Next up, still at #136, is a Douglas Sirk melodrama. Jane Wyman is a well-off middle-aged widow (she was 38 in real life at the time this movie was released, so basically elderly) who scandalously falls in love with her much younger gardener (Rock Hudson, 30 at the time). The movie is about her navigating the conflict between her own feelings and the matrix of other relationships she’s embedded in — dealing with the reactions not just of her friends at the country club, but of her Ivy League kids, all of whom seem to think she’s having an embarrassing midlife crisis (which, arguably, she is).

What’s most fascinating to me about this movie is that it’s from 1955, and yet Rock Hudson is basically introducing her to a bunch of counterculture folks — you even get a copy of Thoreau lying around that she reads out of — who are basically all telling her to be less materialistic and more authentic to her own feelings and the like. And obviously “the sixties” didn’t materialize out of nowhere, but I’m surprised to see that strain of thought was already prominent enough to be in a mainstream Hollywood movie like that.

For the most part, the movie stays grounded, with subtle character notes (like the way that her son, back from Princeton, is trying so hard to be a sophisticated adult); the ending lapses into implausible and overwrought melodrama — and because it’s a classic Hollywood picture, there’s only one way things could end — but up until it gets to that lightly silly finish, it’s been sharply-observed. This wouldn’t make my top ten, but I can definitely understand how someone who saw it at a particular time in their life (particularly if they saw it back near its release) would put it there.