All That Heaven Allows

The use of music and lighting play a major role in movies, especially in melodramas. Douglas Sirk uses both tools to emphasize the emotions in his movie, All That Heaven Allows.  To start with, music plays a strong role in creating the sense of the scene that is about to role out, without a character even speaking. Light and cheerful music is played during either happy scenes or scenes where nothing in particular is happening. The audience is at ease listening to the music knowing that nothing terrible is about to happen. When an intense, dramatic scene is happening, the music is dark, loud, and powerful. The audience instantly is aware that something serious is about to happen. The same goes for lighting; it’s very exaggerated in this movie in particular. When Cary and Ron are in the mill and decide to get married, they are standing in front of the large window, which is radiating with light. Then, when Cary’s son tells her that he will never talk to her again if she goes through with the marriage, the lighting is very dark and somber. The book says that, “widescreen, deep-focus photography of the kind that Sirk in almost all of his most celebrated melodramas makes it possible to illustrate the emotional distance between characters in physical terms and this is a technique that he was to take full advantage of” (Mercer and Shingler 53). The audience can physically see the separation between Cary and her son during that scene when he is standing behind the screen, but if closer analyzed, it is used to prove the point that they are emotionally separated as well.