A woman comes back with all her dreams, with her love -- and she finds nothing but this rotten, decrepit middle-class American family.
--Douglas Sirk, on All I Desire
Even the title is ironic, no one in the film finds what they desire, even the long-in-the-tooth family cook cannot marry the man she loves, yet. Naomi Murdoch (played beautifully by Barbara Stanwyck)left her home for the stage in 1900 because, among other reasons, she was condescended to because of her lower-class background . She comes back after ten years to see her daughter in a high-school play. Her stuffed-shirt husband still resents her, her young son barely knows who she is, and her other daughter wants nothing to do with her. Sirk and his cinematographer Carl Guthrie capture, in beautiful black-and-white, the changing family dynamics in complex shots, often showing what different family members are doing, unaware of each other, in the same shot. The film takes place about 1910, before WWI, and was released the first year of Eisenhower's presidency. Both periods are seen by some as peaceful and even idyllic, but those of us who grew up in the fifties in small towns experienced the narrow-mindedness and anti-intellectualism so apparent not far beneath the surface of this and other Sirk films.
Producer Ross Hunter insisted on the "happy" ending, very different than the ending of the original novel, Stopover, by Carol Brink. But it is clear things may not be happy for long, even though Naomi has (accidentally) shot her former lover, who the whole town seems to have known about. It's hard to believe that things will be much better for her this time around, as little has changed. Sirk deals with some of the same questions in There's Always Tomorrow (1956), also starring Barbara Stanwyck.
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