深锁春光一院愁

剧情上除了两个问题以外其余都很棒 1.kirby到底喜欢Carrie什么？ 2.kirby到底成长没有？在Carrie说结束之前kirby一举一动就好像个神人一样，波澜不惊，自信满满。Carrie离开后他懊恼的动作或许是整部电影中他感情波动表现的最明显的镜头。当然你可以看到影片对他自然地生活方式是推崇的，但对他对待别人的方式却有所批判。比如他总是让别人对自己的生活做主，却不知有时候女人不希望仅凭自己拿主意。 但是他对此没做出任何行动，或许导演只是觉得这是kirby顺从内心带来的一点副作用罢了，并不需要特别提出来批判一下。 到了最后，kirby受伤，Carrie到他家照顾他时，遇见k的那位女性朋友，carrie却又像第一次到她家做客的时候那样说起kirby，完全是重复甚至强调那时的观点。而这与kirby，剧情发生的东西是冲突的。所以，我很是不解

有许多追求者的寡妇Cary，却被英俊的园丁Ron吸引，他请她去他的树林、小屋看，他过的是出世的生活。Ron的朋友Alida告诉Cary，他们发现脱离名利社会的真理并不简单。Ron想结婚，结果Cary反对，她太传统，而拖着就被Commère的Mona看见，她爱上身份低贱的园丁，甚至是在丈夫死前就开始，而高地位的追求者却失败的流言四起，儿女只支持她和高地位的人再婚。她让儿女看，女儿并不太同意，认为她的传统不能接受他，而儿子说她背弃了她丈夫的光荣传统，直接再也不来。好友Sara建议她带Ron去晚会让大家改变意见，只是得到嘲笑以及追求者的挑衅。女儿因为这事和男友吵架痛哭，为了儿女和名誉她只能断绝关系，却日日头疼，Ron也诸事不顺。而儿女仍然繁忙，儿即将出国，女马上结婚，儿子甚至说要卖了祖宅，忘了他当年说这房子的光荣传统要守护的借口。儿子送的大礼，就是她那不需要独自打发寂寞用的电视机，与那种出世生活完全抵触。医生告诉她治愈头疼方法只有直面现实，嫁给她。她却害怕太晚，他或许早已爱上其他人，如之前聚会看见和他碰见热情的玛丽安。但她碰见Alida，告诉她玛丽安嫁给别人。她想去找他，却最终不敢，返回，他在雪地中太兴奋呼喊她坠悬崖。脑震荡，Alida告知后她去照顾他，想起来他只为他打点的老磨坊，终于他苏醒。

An auteur maudit of his time, German émigré Douglas Sirk's renown has been considerably reappraised with much admiration for his trademark disposition of light and color, the swelling watchability sublimated from its saccharine source material, aka. the often derogated melodrama, and affecting emotional flux elicited from his sharply tricked-out players (Rock Hudson is among the staple).

Sirk's second Wyman-Hudson vehicle, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, is a lean, Technicolor-fueled, frippery-free, love-overcoming-moral-prejudice romantic drama, a middle-class suburban widow Cary Scott (Wyman) gallantly accepts the marriage proposal from her much younger boyfriend Ron Kirby (Hudson), who is hailed from a different class bracket and has no ambition in pursuing affluence. What transpires in the wake of her decision trenchantly discloses the selfishness, snobbery, myopia and hypocrisy inherently pertaining to the objectionable mindset of small-town bourgeoisie. On paper, the story sounds platitudinous, but Sirk’s wow factor is, as always, his divine composition of the palette and setting, everything is undergone through a minutely preparatory process, from the impeccable cosmetic furnishing and elegant garbs of its dramatis personae, to its almost storybook environs, however, to counterpoise the richness on one’s eyes, Sirk is quite self-aware of not overreaching himself, ergo, the plot pans out in a reductive but expressively accurate manner, sansdevious routes, to sustain a vigorous lifeline that magically keeps a spectator rapt.

It goes without saying this approach often lives and dies with the performers, and in this case, it totally hits the bull-eye. Jane Wyman is a screen paragon who can yoke unperturbed grace with understated determination in a pinch, and step by step, Cary’s liberation from those fetters chained to a lonesome widow is limned through her pitch-perfect, layered felicity that it hits every right spot to accompany a viewer’s mirrored, visceral journey. Rock Hudson, a quintessential specimen of American masculinity and good looks, aptly elicits Ron’s larger-than-life symbol of perfection but at the same time, conveys his vulnerability and misery with pinpricks of impatience and disappointment, which injects a more personal note to the character.

As regards the peripheral roles,Gloria Talbott andWilliam Reynolds, who play Cary’s college-age children, both stoutly take it to themselves as the cardinal negative force impeding their mother’s new romance, with the former’s talk-the-talk, walk-the-walk turnabout and the latter’s sheer self-seeking callousness, god bless our offspring. But one’s heart easily goes with a solicitous Agnes Moorehead, who is always a pleasant sight as Cary’s matter-of-fact confidant and an effulgent Virginia Grey, radiating warmth even if she is not necessarily needed to do so.

Lastly, the purportedly compromised ending, stank with the inimical Catholic precept that one must suffer (both physically and mentally) plenty before finally gaining the reward, comes off as a fly in the ointment to wring a quasi-tearjerking effect, nonetheless, as vouched by Liszt’s timelessly enchanting Consolation No. 3 in the beginning, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS oozes a vintage vitality in its most luscious taste, isn’t that a delight?

referential films: Sirk’s MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION (1954, 7.1/10), WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956, 8.0/10); Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL (1974, 8.7/10); Todd Haynes FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002, 9.2/10).

Douglas Sirk once said: “This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” When All That Heaven Allows was released by Universal Pictures in 1955, it was just another critically unnoticed Hollywood genre product, designed to appeal to the trashy “women’s weepie” audience. Now, in retrospect, it is considered to be closer to the art side of Sirk’s dialectic, and one of his key films. But this is part of a wider process of critical reevaluation in which his entire body of work has been rediscovered and reappraised by successive generations of filmmakers and historians.

No one seeing the film at the time of its release would have imagined its director to be an elegant, extremely erudite European whose career started in the theater of Weimar Germany and who was an early director of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. After a short but successful career at UFA studios in the vacuum left by the massive emigration of Jewish talent after the Nazis came to power in 1933, Sirk made his way to Hollywood, directing his first film there in 1942. Following an unsuccessful attempt to return to Germany in 1949–50, he signed a contract with Universal. His movie career then culminated with his highest-profile films, the melodramas of 1952–58. By 1959, he was Universal’s most successful director. At that very moment, he left moviemaking and America. Until his death in 1987, he and his wife, Hilde, lived in Lugano, Switzerland.

All That Heaven Allows marks the final turning point in Sirk’s strange and varied career. On the back of Magnificent Obsession’s success the previous year, Universal gave him a budget and freedom that enabled his mature style to blossom. All That Heaven Allows contains all the elements of characteristically Sirkian composition: light, shade, color, and camera angles combine with his trademark use of mirrors to break up the surface of the screen. Here are all the components of the “melodramatic” style on which Sirk’s critical reputation is based and that has made him the favorite of later generations of filmmakers, from Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Quentin Tarantino, from John Waters to Pedro Almodóvar.

But at the time, Universal was just anxious to repeat its successful pairing of Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in a romance between an older woman and an extremely handsome younger man. Wyman was still a big star but, by then, past her prime. Recently divorced from Ronald Reagan, and aware that her future lay with the soap-opera audience, she was pleased to be teamed with Hudson again. At the time, he was the new Hollywood heartthrob, who, although “out of the closet” in his personal life, had to be continually shut back in publicly and professionally by an anxious studio.

The All That Heaven Allows version of the May-September romance formula has Wyman playing Cary Scott, a well-to-do widow with two college-age children and a dull social life at the country club. The emptiness at the heart of her existence is filled when she meets Ron Kirby, the young gardener–turned–tree farmer who prunes the trees that line her all-American suburban yard—and then comes back to court her. This simple love story is disrupted by the vicious snobbery of her children and high-society acquaintances. Early in the film, Cary is at her dressing table, preparing for an evening with the Stoningham “elite.” To one side stands a vase containing the branches Ron cut for her earlier, so that Cary’s awakening interest in him carries over from the previous sequence. In a beautifully composed shot, the children first appear reflected in the mirror, coming between Cary and the vase, and then, as the camera pulls away, she is taken back into the room and toward the children. This one shot tells the story of the dilemma that Cary will face for the rest of the film and is typical of Sirk’s emblematic, economical use of cinema. His stars’ performances mesh well with this style. He gives them the screen space appropriate for their status, but the sexual charge between Cary and Ron is articulated through looks and gestures, and the roller-coaster highs and lows of their love are displaced onto the things that surround them.

Objects play their own significant part in expressing the emotions blocked by convention in small-town, middle-class 1950s America. Sirk creates a cinema in which the screen itself speaks more articulately than the protagonists, tongue-tied as they are by the codes of their fictional setting, the powers of censorship in Hollywood at the time, and the norms of the family melodrama genre. Out of these constraints, Sirk builds his film, while also using a typically melodramatic score to punctuate points and to accompany the tones and textures of the actors’ voices.

Years after their initial dismissal (and sometimes derision) by reviewers, Sirk’s successful string of big-budget soapers (and the director himself) have acquired a rich and complex critical afterlife, as different aspects and facets of the films have been reclaimed by successive phases of film criticism. For the auteurists and structuralists of the 1960s, Sirk’s mastery of cinematic language transcended the working conditions of the Hollywood studio system; feminists reclaimed him as a director of melodrama, with his women protagonists and dramas of interiority, domestic space, and sexual desire; gay critics today see a camp subtext in his films with Hudson, in which ambiguous situations can be read as double entendre.

The gap between the contemporary perception of All That Heaven Allows and that of the later critics is closed by Sirk himself, who once explained the conditions of work at the studio: “At least I was allowed to work on the material—so that I restructured to some extent some of the rather impossible scripts of the films I had to direct. Of course, I had to go by the rules, avoid experiments, stick to family fare, have ‘happy endings,’ and so on. Universal didn’t interfere with either my camera work or my cutting—which meant a lot to me.” Although All That Heaven Allows does, on the face of it, have a happy ending, its “happiness” is twisted with more than a touch of Sirkian irony. This piece originally appeared in the Criterion Collection’s 2001 DVD edition of All That Heaven Allows.

Jun 10, 2014

摘自CC官网：//www.criterion.com/current/posts/96-all-that-heaven-allows-an-articulate-screen