Romantic Melodrama Analysis

Romantic Melodrama: Genre development illustration in films All that Heaven Allows and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Serving as a method of decoding the films, the emergence of the genre romantic melodrama succeeds in approaching the audience emotionally as well as intellectually by seriously deciphering the social flaws. Particularly, this is done through the delineation of virtuous and innocent lovers suffering from repressive prejudice and restrictions in the morbid society. As a matter of fact, both Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder fully exploit the genre in their movies to examine the communities they stay with and thus contribute to the future development of this genre in the film industry. More interestingly, the fact that Fassbinder

As is demonstrated in the two films above, holding the myths constant, in which both movies deal with the rises and falls, setbacks and breakthroughs in the love affair between an aged widow and a relatively young outsider—distant from the woman’s social intercourse, while situating the myths in disparate periods, locations, and atmospheres, the films effectively address completely different sociocultural problems under each circumstance. In All that heaven allows, the story begins with a romanticized and even, in some way, fantasized New England small town in the fifties, in which American upper-middle class professionals enjoy their flamboyant lives by means of superficial parties and hypocritical concerns of each other. Such kind of background setting is not groundless; instead, “film is also a business connected with the economic situation of the country”, and “the state of a nation’s economy can help explain a movie’s specific financial outlay, along with its attendance record” (Casper 2007, 11). American economy, at that time, was recovering from the severe slump of WWⅡ, and therefore, Sirk’s movie expresses the public’s sanguine views of the financial condition. Moreover, with the

Drew Casper points out that in the post classical period “the icon of gorgeous landscapes (even in wartime) that pluck the lovers out of the everyday, thereby highlighting the specialness of romance, was given a boost by its embrace of location shooting, large screen, and color” (Casper 2007, 263). All that Heaven Allows, directed in 1955—before the collapse of the studio production system, is the paradigm of postclassical aesthetics in film industry. At the same time, “Sirk manipulates not only camerawork and lighting…but virtually every aspect of the filmmaking art: décor, costumes, sets, actors, and even the stories themselves” (Schatz 1948, 249). In Sirk’s film, he muffles up the truth of the actual world in the presence of elegant characters as well as glamorous mise en scene. The protagonists in All that Heaven Allows Rock Hudson (Ron Kerby) and Jane Wyman (Carey Scott) are star-actors with extraordinary physicality and personas. In addition, the whole movie applies captivating colors which delineate a town of great vitality. One of the most impressive iconic pictures is the closing scene, in which the picture window, showing the rising sun with hopeful light yellow color, and the deer, symbolizing auspicious omen, indicate the seemingly bright future of the protagonists. In addition,