Douglas Sirk: In Praise of Melodrama

Another piece I wrote for Reel News, SIFF's now-defunct publication for members, in 2002 (it was never online, because that was a different time). I've lightly revised it from the original text and added new images.

Long live melodrama, and let us stress the quality of Douglas Sirk.

--David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film 

Although his directorial career lasted for over 40 years, including the German films he made in the 1930s and 1970s, Douglas Sirk (1900-1987) is best known for the melodramas he made for Universal between 1954 and 1959, including such enduring classics as Magnificent Obsession (below right), All That Heaven Allows (above), Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, and Imitation of Life. (All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind are now available on DVD from The Criterion Collection.) 

 

That isn't to suggest there aren't other entries in his filmography that are worth a look, like 1947's Lured with an excellent Lucille Ball or 1949's Shockproof with a screenplay from Samuel Fuller, but few are as well known or as widely appreciated. If it could be said that any one person did everything they could to give melodrama a good name, it was Douglas Sirk. 

 

As Todd Haynes (Poison, Velvet Goldmine) explains in the production notes for his unapologetically Sirkian new film, Far From Heaven, "While the look and style of those '50s melodramas are anything but realistic, there's something almost spookily accurate about the emotional truths of those films. They are hyperreal, that's why we call them melodramas. Because they are about the kinds of things that are close to our private, personal lives, like falling out of love with somebody.” 

 

Since Sirk's heyday, unfortunately, melodrama has, for the most part, fallen into disfavor. Nowadays, to describe a film as "melodramatic" implies that it's over-done: the acting too "big," the music too loud, the story line ridiculous, if not completely implausible. In the 1979 BBC documentary, Behind the Mirror: A Profile of Douglas Sirk, portions of which appear on the All That Heaven Allows DVD, the director agrees when host Mark Shivas suggests that Sirk meant the term literally: as a marriage between music and drama, as opposed to drama that is, like the title of Nicholas Ray's scathing 1956 attack on middle-American complacency: Bigger Than Life. 

 

The All Movie Guide describes melodrama as a genre that focuses on "human emotion, illness and physical hardship." Further, it is often "critical of social and political climates and mores but can include domestic portrayals which are romanticized." D.W. Griffith's 1914 Birth of a Nation and Lewis Milestone's 1944 The Purple Heart are cited as examples. It's also noted that, "Lucid distinctions exist between good and evil, hero and villain, right and wrong, and rule oriented society." Fortunately, such distinctions aren't always so clear in the films of Sirk and those he has inspired. 

 

Born in Hamburg in 1900 (or 1897 according to some reports) to Danish parents, Claus Detlev Sierck moved to Munich to study law after the First World War, then later to Hamburg to study philosophy. His life as a director began in Germany; first in theater, but then in film once the Nazis began to exert their censorious ways. His theatrical background should come as little surprise; Sirk's work has always been very "theatrical" in the best sense of the word. Along the way he changed his name to the more Teutonic-sounding Detlef Sierk.

 

In 1934, he was hired by legendary movie studio Universum Film AG (UFA), and they released his first feature film, April, April!, the following year. 

 

But then, in 1937, the left-leaning Sirk and his Jewish wife, Hilde Jary, fled Germany altogether for short sojourns in France, Holland, Spain, South Africa, and Australia, eventually settling in the United States, some time between 1939 and 1943. His directorial reputation preceded him. 

 

That Sirk would go on to make some of the most quintessentially American motion pictures of the 1950s isn't what makes him unique. That, once ensconced in the States, he would change his name to something less Germanic isn't either. The same could easily be said of his German-born UFA compatriots Billy Wilder and, to a lesser extent, Fritz Lang--not that Lang was a lesser director, just that "quintessentially American" are two words that don't fit the monocle-sporting Lang or his Expressionistic work quite so comfortably. But Sirk wasn't an auteur in the same way as Wilder and Lang, which may go some way towards explaining why his significance and influence have taken so much longer to grow and to take root in the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the 1970s and Todd Haynes in the 2000s. 

 

Right: Douglas Sirk and his wife, actress Hilde Jary
 

In that sense, Sirk would almost seem to have more in common with French-born B-movie maestro, Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie). Like Sirk, Tourneur wasn't known as much for his taste in material as for the stylistic miracles he worked with the screenplays he was given such that he could, time and time again, make one cinematic miracle after another out of the studio-generated material that came his way. 

That said, Sirk would, like Billy Wilder in Double Indemnity, go on to work with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in 1956's There’s Always Tomorrow, one of non-fiction filmmaker Errol Morris's favorite films. As with Tourneur, Sirk wasn't known for casting the biggest stars, or at least the most critically acclaimed--Tourneur's stellar noir Out of the Past with Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum, is a rather notable exception to the rule. 

Not to take anything away from the handsome Rock Hudson (Magnificent Obsession) or glamorous Lana Turner (Imitation of Life), but Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman they were not. Then again, it's hard to imagine those Hitchcock stars fitting as neatly into the artificiality of a Sirk production. 

On the other hand, although Turner's Lora is on screen more than anyone else in Imitation of Life, which was remade, like Magnificent Obsession, from John M. Stahl’s 1930s version, and gives one of her finest performances--it's the lesser-known Susan Kohner as the light-skinned daughter of Lora's Black maid (Juanita Moore) who steals the show. Consequently, she and Moore would garner the film's only Oscar nominations. (Surprisingly, Kohner would not capitalize on that early success. Her subsequent filmography may be sparse, but her writer/director sons, Paul and Chris Weitz of American Pie and About a Boy fame, seem fully prepared to make up for that). 

Prolific and openly gay producer Ross Hunter was behind these films and others that Sirk, the closeted Hudson, and Turner made, whether together or separately, including 1959's Pillow Talk with Hudson and Doris Day and 1966's sub-Sirkian Madame X, which gave Turner one of her last juicy roles. Sirk and Hunter made a total of 10 films together, many shot by Sirk's "secret weapon," Russell Metty, including Imitation of Life, his last American film and biggest commercial success. 

Meanwhile, Sirk's films with Hudson total an impressive eight. While he can't lay claim to having discovered the former Roy Harold Scherer Jr., many have credited Sirk for Hudson's matriculation from contract player to leading man.

Sirk was preparing to direct another film with Turner and Kohner when he was beset by health problems and the production was shelved. Instead of whiling away his days by the pool, he returned to Germany where his health improved, leading to speculation that the refined intellectual--who hasn't just been described as "Brechtian," but who actually worked with the progressive playwright early in his career--had literally grown sick of Hollywood. And he never looked back, though he would eventually exchange Germany for Switzerland, where he spent the last several years of his life.

Right: Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and Ross Hunter

The late-1950s, though, was an odd time for Sirk to leave, just as his work was just starting to find favor with the influential critics-turned-filmmakers of the French New Wave, like François Truffaut. Although they wouldn't burnish his reputation to the same degree as that of Nicholas Ray, Howard Hawks, or Alfred Hitchcock, the seeds were planted for a full-blown critical reassessment.

As Truffaut wrote about the Technicolor extravaganza Written on the Wind, as featured in the 1994 essay collection The Films in My Life, "This is movie-making unashamed of what it is, with no complexes, no hesitations, simply good workmanship." Like American film critics David Thomson and Andrew Sarris, he was also fond of Sirk's 1940s potboilers with George Sanders, but feels he really blossomed in the 1950s--much like that lilac bush in 1944's Summer Storm--and was impressed by his bold use of color. "They are," he theorized, "the colors of the Twentieth Century, the colors of America, the colors of the luxury civilization, the industrial colors that remind us that we live in the age of plastics." And with that, he would also predict the affluent end of 1960s America as depicted in Mike Nichols' The Graduate. 

In the pages of the same journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard would commend 1958's A Time to Love and a Time to Die, as excerpted in Barbara Klinger's Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk, for his "delirious mixture of medieval and modern, sentimentality and subtlety, tame compositions and frenzied CinemaScope." 

 

In Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1995 essay collection Placing Movies, the Chicago Reader critic claims that Sirk's Erich Maria Remarque adaptation (left) would, in turn, become "an important source for Les Carabiniers (1963), particularly the shooting of a partisan woman who denounces her assassins (a Russian peasant in Sirk's film, a French girl quoting Mayakovsky in Godard's)." 

The UK caught on in the 1970s and sang Sirk's praises in the pages of Screen, by way of a retrospective at the 1972 Edinburgh Film Festival, and in the publication in 1971 of Jon Halliday's interview collection Sirk on Sirk. 

 

Around this time, more significantly, his American work made a deep impact on young German actor and filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. As Thomas Elsaesser elucidates in his essay, "A Cinema of Vicious Circles" from the Museum of Modern Art's 1997 Fassbinder compendium, "Fassbinder's discovery--documented in an essay he wrote in 1971 on six Sirk films he had just seen--proved momentous; it rehabilitated a then almost-forgotten director and renewed interest in a genre that was to gain considerable critical prominence in subsequent years: the Hollywood family melodrama." 

Regarding Written on the Wind, his favorite of the six, Fassbinder (pictured with Sirk to the right) sums up his attraction: "The good, the 'normal,' the 'beautiful' are always utterly revolting; the evil, the weak, the dissolute arouse one's compassion." (Gosh, it almost sounds as if he's describing his own work.) About Dorothy Malone's Marylee, a "bad girl" with heart, a searing performance for which she would receive an Oscar, he wrote, "I love her as I rarely love anyone in the cinema" (Robert Stack, who found a new kind of fame in the 1990s as the ghoulishly stone-faced host of Unsolved Mysteries, would also receive a nomination). 

About The Tarnished Angels (below left), an adaptation of William Faulkner's Pylon, which featured many of the same actors and was shot in B&W CinemaScope, he wrote, "Sirk looks at these corpses with such tenderness and radiance that we start to think that something must be at fault if these people are so screwed up and, nevertheless, so nice. The fault lies with fear and loneliness. I have rarely felt fear and loneliness so much as in this film."

Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons, released the same year as this essay, was his first to fall directly under Sirk's sway. He would even go on to work with him after his return to Germany to teach. Elsaesser goes so far as to describe Sirk as "the perfect elective father for the fatherless Fassbinder."

With 1973's Ali, Fear Eats The Soul, the acolyte would up the ante by taking on All That Heaven Allows. In the original, Jane Wyman's upper class widow falls for Rock Hudson's younger man, who happens to be a gardener and a bohemian. 

Her college-aged kids and country club associates do all they can to put a kibosh on the relationship. What is her (individual) happiness worth compared to their (collective) reputation? Very little, apparently. In Ali, Fassbinder complicates the situation further by adding race to the mix, since the younger man is an Arab (Fassbinder's lover El Hedi ben Salem). 

Fassbinder by way or Sirk cleared the way for Pedro Almodóvar, François Ozon, and Todd Haynes, who, unlike Hudson, have made little effort to hide their sexual orientation, but then, they grew up in very different times, let alone countries. In Elvis Mitchell's New York Times review of the Spanish filmmaker's latest, Talk To Her (Hable con Ella), he notes, "Mr. Almodóvar's purview started out as a lewd, slapstick version of the heightened melodrama of the 50's director Douglas Sirk: if Magnificent Obsession had starred a sexual Lucille Ball. But the director has moved past candy-colored Fassbinder with a sense of humor." (And Ball really did work with Sirk.) 

Mitchell seems to feel that Almodóvar has only really come into his own by moving away from the frenetic Sirk-isms of his early work and, since I'm also more enamored of his more recent films, like 1995's The Flower of My Secret (La Flor de mi Secreto), 1997's Live Flesh (Carne Trémula), and 1999's Oscar-winning tearjerker All About My Mother (Todo Sobre mi Madre), I'm inclined to agree. 

Really, though, it's more that Almodóvar has thrown off the freneticism, never a part of Sirk's oeuvre, while hanging onto the rest, like the focus on women--including trans women and those of "a certain age"--and a brilliant use of color. All About My Mother, after all, much like Imitation of Life, revolves around an actress and mother and the women in her orbit, though I believe Sirk's influence has been more of a boon for Ozon and Haynes. 

Though the French filmmaker adapted his most recent feature, star-studded musical murder mystery 8 Women (8 Femmes, below), from an obscure 1960s stage play by Robert Thomas that feels like Agatha Christie with a side of kink, it sure looks like Sirk, right down to the deer in the snow at the beginning--an obvious tip of the chapeau to All That Heaven Allows, which Ozon claims to adore. As he explained to Paris Expatriate earlier this year, "I love his movies. They are very simple but very stylish. I love the color, the mise-en-scène. He makes a Greek tragedy out of a simple story." 

It doesn't hurt that one of Ozon's previous films was a 1999 set-bound adaptation of Sirk protegé Fassbinder's play Water Drops on Burning Rocks (Gouttes d'eau sur Pierres Brûlantes) or that he had already made another, 1998's Sitcom, about a suburban family with some rather serious problems (dad's a giant rat!). Granted, the latter is more black comedy than melodrama, but the idea of a beautiful home that feels like a prison provides a link with Sirk. 

The 1950s-set 8 Women, with its kitschy jewels-and-flowers opening with all the words in pink script, essentially reproduces the falling-diamond opening to Imitation of Life. The period outfits, including furs and leopard-print coats, and immaculately-coiffed divas--Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, and Isabelle Huppert in the Agnes Moorhead role--only serves to confirm the connection. The comparisons to Almodóvar don't hurt much either. 

Then there's Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven. Sirk, whose adherents include gay filmmakers John Waters--All That Heaven Allows is his favorite film--and The Deep End's Scott McGehee--a big fan of Written on the Wind--may not have been gay himself, but as Haynes joked to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel this fall, "He was a German intellectual, so he was close, I guess." He adds that producer Hunter was "a flamboyant gay fellow in that period."

Though Haynes takes Fassbinder's lead in using All That Heaven Allows as a jumping-off point, his film is even less of a remake. As he explained to Eye Weekly prior to a sold-out screening at the Toronto International Film Festival--even Roger Ebert was shut out--it isn't "about the '50s in America. It's about filmmaking in the '50s in America and the language of Hollywood filmmaking at that time. Everything is filtered through a California-sound-stage mentality." 

Haynes reunites, after Safe, with Julianne Moore for the story of Cathy, a well-off housewife living a life of "quiet desperation" in 1950s Connecticut--my hometown of Hartford, to be exact--until confronted by the sexual confusion of her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) and a "forbidden" attraction to her sympathetic black gardener, Raymond (24's Dennis Haysbert). 

Says Haynes, "Creating a '50s-era melodrama today and playing it straight, smack in the midst of this pumped-up, adrenaline-crazed era, might seem a perplexing impulse. Yet the strongest melodramas are those without apparent villains, where characters end up hurting each other unwittingly, just by pursuing their desires. To impose upon the seeming innocence of the 1950s themes as mutually volatile as race and sexuality is to reveal how volatile those subjects remain today and how much our current climate of complacent stability has in common with that bygone era."

And yet, by making such a film in 2002, he can tackle these subjects with a greater degree of, well, frankness--hence the name of Quaid's character--than Sirk or his 1950s contemporaries George Cukor or Vincente Minnelli ever could, including an on-screen kiss between Quaid and a male paramour. It goes without saying that that would have been unthinkable during the Production Code-era in which Sirk produced his most lasting works. 

By reviving his legacy with such obvious affection, while commenting on it at the same time--an acknowledgment that many of Sirk's best films were commentaries at heart--Far From Heaven seems likely to stand as the ultimate homage to his work. If it encourages even a few curious viewers to seek out All That Heaven Allows, let alone other Sirk masterworks, Haynes will have done more than enough. That it's destined to rank among the year's best is the coconut-covered icing on the red velvet cake. 

There will always be those who write off Sirk as glossy and insubstantial, while others revel in his work due to its perceived "subversiveness," as if everything must have a hidden meaning and nothing can be taken at face value, but as Sirk once said, "There is a very short distance between high art and trash." I believe his true worth lies in the way he transformed that trash, or "rather impossible" material, as he charitably put it, into art. 

As Fassbinder exulted, "I've seen six films by Douglas Sirk. Among them were the most beautiful in the world." And in that beauty, he found truth. As Andrew Sarris predicted in The American Cinema, "Time, if nothing else, will vindicate Douglas Sirk as it has already vindicated Joseph von Sternberg. Formal excellence and visual wit are seldom as appreciated at first glance as are the topical sensations of the hour." Clearly, that time is now. 

Kathleen Fennessy writes about music and film for Amazon.com, The All Music Guide, and Tablet.  She considers Todd Haynes' psychodrama Safe one of the finest films of the 1990s and wouldn't mind if the filmmaker worked as often with Julianne Moore as Douglas Sirk did with Rock Hudson.  

Images from Sicilia Queer Film Fest (Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows), The Criterion Collection (Wyman in Magnificent Obsession), They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (Douglas Sirk with Wyman and Rock Hudson), Cinémathèque Suisse (Sirk and Hilde Jary), Sabzian (Susan Kohner and Juanita Moore in Imitation of Life), Shutterstock (Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and Ross Hunter on the set of Pillow Talk), Slant (John Gavin and Lilo Pulver in A Time to Love and a Time to Die), College of Film and the Moving Image (Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Letterboxd (Hudson and Dorothy Malone), The Guardian (Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem), The Film Experience (Isabelle Huppert), and Screen Slate (Julianne Moore).