All This, & Heaven Too

For the second year running, Barbara O’Neil plays the half-insane wife keeping Charles Boyer from happiness with the true love of his life. In When Tomorrow Comes, one might wish he or Irene Dunne could somehow have dispatched her, but All This proves that — in perhaps too thickly laid irony — that recourse only sends doomed love deeper under cover. Of the two this is the larger and showier role for O’Neil, who handles her mad mood swings with just the right balance of wide-eyed, snarling camp and real understanding; it earned her the film’s only Oscar nomination for acting, although it was one of three fine performances.

Bette Davis is the other woman, the new governess Boyer chooses after wresting full control over their four children’s education and welfare from their indifferent mother. She cares little for the children and ferociously for her husband who is suffocating under her paranoid tirades and ardent professions of love; these tensions are well-entrenched by the time naive and lonely Henriette turns up. It’s not long before she becomes the one bright spot in de Praslin’s life, an affection that begins when he observes her affinity with his children and gradually blooms into something stronger and more personal. The film is long, and in the best possible sense, as it allows time for their love to feel grounded in real things, and then for the two to yearn for one another sufficiently. Love at first sight doesn’t work as well in melodrama as it does in comedy; it doesn’t do simply to assert they love one another (where WTC again and so many others fail) — it must be established, it must be felt. And then, to sustain it, a film must be interesting besides, and this one keeps everything moving nicely for its entire two and a half hour duration.

Of course, this sort of thing depends on one’s willingness, and I gave mine entirely, so happy am I to fall into Boyer’s unfathomably lovelorn eyes, to follow his gaze cast at a particularly spirited and responsive Davis. The two have immense chemistry, which the film trusts and relies upon. No, it wouldn’t have been half as effective if it had been love at first sight, or passionate embraces halfway through, or indeed, ever at all. The film builds and sustains an almost unbearably potent and utterly captivating yearning. They develop a sort of asexual fidelity, an unspoken understanding. The film builds and builds the erotic tension, and doesn’t release a fraction of it: for the willing, it is incredibly intense.

In being so swept away I’d hate to devalue the film’s other merits, which are many: Litvak’s patient direction and flowing camera, for one, and his ability to convey much without a word (an exceptional sequence following a ball thrown in the Duke’s home tells in a few silent moments the entire living situation and emotional landscape of the major characters); Max Steiner’s moving but never maudlin score; the trenchant and forward-moving adaptation of Rachel Field’s novel. Above all, the film succeeds because it knows where to withhold and where to let it all go.