Analysis
The film High Heels which Almodóvar eventually made was not the one he had intended to make after the completion of Law of Desire in 1986. That film would have been a variation on García Lorca's classic play The House of Bernarda Alba and would have been set in rural Spain, not in Madrid. The story would have involved a domineering mother and her two daughters, both of whom leave home in order to escape her tyranny. The mother is subsequently thought to have perished in a fire but continues to pursue one of the girls for fifteen years. The proposed film did not come to fruition for a variety of reason. Almodóvar turned instead to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown which could be conveniently be shot in Madrid. When he eventually made High Heels it was fundamentally different from his original idea. Only the title remained. The plot was developed around the idea of someone confessing a crime on a live television news bulletin.
High Heels relates to the American tradition of melodrama and the so called "woman's picture". Imitation of Life (1959), directed by Douglas Sirk, was a major influence and there are some striking parallels between High Heels and Sirk's film. In both films, the mother is a performer – Becky a singer, the Lana Turner character in Sirk's film an actress – whose career takes precedence over a young daughter; mother and daughter are rivals over a man; both films begin with the child separated from her mother at a holiday resort; and at one point Rebeca tells her mother to stop acting, a phrase borrowed from the Sirk's film. Imitation of Life was both a remake and a reinterpretation of an earlier film – John M. Stahl's 1934 version – so High Heels is very much Almodóvar's own film, distinguished throughout by his particular style and concerns.
With its tense mother- daughter dynamic High Heels also pointedly nods to Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945), though in that film it is the mother, a businesswoman, who obsessively loves her daughter. In Stella Dallas (1937), directed by King Vidor, the same kind of relationship is also prominent, thought here the mother, Stella, is neither artist nor businesswoman but a lower class woman who has social aspirations for her daughter.
High Heels alludes both to the films made by Lana Turner and Joan Crawford and to their lives, to the relationship between Lana Turner, whose lover was killed by her daughter, and to the tumultuous relationship between Joan Crawford and her daughter Christina.
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