A switched-off television screen is the mirror for a vast yet terribly personal emptiness in this Douglas Sirk melodrama. Jane Wyman is a widow "too beautiful to be lonely" but too smart not to be, in her small-town nouveau-riche milieu. Rock Hudson comes to prune her garden and uproots her life. Rock wants to be her redeemer: come see my silver-tipped spruce, he urges, and she does. But from the start, a threat hovers as family and friends try to seduce the lady back with "television: all the company you want, right there on the screen...the last refuge of lonely women." Her disapproving grown children-at once idiotic and all-powerful, as Sirkian offspring are wont to be-present her with the final coup de Tube one snowy Christmas, then leave her to contemplate her new electronic friend. Later, a roaring fire from the hearth reflects on the TV screen. Sirk's elegiac mood piece is also a furious battle of ideas that, à la Thoreau, locates the American sadness in a violent split from nature. Nowhere else in cinema do we find such a mournful cry against the intrusion of The Box into what used to be known as life. (JB)