ALL I DESIRE

Barbara Stanwyck has spent ten years convincing her family that she's become a famous actress. Unfortunately, her career hasn't quite lived up to the publicity. In Douglas Sirk's ALL I DESIRE, she returns to her small Wisconsin hometown for her daughter's school play, where her arrival causes considerable excitement among people who have spent the last decade discussing her disgrace. Her youngest daughter worships her, her eldest daughter resents her, and her estranged husband (Richard Carlson) has grown accustomed to a life without her. To complicate matters, an old lover (Lyle Bettger) is still hanging around town, apparently under the impression that ten years is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to wait for a woman who wants nothing to do with you.

Adapted from Carol Ryrie Brink's novel Stopover, ALL I DESIRE is one of Sirk's most intimate and affecting films, a beautifully observed melodrama about the lives we imagine for ourselves and the people we disappoint along the way. Stanwyck is extraordinary as a woman who has spent so long pretending to be someone else that returning home requires an entirely different kind of performance. Sirk finds enormous feeling in the smallest gestures, particularly the gulf between a daughter who idolizes the mother she barely knows and one who remembers exactly what it was like to be abandoned by her. At just 79 minutes, it's a wonderfully rich little movie, with Stanwyck finding vanity, humor, and unexpected tenderness in a woman who has spent ten years rehearsing her triumphant return and now has to face the people who know better.