A year after making the ultimate Connecticut Of The Mind film, "All That Heaven Allows", WASP zeitgeist director extraordinaire Douglas Sirk ventures down to Texas On The Universal Back Lot with almost as memorable results in this beautifully decadent cinematic exploration of an oil family's moral ruin. Only a rather large story hole in George Zuckerman's otherwise good screenplay, namely a failure to adequately explain why an intelligent, non materialistic gal like the one portrayed by Lauren Bacall would instantly fall in love with such wealthy damaged goods as Kyle Hadley, as well as a rather wooden performance from Ms. Bacall, keep it from joining "Heaven" on the top 100 American films list, in my opinion.
A number of IMDB reviewers below employ the standard canard against Sirk that "it's just lovely to look at soap opera" forgetting how difficult it is to do the "just" part and completely missing the point that soap opera, with its embrace of excess and melodrama for their own sakes, and Sirkism with its use of excess and melodrama to hook the viewer so that she or he will then listen to a rather searing jeremiad against 50s materialism, conformity and emptiness, are two very dissimilar creatures.
Aiding Minister Sirk in his very moralistic task is his chief visual sexton, cinematographer Russell Metty whose images are seductively lovely while at the same time disturbing. For examples let me cite the opening of the film, with Robert Stack's banana yellow sports car tearing through the black oil derricks and drums of Hadleyville hell bent on self destruction in a de natured landscape, and the closing scene with Dorothy Malone's 50s "tramp" turned tycoon, sitting at the massive wooden desk of the father she helped murder, clutching a phallic toy oil well, while his portrait, with similar well, glowers behind her. Such images linger in our minds long after the soap is off the opera.
Give it an A minus.
A number of IMDB reviewers below employ the standard canard against Sirk that "it's just lovely to look at soap opera" forgetting how difficult it is to do the "just" part and completely missing the point that soap opera, with its embrace of excess and melodrama for their own sakes, and Sirkism with its use of excess and melodrama to hook the viewer so that she or he will then listen to a rather searing jeremiad against 50s materialism, conformity and emptiness, are two very dissimilar creatures.
Aiding Minister Sirk in his very moralistic task is his chief visual sexton, cinematographer Russell Metty whose images are seductively lovely while at the same time disturbing. For examples let me cite the opening of the film, with Robert Stack's banana yellow sports car tearing through the black oil derricks and drums of Hadleyville hell bent on self destruction in a de natured landscape, and the closing scene with Dorothy Malone's 50s "tramp" turned tycoon, sitting at the massive wooden desk of the father she helped murder, clutching a phallic toy oil well, while his portrait, with similar well, glowers behind her. Such images linger in our minds long after the soap is off the opera.
Give it an A minus.