All that Heaven Allows

Objects play their own significant part in expressing the emotions blocked by convention in small-town, middle-class 50’s 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 of the actors’ voices. (Laura Mulvey)