This isn’t a movie blog, but it’s no understatement that while I love reading books, a large part of my style and drive as a storyteller has been informed by movies. I’ve been an avaricious book reader since I was a girl and I’m so grateful for my parents giving me the freedom to read as much as I did, but it is things like Star Wars and Auntie Mame and Singing in the Rain and 2001 and alllllll those John Wayne Westerns that were formative for me.
One of those formative movies is the lesser recognized, rarely remembered outside of film buff circles is the classic All that Heaven Allows, staring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, and directed by Douglas Sirk. This was brought to mind recently during talks with some of my writerly friends about issues like mary-sue accusations, genre novels, and feelings of shame.
If you haven’t seen or heard of the movie, it’s a romance about an “older” woman (Jane Wyman’s character, who I suppose is be at most about 45 in the movie — ancient, I’m sure we all agree) who is a widow living in the stereo-typical 1950s middle-class suburbs. She hires a free spirited gardener (Rock Hudson) and they fall in love, creating a scandal for her with her peers and children. For 1955, it was a fairly radical presentation of an older woman. It’s a very melodramatic story, quite over the top in places, but it’s charming, and hey, with eye candy like Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson can you really go wrong?
My memories of this movie are tinged by that old patina of time, because I first came across this on AMC in the late-1980s, back when AMC was more about the “classics” than it is now. Given that VHS was still in the early stages, AMC was really the only reliable way to catch older movies that wasn’t staying up until 2am for the late night movie on a broadcast station. For movie junkies like me and my mother, living in small-town Florida, AMC was a godsend. Anyway, I saw this by myself on AMC because if there was on genre of movies or books that my mother could not stand it was romance.
Oh, you see the irony, yes?
Anyway this movie really side-swiped me, and not necessarily for the romance in particular. It just struck me as so daring to tell the story of Jane Wyman as an older woman in love in a way that was not tragic, using actors who were actually appealing and had chemistry. It has remind with me over the years, despite never having seen it in full since that time. So when I was talking about writing stories with my writerly friends, this movie came to mind.
For me personally, the connection is pretty strong that stories like All that Heaven Allows are inferior; romance, and happy endings, do not great literature make. This is in no way a valid argument, it’s a gut-level emotional reaction I have based on the era I grew up in (70s and 80s) and the opinions of my stridently 2nd-wave white feminist mother. I’m also not getting too much into how such romance stories are “culturally legitimate” when told by men (Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Sparks)