The Middle-Class American Home of the Fifties: The Use of Architecture in Nicholas Ray's "Bigger than Life" and Douglas Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows"

Abstract

Certain traditional genres in the American cinema are more or less definable in terms of the time and place of their settings. A clear example is the Western, where the is the landscapes and towns comprising the frontier of White American civilization during its movement West over a period of time in history. Films about contemporary middle-class families can be seen as emerging in the form of a genre (including both comedies and melodramas) in Hollywood during the forties and fifties-a genre clearly defined by its being set in and around the middle-class American family home. Just as in the Western the as an actual historical-geographical place is transformed, through the behavioral patterns of its inhabitants, into an ideologically laden cultural phenomenon, so in the middle-class family genre the family, as an actual category of people inhabiting a collection of dwellings across contemporary America, becomes a generic subject of ideological significance. A discussion of the use of domestic architecture is as integral to the dominant directorial styles of Ray and Sirk as, say, the use of landscapes to those of John Ford and Anthony Mann. As with landscapes in certain Westerns, the homes in Bigger Than Life and All That Heaven Allows provide an interesting locus of thematic and stylistic approaches to the American middle-class family as the subject matter of a genre. The particular conceptions of architecture in the two films (and in the two directors' work generally) are in a certain way diametrically opposed. Within the context of the middle-class family film, they can be seen as providing opposite poles or coordinates between which the films of other practitioners of the genre-Minnelli, Kazan, Cukor, etc.-can be located (cf. Ford's and Mann's conceptions of the landscape of the West). In essence, the difference is that Ray conceives of architecture as architecture whereas Sirk uses architecture as a tool. In Bigger Than Life the expressive role of architectural features invariably depends on their specific architectural functions, while in All