Significant Theme.

Now "star-crossed lovers" are no new theme in the film or any other form of art but there are certain features about "All This and Heaven Too" which lend them a peculiar significance. For in this case we have not only the escape into the past and the morbid subjectivism that were so typical of the German film in the years following the war but we are faced with a situation which we know from the beginning must end in tragedy and in which every moment of happiness is shadowed by the approach of disaster. In this, of course, it reflects the increasingly strong current of thought that can see no escape from the horror of fascism and war and can suggest nothing but to laugh and love until the S.S. men arrive. To people who have adopted this attitude the frustration and suffering of the Praslin household, with its final catastrophe, will be profoundly moving since it will be to them not a hundred year old French society scandal but a reflection of their own lives and their own philosophy.—Candide.