Part of what makes All That Heaven Allows such a powerful film is how deceptively plain it begins. Douglas Sirk doesn’t pull punches (well, outside of his studio-mandated “happy” endings), and likes to disorient audiences right at the beginning. Take Written on the Wind, which opens with Robert Stack drunk driving across an oil field in an Allard J2X. There’s no flash like that in All That Heaven Allows, just the aching piano of Liszt’s “Consolation No. 3” as the camera pans and tilts down from a clocktower through an idyllic New England town, before landing on some ostensibly perfect suburb. That descent paired with the title, which gives a limit to just how much and what kind of happiness one can seek in this place, sets the stage for Sirk’s impossible romance.
Perhaps it's just how many times I’ve seen the movie, or maybe it really is a cliche, but the autumnal widow bonding with another lonely soul of their dead loved ones as a way to spark a new relationship is incredibly cheap, like the setup to a Hallmark movie. It’s inconspicuous within its drama—at first, at least. Like the Liszt piece which terribly, tremendously has to wait before it can hit its note again, All That Heaven Allows is a film about hesitations, accumulating them until they turn into an even more heartbreaking decisiveness. Every time Jane Wyman’s Cary second guesses her love for Ron (Rock Hudson), she’s one step closer to the scene where she suddenly tells him it's over with shockingly quick confidence. Most of that scene is framed in the deep hues of evening snow bounding blue into a wall of window, with only the actors’ eyes peering out of their silhouettes, catching enough light to show that they’re both on the verge of tears.
That whole sequence—which has Cary giving into social pressures from her kids and club people who just can’t stand the thought of her marrying some young bohemian gardener—pulls out the stops that have people consider how subtle Sirk’s direction was up until that point. Now, every movement or slight that was moved away from quickly in the script or buried underneath Sirk’s dense mise-en-scene is brought to the forefront in its most expressionistic way. The two have tried to bottle up their emotions and still maintain the decorum that is expected of them (for Cary, at least, but she’s doing enough of that for both of them). Now, their emotions are so big that they’re spilling out into the form of the film itself.
The dull setup makes All That Heaven Allows brilliantly unsuspecting, constantly having the audience grow a fondness for it in a way wholly different than what they think will come at the end. A first-time cold viewer might even implicitly know what direction the film is headed given that devastating Liszt piece underscoring the deathly beauty of fall, but Sirk won’t show his hand any more than that. Even when you think you’ve got the whole movie figured out—with Cary winding herself up into an all-for-naught breakup with Ron, and Rock Hudson’s stony facade melts away in an instantaneous vulnerability—Sirk has another right-hook waiting for you: Cary’s given a TV. The salesmen her kids brought over explains how the television is a refuge for lonely widows, all the while Cary stares at her brassy reflection on the empty screen. Everyone around her has taken whatever happiness she could make for herself and consoled her instead with four channels. Sirk’s not the kind of filmmaker her kids might have wanted her to sit and numb herself with because instead of making yet another widow’s romance, Sirk holds a mirror to that kind of storytelling in the first place.