All That Heaven Allows (4K)

Screening as part of BFI's UK-wide season Too Much: Melodrama on Film. See any 3 titles in the season for £24 when you book them together – simply log in and add the tickets to your basket, and the discount will be applied at checkout.

Douglas Sirk’s 1955 multicolour melodrama masterpiece is one of the most iconic and influential films in the genre. Sirk’s approach to melodrama is at once slyly subversive, but also respectful of the genre’s conventions and gives real room and weight to his characters’ struggles. In some ways, the film is a critique of the entire American post-war attitude of optimism. 

Jane Wyman stars as the middle-class widow who falls in love with her younger gardener, played by matinee idol Rock Hudson. Hudson was a closeted gay man in real life; although his sexuality was apparently known in the industry, this side of him wasn’t made public until around the time of his death from AIDS-related illness in 1985. Subsequent readings of the film have drawn compelling parallels between Hudson’s double life and All that Heaven Allows’ depiction of a romance which resists stifling conformity. 

Its story of a woman straining to break free of the oppressive social structures of 50’s American suburbia has been extremely influential. There are clear throughlines from Sirk to filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar and David Lynch and Todd Haynes’ 2002 film Far From Heaven is effectively a feature-length homage to Sirk’s films. 

This screening will include programme notes by writer Laura Venning. 

Supported by the BFI Film Audience Network, awarding funding on behalf of the BFI National Lottery.