All That Heaven Allows (1955) or, Not The Widow and Her Gardener!

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The glamorous stars are wrapped in a beautiful, painted embrace on this color-blasting, grand poster for Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows

A good-looking widow, who has a laconic relationship with an older, respectable gentleman in the country club and 'cares for' the 'children', (who are obviously fully grown adults.) She falls in love with a younger gardener, who speaks so divinely about trees, but is not accepted by neither her children nor the surrounding suburban society.

All That Heaven Allows is written by Peggy Thompson (Whirlpool (1935)), based on the same-titled novel by Edna and Harry L. Lee, and directed by Douglas Sirk (April, April! (1935)). SPOILER After a concussion induced by a dramatic snowfall, the two controversial lovers, however, find each other again, while a deer sniffs around in the snow right outside the window (see images below.)
The style of this melodrama classic is absolutely artificial in all its Technicolor, laminated-feel, studio-created crispness, which is also the film's main attraction: It's simply freakish!
Sirk's modern message about a widow finding hot love again after her husband's demise is wrapped in a 1950s material conservatism so thick and obstinate that I sometimes get the creeps.
The romantic melodrama largely came about because the studio wanted to re-join the two attractive stars of Sirk's major success Magnificent Obsession (1954); Jane Wyman (The Kid from Kokomo (1939)) and Rock Hudson (Sea Devils (1953)).

Haven't we all been there, honestly? A romantic, private hour and BAM, a cute deer comes along to join us. It happens in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows

Witness the 50s-type 'passion' and 'ecstasy' right here in the trailer for All That Heaven Allows

Cost: Unknown
Box office: 3.1 mil. $ (North America only)
= Uncertainty but likely a big hit
[All That Heaven Allows premiered 25 August (London, UK) and runs 89 minutes. Sirk found the original screenplay "rather impossible". Wyman at age 38 played the 'older woman' mother to two younger actors both aged 24; the 'younger man' gardener Hudson was 30 at the time. Shooting took place in Universal's California lot around January 1955. The film was advertised in women's media and became a solid hit in North America. Its foreign gross numbers are regrettably not made public. If made on a similar budget to Sirk's Wyman/Hudson hit from the year before, Magnificent Obsession, which was reportedly made for 780k $, All That Heaven Allows would rank as a big or maybe even a huge hit theatrically. Sirk returned with uncredited direction in Never Say Goodbye (1956) and as credited director on Written on the Wind (1956). Wyman returned in Lucy Gallant (1955); Hudson in Never Say Goodbye. All That Heaven Allows is fresh at 90 % with a 7.69/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of All That Heaven Allows?