All That Heaven Allows - 70th Anniversary

Douglas Sirk’s sweeping melodrama celebrates its 70th anniversary in 2025, and we start our melodrama season by sweeping you off your feet with one of Sirk's most successful romantic melodramas of the 1950s. "All That Heaven Allows" movingly portrays a May-December romance between Cary Scott (Jane Wyman), an attractive widow, and handsome gardener-landscaper Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson). Exceedingly lonely since her husband's death, Cary throws conventional behavior to the winds and facing social ostracism by pursuing her romance with Ron, who is unjustly perceived as a fortune-hunter by Cary's friends and family, especially her priggish son Ned (William Reynolds).

Douglas Sirk is so synonymous with 1950s melodrama that it is easy to forget that he made dozens of films across Germany, the Netherlands and the US before his brilliant run of so-called ‘women’s pictures’, from All I Desire (1953) to Imitation of Life (1959).

Although critically derided, many of these melodramas were huge hits at the box office, making Sirk’s decision to retire from filmmaking so early all the more surprising. In 1967 the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma reappraised Sirk’s work, and he is now seen as one of cinema’s great social critics.

Cunningly, he chose melodramas (seen then as soapy concoctions for female audiences) as vehicles for his critiques, subtly dissecting prejudice and avarice under a seemingly innocuous surface. He has had a huge influence on directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Todd Haynes and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Too Much: Melodrama on Film is a UK-wide celebration of exaggerated staging, score and performance to create the ultimate spectacle. Melodrama tells intimate and familial stories, a rare cinematic form that concerns itself with women's inner lives repeatedly dismissed by critics that found the outpouring of emotion "too much" and yet these films and the legacy of 'womens' pictures' carry searing social commentary beneath a glossy veneer. Imperfectly feminist yet endlessly relatable, come to the cinema to reconsider what, if anything, is "too much".

Supported by BFI FAN and National Lottery funding and co-curated by Young Electrics.