The Taste of Tragedy: Douglas Sirk’s All I Desire and There’s Always Tomorrow

For good reason, Douglas Sirk’s legacy has long rested on the Technicolor domestic melodramas he made in the 1950s, like the floridly evocative and baroquely stylized All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. But seldom named-dropped alongside these canonical works are two other similarly themed films he made during the same decade, only shot in black and white: All I Desire and There’s Always Tomorrow, which are superficially more subdued but no less withering in their portraits of suburban malaise.

With these films, Sirk dissects the postwar nuclear family from complementary angles, with the former dramatizing the attempted reunion of a single mother with the family she abandoned in the midst of an extramarital affair a decade earlier, and the latter homing in on a married man just as he’s contemplating the same fateful act himself. Together they form a rich analysis of the psychological toll of domesticity, which can act as both a gravitational force and a suffocating echo chamber, and they do so through a visual language that’s closer to noir than to the flamboyant expressionism of the films for which Sirk is more frequently celebrated.

Beyond their plot parallels, both films are further united by the grounding presence of Barbara Stanwyck. Of the actress, Sirk would later gush in a 1978 Film Comment interview: “there is such an amazing tragic stillness about her…this deep melancholy in her presence.” And given Sirk’s predilection for tough but tormented heroines, one wishes that they’d collaborated more often. Stanwyck, then in her late 40s, isn’t made up to look youthful in either film, as it’s the wisdom and world-weariness of her characters that Sirk emphasizes throughout.

All I Desire’s Naomi Murdoch is a past-her-prime stage actress whose low-voiced narration betrays a jadedness and exhaustion with her vocation, while There’s Always Tomorrow’s Norma Vale is a fashion designer whose lack of an immediate family grants her a detachment and emotional maturity not shared by the rest of the ensemble. Both women ultimately choose a path that diverges from their desires in favor of preserving a greater order, as they both carry a knowledge of the pitfalls of individual whims deep in their bones.

Released in 1953, All I Desire is set in Riverdale, Wisconsin, a small town where the Murdoch name is held in high regard. The nepotism of the community is wryly emphasized when a scene showing Naomi’s youngest daughter, Lily (Lori Nelson), boasting of her reputation as a high school thespian to housekeeper Lena (Lotte Stein) segues immediately to a shot of the principal’s office door with the name “MURDOCH” plastered on top. It’s obvious why a woman of Naomi’s ambition would abandon a town with such narrow horizons, but after years of professional humiliations she’s enchanted by the prospect of a homecoming.

Meanwhile, Lily, who secretly writes to her mother to invite her home for the senior class play that she’s starring in, clearly wants to follow in Naomi’s big-city footsteps, though what the film quickly goes about establishing is that neither Naomi nor Lily’s grass-is-greener assumptions are warranted. When Naomi eagerly turns into town on horse-drawn carriage after 10 years away, Sirk’s camera pans to reveal the inside of the local sporting goods store, where her former flame, Dutch Heineman (Lyle Bettger), is raising a rifle to demonstrate its features—a not-so-subtle omen of the dimmer direction that All I Desire will take.

The way that Sirk frames this shot—from a high-angle at the street corner, looking through the windows inside—establishes the visual motif of surveillance that runs through All I Desire and There’s Always Tomorrow. When Naomi arrives at her old home, there’s an extended moment, both tender and melancholy, where she spies on her family from the porch, the camera adopting her perspective as she observes a scene of domestic harmony. The chiaroscuro lighting of this striking sequence, which sees Stanwyck moving in and out of pools of darkness, is a natural function of the outdoor setting, but the interiors are no less stylized, with bannisters and furniture repeatedly blocking light sources, and lamps seeming to emanate in odd directions. Sirk’s mise-en-scène here is more theatrical than naturalistic, encouraging a view of the home itself as a stage where everyone inside embodies rigid personas: Lily the bubbly dreamer; sister Joyce (Marcia Henderson) the stern pragmatist; father Henry (Richard Carlson) the cold patriarch; and Lena the doting maid.

From 1955, There’s Always Tomorrow is guided by a similar vision of the suburban home. In the film, Clifford Groves (Fred MacMurray) is in an existential crisis about whether or not to confront his and his family’s complacency. Pivoting to widescreen after All I Desire’s imprisoning use of 4:3, Sirk goes to further extremes of stylization to accentuate the sterile chill of Clifford’s slick, spacious Los Angeles residence. As in the earlier film, the main character here wades through pockets of inexplicable darkness in rooms that otherwise radiate an evenly lit neutrality, and elements of the set that could easily be mere functional assets of the modern home become dividing lines, prison bars, and vectors for detached surveillance. When Norma, a former employee at Clifford’s toy business, arrives unannounced at his home one evening after decades away, it reawakens a dormant romance that in turn renders all these set components especially significant, as they’re increasingly exploited by Clifford’s suspicious children to snoop on their father’s activities without detection.

More so than All I Desire, though, There’s Always Tomorrow relies on auxiliary locations to map out its portrait of middle-aged discontent, namely Clifford’s office and a resort (the fictional Palm Valley Inn) where he and Norma attend conveniently timed business trips. The latter functions as a sunbaked paradise of escapism and consumerism—albeit a false one in which Clifford falls prey to the same scrutiny that he experienced back in L.A. Meanwhile, strewn with childhood toys, including a mechanized robot figurine that offers a blunt analogue to its inventor’s existential state, Clifford’s place of work is both a locus of his arrested innocence and a demonstration of his tendency to domesticity. The after-hours tour that Clifford gives Norma is therefore a scene of fascinating tension, as we’re witness to his clear infatuation for her and aware that an extramarital affair would jeopardize his professional stature and accomplishments. In fact, with the foreknowledge of Naomi’s spiritual yearning as a result of her flight from family in All I Desire, it can be presumed that Clifford’s indulgence in such a taboo would place him on a similar path of exile and despondency.

Despite these implied harbingers, Sirk’s sympathy is wedded intimately to Naomi and Clifford throughout both films. By calling attention to the pretenses of family life, Sirk arouses a feeling of identification with both characters’ pursuits of an authentic joy separate from the confines of their homes, and further wraps that identification around a sense of time passing. Modes of transport figure prominently in both films: the arrangement of All I Desire’s narrative around Riverdale’s train schedule, the layering of train sound effects into domestic scenes, the model train set in There’s Always Tomorrow whose loud emissions drown out Clifford’s words at one point, and the airplane that takes Norma back to her point of origin, and whose path Clifford longingly watches through a window.

As with the fatalistic use of ticking clocks in All That Heaven Allows, there’s a morbid irony hanging over these recurring motifs, an acknowledgment of how indifferent time is to the preciousness of an individual life, and therefore of the importance of living one’s truth. That both Naomi and Clifford must ultimately elect for compromises—resulting in a false happy ending in All I Desire and a poignant downer ending in There’s Always Tomorrow—supplies each of these films with the delicate aftertaste of true tragedy.

All I Desire and There’s Always Tomorrow are out on August 25 on Kino Lorber Blu-ray.