A Film Canon

Not since D.W. Griffith has melodrama been raised to the irrealistic, hallucinatory register that it takes in this film, which describes the objections from family and community that confront widow Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) when she decides to marry Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), her younger gardener. At one level, this simply involves the rehearsal of tropes endemic to 1950s 'women's pictures', albeit with a particularly eloquent, sustained plea for a woman's right to choose her romantic and sexual partner (and concomitant refusal of the empty rhetoric of self-sacrifice, responsibility and tradition), as well as a peculiarly chilling portrayal of the transformation of children into so many cruel, neglectful, idiotic neighbours. Yet Sirk and cinematographer Russell Metty suffuse this generic scenario with an extraordinary wealth of colour that intensifies and defamiliarises it. This is structured around an opposition between cool exteriors and warm interiors, whose axis is gradually generalised from the wall of the house, to the walls between rooms, and, in turn, to the various separations that exist within rooms - as if to suggest that the issue of inside and outside, so precious to Griffith, has either become burdensome, or is simply no longer relevant, suburbia having naturalised itself in such a way as to break down all distinction between nature and culture. At the same time, this lurid aestheticism provides a startling evocation of the "different drummer" within Cary and Ron's breasts; a mode of perception unavailable to the figures that surround them. From this perspective, the film's Waldenesque fantasy is curiously qualified by the implication that Walden is as much a gaze as a place, as Sirk enjoins suburban housewives to turn away from their television sets, but only for the sake of projecting his Technicolor transcendentalism onto their lives.