All That Heaven Allows (1955) on Netflix
Cary Scott, a widow in a New England town, falls in love with Ron Kirby, the younger arborist who tends her trees. Her children and her country club friends disapprove.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.6/1018,825 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes90%
Trailer
Plot summary
Cary Scott lives in Stoningham, a New England town, where her college-age son and daughter visit at weekends and her days otherwise hold little beyond the country club. Ron Kirby, who tends her trees each season, takes her to the old mill on his land, which she urges him to make into a home, and to meet Alida and Mick Anderson, whose plain way of living owes nothing to money or status. Cary and Ron fall in love and he proposes. She accepts, though the gap in their ages and lives troubles her, and her children and her friends object to the match.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about All That Heaven Allows (1955)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
Sirk considered having Hudson's character die at the end of the film, but Ross Hunter, the film's producer, would not allow it, because he wanted a more positive ending.- The film inspired Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), in which a mature woman falls in love with an Arab man; it was spoofed by John Waters in Polyester (1981), and Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven (2002) is an homage to it.
- Sirk's reputation waned in the 1960s, when he was dismissed as a director of dated and insubstantial Hollywood melodramas, but it revived in the 1970s thanks to praise from New German Cinema directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the publication of Jon Halliday's Sirk on Sirk (1971).
- Wyman was 38 when she played the film's “older woman”, who scandalizes society and her grown-up children by becoming engaged to a younger man; Hudson, the younger man, was 29 at the time.
- Some exteriors were shot on “Colonial Street”, a studio backlot built by Paramount Pictures on the property of Universal Studios four years earlier and re-designed to mimic an upper-middle class New England town; the set was later featured on the television series Leave It to Beaver.
