs to him and that Cary liked very much. When the spiteful village gossip aunt Mona Plash observed the two of them together, word got around. Carys now tries to integrate Ron into her life, but fails: In the country club , the mesalliance is being blasphemed, Cary is treated with disgust like an easy girl; her two children do not want to accept the new man at Cary's side and renounce her. Cary is unable to withstand this pressure. She tells Kay and Ned that she will not see Ron again, which they take for granted.

But then Cary realizes that her grown children will soon be gone and have their own lives, that she doesn't care about the country club's recognition and that she continues to love Ron. After she visits her doctor because of persistent headaches, he speaks to her conscience because she is turning away from life. Then she drives to Ron's house, who was hunting with a friend. But Cary loses courage and she wants to drive away in her car. At this moment Ron returns, wants to see her - and falls down a slope in the process. When Cary is informed of Ron's accident, she immediately goes to the unconscious. When Ron opens his eyes and says her name questioningly in astonishment, she replies that she has now come home forever.

Effect and meaning

What Heaven allows mercilessly reckons with 1950s American society by describing it as gossipy, arrogant, materialistic and spiteful. As a counter-image, it is contrasted with Ron's nature-loving circle of friends, in which Walden is read by Thoreau. The film did not receive any awards at the time, but because of its subversive message captured in bewitchingly beautiful images, it is a prime example of Douglas Sirk's mastery, regardless of the pressure to adapt in studio productions at the time to get to the core of things and to reinforce it through ironic breaks - among other things at the happy end, where in the last shot a fallow deer looks in through a snow-covered window.

What is striking, for example, is Serk's placement of mirroring in the film, with which he breaks the surface and indicates how closely the characters are socially observed. Lattice windows are also used in many scenes as an expression of the social narrowness of What Heaven Permits , whereby Cary mostly appears “trapped” within the lattice windows, while Ron moves easily through them. The use of light and shadow to express moods, as well as the striking use of color that emphasizes the artificiality of the film, are also artistic. The Technicolor colors show the outside world in bright, lively colors, in contrast to the scenes of the inside world, which are mostly kept in inconspicuous shades of brown. When Cary and her daughter are lying on a bed crying desperately over the gossip in the small town, colorful technicolor shades are beamed onto the two of them through the window to express their psychological unrest. Many symbols are also brought into the film, such as Ron's cup, which was repaired and then broken again, as well as the television that became popular among the general public in the USA in the 1950s . When she separates from Ron and her children give her the television for Christmas, this indicates the danger that from now on she will be trapped in her life as a lonely housewife and that life will pass her passively through the television.

Frank Skinner's film music is designed in a striking way and underlines the feelings of the protagonists in many places. The “third consolation” ( Consolation No. 3 ) in Des, composed by Franz Liszt , appears as a recurring motif in Skinner's film music. Skinner also adopts the composition “Why?” In some places from Robert Schumann's Fantasiestücke op. 12 as well as elements from the finale of Johannes Brahms ' 1st Symphony .

Production background

A year earlier, Douglas Sirk had made The Wonderful Power (1954), also starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson. After Universal Pictures had a huge box office hit with The Wonderful Power , the two actors were re-paired under Sirk's direction. Sirk received from Universal - in the hope that he would repeat the theatrical success of The Wonderful Power again - a high budget and extensive artistic freedom in the implementation, which was not the case with most of his previous Hollywood films. That allowed him to make the film more based on his ideas. There was one thing that Sirk couldn't get away with: he wanted to end the film with Ron falling off the cliff and leaving it open whether he would survive or not. But that was considered too gloomy by the film studio and Sirk complied with this opinion.

The house Cary lives in was on Universal Pictures' studio lot and was rented from Paramount for the film. It's the same house as that of Fredric March's family from the 1955 thriller On a Day Like Anybody Else . However, for this film, cosmetic changes were made to the house beforehand because the audience was not supposed to realize this.

synchronization

The German synchronization was created in 1956 at Berliner Synchron with a dialogue book by Fritz A. Koeniger and directed by Klaus von Wahl .

role actor German Dubbing voice
Cary Scott Jane Wyman Marianne Kehlau
Ron Kirby Rock Hudson Gert Günther Hoffmann
Sara Warren Agnes Moorehead Ursula War
Harvey Conrad Nagel Paul Wagner
Kay Scott Gloria Talbott Marianne Prenzel
Ned Scott William Reynolds Gerd Vespermann
Alida Anderson Virginia Gray Ruth Piepho
Mick Anderson Charles Drake Horst Niendorf
Dr. Hennesy Hayden Rorke Alfred Haase
Mona Plash Jacqueline deWit Berta Drews
Howard Hoffer Donald Curtis Klaus W. Krause
George Warren Alex Gerry Robert Klupp
Mr. Weeks Forrest Lewis Erich Poremski
Mrs. Humphrey Eleanor Audley Agnes Windeck
Tom Allenby Tol Avery Hans Emons
Grandpa adams Anthony Jochim Carl Heinz Carell
Manuel Nestor Paiva Eduard Wandrey

reception

Heaven Allowed was a box office hit, but little received by American critics of the 1950s (like most of Sirk's films). It was considered another common, almost trashy "woman's film". For example, Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times : “Solid and sensitive drama had to make way for strikingly emotional bulldozers and a paving of simple clichés.” Jane Wyman was not responsible for this, because what could “a sensible actress achieve when director Sirk did her bathing in lush autumn colors and hitting everything on the piano and violas? "

In the meantime, the general perception of Sirk's work has turned and What Heaven Permits mostly receives very positive reviews. Since the 1970s, the film, along with other Serk melodramas, has been one of the great models of directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder ( fear eats the soul ), Pedro Almodóvar , Quentin Tarantino and Todd Haynes ( Dem Himmel so Fern ).

Dave Kehr described the film as a "masterpiece" in that it was "a deeply moving, deeply compassionate portrait of a woman trapped by morals and social codes". Through his mise en scene , like the objects and surfaces in the film, Sirk would almost exclusively clarify his action. He is one of the few filmmakers who would insist on “reading the picture.” Cinema wrote: “Disguised as a 'women's film' in glowing technicolor, director Douglas Sirk, born in Hamburg as Detlef Sierck, reckons with the emotionally impoverished middle-class US Society in the 1950s. Conclusion: Rigorous attack on narrow-minded little minds "The lexicon of international films wrote:" A far-fetched, sentimental cinema story in a neat production. The social melodramas of the 1950s by Fassbinder's role model Douglas Sirk (= Detlef Sierck) are now recognized as standard works of a specific emotional cinema. "

Awards

literature

  • Edna Lee, Harry Lee: All That Heaven Allows. Putnam, New York 1952.
  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Six Films by Douglas Sirk. In: Laura Mulvay, Jon Halliday: Douglas Sirk. Prescot 1972.
  • Georg Seeßlen : Cinema of feelings, history and mythology of the film melodrama. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1980, ISBN 3-499-17366-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See e.g. B. Seeßlen p. 115 ff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder p. 96 f and Gary Morris in http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue10/reviews/sirk/text.htm
  2. ↑ All That Heaven Allows at the Criterion Collection
  3. ↑ Audio commentary on the Blu-Ray with the film scholars Dr. Werner Kemp and Christian Bartsch
  4. ↑ Audio commentary on the Blu-Ray with the film scholars Dr. Werner Kemp and Christian Bartsch
  5. ↑ A TV set brings "life's parade" to the living room. Retrieved September 27, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Essay on All That Heaven Allows at the Criterion Collection
  7. ↑ IMDb Trivia
  8. ↑ Synchronized files
  9. ↑ Essay on All That Heaven Allows at the Criterion Collection
  10. ↑ "What Heaven Permits" in the New York Times
  11. ↑ "What Heaven Permits" at Rotten Tomatoes
  12. ↑ Dave Kehr's review for Chicago Reader
  13. ↑ "What Heaven Permits" at Cinema
  14. ↑ What Heaven Permits. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed August 29, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 

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