Devoted wife and mother Cathy Whitaker (Moore) lives a life of domesticated bliss with her lantern-jawed husband and cutsie kids.

An enlightened 1950s lady-who-lunches, Connecticut's glossy monthly has her down as "a woman as devoted to her family as she is kind to negroes".

So it's a bit of a surprise when she blunders into her all-American husband Frank (Quaid) snogging the face off another bloke in his office at Magnatech TV sales.

"I'm going to beat this thing," a rugged Frank later tells the specialist, who has just informed him the treatment has a "35% rate of heterosexual conversion".

Cathy takes hubby's confession with the same sort of cheery stoicism as if she had received news that the Frigidaire had broken down.

However, as an in-denial Frank hits the bottle, she becomes increasingly attracted to widowed black gardener Raymond (Haysbert).

Unfortunately, an afternoon out with the nobly sympathetic Raymond is clocked by a vicious gossip and soon the telephone wires are singing.

The golden couple once hailed as "truly Mr and Mrs Magnatech" are torn apart as they pursue their real desires against the moral straitjacket of fifties America.

Drawing on Douglas Sirk's domestic melodramas, such as Imitation of Life, director Todd Haynes has pulled off a rather difficult dramatic trick.

Meshing just about acceptable 1950s storylines (race, feminism) with strictly taboo themes (homosexuality), he's tied the whole lot up in a perfectly pitched homage to their Technicolor style and convention.

From Elmer Bernstein's rich score to Moore's period wardrobe, the whole shebang is camper than a marquee sales convention.

However, despite the Old Compton Street aesthetic, the result is a sure-footed salute to the genre, which becomes genuinely moving by the time the period credits roll.

This is in no small part thanks to Moore's Cathy, whose eternal yet doomed optimism makes Christine Hamilton look the picture of misery.

"Miami is just darling - everything is pink," she bubbily tells her repressed husband. "Maybe we ought to consider Bermuda," he half-jokes back.

Tim Evans