All That Heaven Allows

press release:

USA | 1955 | 35mm | 89 min.

Director: Douglas Sirk

Cast: Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead

A well-to-do widow (Wyman) falls for her down-to-earth gardener (Hudson) in this incomparably moving melodrama, one of the essential films of the 1950s and an inspiration for both R.W. Fassbinder (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, screening 9/16) and Todd Haynes (Far from Heaven, screening 9/21). In gleaming Technicolor,  Sirk (Imitation of Life) lays bare the hypocrisy, classism, and consumerism roiling beneath small-town Americana’s picket-fence façade.

Our numerous and diverse Fall 2018 special presentations include a screening of an excellent vintage print of Roger Corman’s low-budget The Little Shop of Horrors; Douglas Sirk’s masterful melodrama All That Heaven Allows and Todd Hayne’s reworking of Sirk, Far from Heaven; rare 35mm prints of Antonioni’s counter-culture classic Zabriskie Point and Claire Denis sibling saga Nenette and Boni; a screening of the popular recent documentary The Eagle Huntress with producer Stacey Reiss in person; plus new digital restorations of two cult horror comedies from the early 1980s: Basket Case and Strange Behavior, as well as George Sluizer’s great thriller The Vanishing, Powell and Pressburger’s repressed nuns classic Black Narcissus, and the landmark independent Buddies, the first movie to depict the AIDS crisis.

All Cinematheque screenings are free and open to the public.