R.W. Fassbinder on Douglas Sirk (1975):
“Not one of us, Godard or Fuller or me or anybody else, can touch Douglas Sirk. Sirk has said: ‘Cinema is blood, is tears, violence, hate, death, and love.' And Sirk has made films with blood, with tears, with violence, hate--films with death and films with love. Sirk has said: you can't make films about things, you can only make films with things, with people, with light, with flowers, with mirrors, with blood, in fact with all the fantastic things which make life worth living. Sirk has also said: a director's philosophy is lighting and camera angles. And Sirk has made the tenderest films I know; they are the films of someone who loves people and doesn't despise them as we do.
“All That Heaven Allows: Jane Wyman is a rich widow, Rock Hudson prunes trees for her. In Jane's garden a love tree is in flower, which only flowers where love is, and so out of Jane's and Rock's chance meeting grows the love of their lives. But Rock is 15 years younger than Jane, and Jane is completely integrated into the social life of her small American town. Rock is a primitive and Jane has something to lose: her friends, her status which she owes to her late husband, her children. At the beginning Rock is in love with Nature; Jane at first doesn't love anything because she has everything.
“It's a pretty abysmal start for the love of one's life. She, he, and the world they live in.... After seeing this film, small town America is the last place in the world I would want to go. What it amounts to is that somewhere along the line Jane tells Rock that she is going to leave him, because of her idiotic children and so on. Rock doesn't protest too much; he still has Nature, after all. And there Jane sits on Christmas Eve, her children are going to leave her anyway and they've brought her a television set for Christmas. It's too much. It tells you something about the world and what it does to you....” (in Film Comment, Nov.-Dec. 1975).