Stars: Richard Carlson, Maureen O'Sullivan, Barbara Stanwyck, Lyle Bettger

Director: Douglas Sirk

Summary: A woman arrives back in her home town that she left ten years ago to see her daughter in a school play, causing a stir in her former community.

WIN DVDs by rating this DVD

Average User Rating:

WIN DVDS by being amongst the first to review this DVD. Reviewing DVDs earns you bonus entries and lets you WIN DVDs!Please login before reviewing this DVD. If you're a new user, register for free and enter to WIN FREE DVDs!

A modest but intense turn-of-the-20th-century melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck as a wayward mother who returns home to a hostile town, All I Desire looks ahead to the soapy melodramas that would make Douglas Sirk's reputation. Stanwyck is marvelous as the struggling actress who yearns for her old life, all but overpowering her wooden costar Richard Carlson. This is the first of a long string of films Sirk made with producer Ross Hunter, and it's a marriage made in Hollywood. Hunter provides the pulpy material, the stars, and the increasingly larger budgets, and Sirk cranks up the emotions with an operatic sweep, twisting the clichés into fun-house-mirror reflections of American society. Though this is set in the past, the evocation of rural small-town life--a seeming idyllic little world poisoned with gossip, social prejudice, and double standards--isn't all that far from the modern suburbia of All That Heaven Allows. The picture stretches for an unconvincingly pat happy ending, but as Stanwyck fights her reputation, the attentions of an old lover, and the wagging tongues of a judgmental town, Sirk suggests that the final fade-out is only the beginning of her struggle. --Sean Axmaker

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Interactive menu
Release Date:	March 5, 2007
Runtime:	76 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	8236650
Keywords:	English, Desire, All, Drama, Sirk
Genre:	Drama