Rock Hudson was a good actor. Such was his life and fabled collaboration with Doris Day that one can forget that he showed up to good effect is several Fifties works by Douglas Sirk, such as this one in which, as a tree expert, he plays a gamekeeper to Jane Wyman's small-town Lady Chatterley. Her husband is dead rather than crippled, an academic distinction when it comes to the town's tongues.
It is worth pointing out that a part is accorded to an off-stage television salesman - and the eventual arrival of his product. Some might say that this film is a kindred spirit of those soaps which filled it day after day. That is to miss the point. Sirk uses the soap conventions to subvert the very world which gave rise to them.
This is close to a masterpiece.