Here is a revived version of a 2006 Seattle Sound piece about Lynn Shelton's directorial debut and a sidebar about the independent company that produced it. I'm not certain when the publication came to an end, but I contributed from 2006-2007, during which time it morphed into Sound. City Arts, also now expired, would rise from the ashes.
LYNN SHELTON AND LAURA VEIRS:
CONVERSATIONS WITH MY 13-YEAR-OLD SELF
For her first full-length feature, Lynn Shelton, who traded acting for directing several years ago, decided to revisit a time in her life that may be long gone, but still feels as fresh as last night's dream.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at 2006's Slamdance Film Festival, We Go Way Back is the captivating result.
Dreams, in fact, play a big part in the story, as Kate (Cornish grad Amber Hubert), a fixture on the fringe circuit, finds her dream-life intruding upon her real life upon turning 23.
Offered the lead in Ibsen's proto-feminist drama Hedda Gabler, the Ballard actress should be thrilled, but instead she keeps re-reading letters she wrote to herself at 13. Meanwhile, the play's production grows increasingly convoluted, to the point where Kate must speak her lines in Norwegian, while everyone else gets to speak in English. Then there are all the not-great men she can't resist. Why? What happened to her self-confidence?
Kate dreams about the more self-assured young woman she used to be until that person--13-year-old Kate (Garfield student Maggie Brown)--comes to life. As Shelton explains in her director's statement, "At 13, I possessed a clarity of vision and a degree of self-confidence that I marvel at today."
Aside from the Northwest talent on both sides of the camera, We Go Way Back takes place in Seattle and the Key Peninsula and features an all-local soundtrack. Music supervisor Sean Nelson (Harvey Danger) helped Shelton round up a stellar line-up of artists, including the Decemberists and the Lights [Nelson would star in Shelton's followup, My Effortless Brilliance].
Local singer/songwriter Laura Veirs, however, provides the bulk of the score, and her evocative songs are a perfect fit for Shelton's expressive visuals.
As Veirs recollects, "Once I met her, I instantly connected with her and wanted to get involved. She showed me some of her previous short films, and I liked those a lot, so I dove right into the project."
Aside from a cover of 1930s standard "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter," the rest of the material stems from Veirs' recordings Carbon Glacier and Year of Meteors. When we met to discuss the movie, Shelton enthused, "It's amazing. It just works so beautifully as soundtrack."
The experience of working together was so fulfilling that she followed up by shooting a video for "Magnetized," with plans to include it as a DVD extra.
A longtime Seattle resident, Shelton teaches at The Art Institute and expects to start shooting her second feature next summer.
Veirs, meanwhile, looks forward to more movie composing. She acknowledges, "It's not something I'd done prior to working with Lynn." Now it's one of her main objectives.
As for her fall plans: "My band the Tortured Souls and I are touring the West Coast, and then we're making our fifth record together." [The result was 2007's Saltbreakers.] Sadly for Seattleites, she intends to relocate to Portland afterward, but don't count out further collaborations between these two talented Northwesterners.
We Go Way Back opens at Seattle’s Varsity Theatre on September 15.
THE PRODUCERS: FILM PRODUCTION IN SEATTLE
We Go Way Back was produced by Seattle studio The Film Company. Founded in 2004 by filmmaker Gregg Lachow (The Seven Mysteries of Life), it's not to be confused with the Capitol Hill cinematheque Northwest Film Forum, which produced and entered the world of distribution with Robinson Devor's critically acclaimed Police Beat. The two non-profits are separate entities, although a pre-Film Company Lachow was recipient of the NWFF's first "Start-to-Finish" grant for his 1999 feature Money Buys Happiness.
As Lachow explains, "[The Film Company] greenlights artists, not projects. We don't read scripts or hear pitches." So far, they have produced one short and four features. (NYC's Cyan Pictures is distributing We Go Way Back.)
Their next feature release is Canadian director Guy Maddin's Seattle-filmed, silent effort Brand Upon the Brain!, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival this fall. Then they'll begin working on The Part I Love the Best, to be directed by Lachow's wife, actress Megan Murphy.
Michael Seiwerath is NWFF's executive director, a post he took over from cofounder Jamie Hook in 2001. (Hook founded the organization with Deborah Girdwood in 1995.)
According to Seiwerath, "The NWFF has aided in the production of more than 500 films. Police Beat is the fifth Start-to-Finish feature film we have actively produced or co-produced, and we are in development on the sixth, [David Russo's] #2. We are looking to start a national art house film network, made of the cinematheques in North America." They are also working on a DVD release for Police Beat.
Endnote: I interviewed Lynn Shelton in person at Caffe Vita; Laura Veirs, Gregg Lachow, and Michael Seiwerath by email. We Go Way Back is available to stream on most every digital platform thanks to Factory 25. In case you're wondering what Maggie Brown has been up to, Paul Siple, who went to school with her at Garfield, provides the very cool answer.
Here's the pre-obituary I wrote for Amazon's now-defunct blog Armchair Commentary in 2009. Garner would end up outliving this piece by five years.
"What was I qualified to do to make a living? Nothing. You don't need qualifications as an actor or a politician. And I didn't want to be a politician."--James Garner
Emmy Award-winning actor James Garner (born James Bumgarner) died on July 19, 2014 at the age of 86.
Star of screens both big and small, the tall, dark, and handsome Westerner made his biggest mark as the title character in popular programs Maverick on ABC in the 1950s and '60s and The Rockford Files on NBC in the '70s (followed by eight made-for-TV movies on CBS in the '90s).
Maverick slideshow with Bret (Garner) and his brother, Bart (Jack Kelly)
Born in Denver, Oklahoma, Garner served in the Merchant Marine, the National Guard, and the U.S. Army, receiving two Purple Hearts for injuries sustained in the Korean War. Despite his all-American good looks, Garner continued to struggle with serious health problems in the ensuing decades, culminating in quintuple bypass and knee-replacement surgery.
After his service career ended, Garner moved from the stage to advertising work to guest spots and would continue to act in commercials, most famously for Polaroid. While The Rockford Files, in which he played exonerated ex-con-turned-private eye Jim Rockford, cemented Garner's star status, the Emmy Award-winning show also served as a training ground for writer David Chase, who went on to create The Sopranos, and actor Tom Selleck, who followed in Garner's primetime footsteps as Magnum P.I.
Trailer for The Great Escape (1963)
During his career, Garner also earned an Oscar nomination for Murphy's Romance with Sally Field and appeared in Up Periscope, The Children's Hour with Shirley MacLaine, The Great Escape with Steve McQueen, The Americanization of Emily with frequent co-star Julie Andrews, Support Your Local Sheriff!, John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix, which kindled a lifelong enthusiasm for racing, HBO's Barbarians at the Gate, and Victor/Victoria (below),directed by Andrews' husband, Blake Edwards.
One of Garner's last hits was Nick Cassavetes' 2004 The Notebook, in which he played Ryan Gosling's character as a senior citizen. It was a stretch, but Garner made it work. In 2009, House creator David Shore announced that he would be adapting The Rockford Files for a new generation, though it's hard to imagine anyone who could possibly fill James Garner's shoes. (The Rockford Files with David Boreanaz will premiere on NBC in Fall 2026.)
While promoting Clint Eastwood's 2000 Space Cowboys, in which he re-teamed with the Maverick guest star, he told the BBC, "When I go, I want to finish the last shot of a picture and go directly off the set, like Spencer Tracy."
At the time of his death, James Garner was survived by Lois Clarke, his wife of 58 years, and daughters Kimberly and Gigi (Clarke died in 2021 at 98).
For Crypticon this year, I moderated the panels on 1976 horror and 1986 horror. Thanks to the panelists for their great contributions, in addition to anyone who attended or suggested titles. If you see any key films missing, please feel free to let me know.
Due to the timing of the 1986 panel, I missed Tony Kay's interview with Adrienne Barbeau, an actress of whom I've been fond since her days on '70s sitcom Maude; our panel was fun, but that was still a bummer.
In alphabetical order, plus directors, notable cast, and a few notes. If I watched the film online, I've noted the streaming service in brackets.
THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF 1976 HORROR
Panelists: Daniel Gildark, Kennedy Rainer, and Becky Sayers
A-B
Alice, Sweet Alice (Alfred Sole) [Tubi]
Notable cast: Brooke Shields
Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter)
Baby Rosemary (John Hayes)
Bestialità / Dog Lay Afternoon (Peter Skerl)
Blood Sucking Freaks (Joel M. Reed) [Tubi]
Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis)[Tubi]
Notable cast: Bette Davis, Oliver Reed, Karen Black
Notable cast: Tony Lo Bianco, Silvia Sydney, Richard Lynch
The Grim Reaper (Ron Ormond)
Grizzly (William Girdler)
H-M
House of Mortal Sin (Pete Walker)
The House with Laughing Windows / La Casa Dalle Finestre che Ridono
(Pupi Avati) [Internet Archive]
J.D.'s Revenge (Arthur Marks)
Notable cast: Louis Gossett, Jr., Glynn Turman
The Legend of the Wolf Woman / Werewolf Woman (Rino Di Silvestro)
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Nicolas Gessner) [Tubi]
Notable cast: Jodie Foster, Martin Sheen
Mako: The Jaws of Death (William Grefé)
Massacre at Central High (Rene Dalder) [Tubi]
Notable cast: Andrew Stephens, Robert Carradine
O-S
The Omen (Richard Donner)
Notable cast: Gregory Peck, Lee Remick
Las Poquianchis (Felipe Cazals)
Satan's Black Wedding (Nick Millard)
Schizo (Pete Walker)
Squirm (Jeff Leiberman) [Tubi]
T-W
The Tenant (Roman Polanski)
Notable cast: Isabelle Adjani
To the Devil a Daughter (Peter Sykes) [Peacock]
Notable cast: Christopher Lee, Nastassja Kinski
The Town that Dreaded Sundown (Charles B. Pierce)
Who Can Kill a Child? / ¿Quién Puede Matar a un Niño?
(Chicho Ibáñez Serrador) [Prime]
The Witch Who Came from the Sea (Matt Cimber)
I didn't do any crowd-sourcing for the list above, but I did for the list below. I also found Kier-La Janisse's House of Psychotic Women helpful (I have the 2022 expanded edition). It's how I discovered the Polish film I Like Bats (Lubię Nietoperze), which I highly recommend to anyone looking for a funny, sexy, quasi-feminist take on the vampire myth. Janisse also included the film in her Severin boxed set House of Psychotic Women: Rarities Collection.
I follow a number of film critics on Bluesky, and Odie Henderson and Norm Wilner were both so enthusiastic about Night of the Creeps, that when I put out a call for 1986 horror recommendations, they shared their excellent reviews. Click their names for more. Sadly, I also missed the interview with star Tom Atkins, who is perfection in the film, because I was on the Pets in Horror panel. Granted, that was a fun one, too, and you can't do it all.
THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF 1986 HORROR
Panelists: Byron C. Miller, Sara Michelle Fetters, Kennedy Rainer, and Bri Cummings
A-B
Aliens (James Cameron)
Notable cast: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn
America 3000 (David Engelbach)
April Fools Day (Fred Walton) [Pluto]
Big Trouble in Little China (John Carpenter)
Notable cast: Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, James Hong
Black Roses (John Fasano)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch)
Notable cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini
C-D
Chopping Mall (Jim Wynorski)
Notable cast: Barbara Crampton, Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel, Dick Miller
The Clan of the Cave Bear (Michael Chapman)
Class of Nuke 'Em High (Richard W. Haines, Lloyd Kaufman)
Cobra (George P. Cosmatos)
Notable cast: Sylvester Stallone
Crawlspace (David Schmoeller)
Notable cast: Klaus Kinski
Crimewave (Sam Raimi)
Critters (Stephen Herek)[Tubi]
Notable cast: Dee Wallace, Billy Green Bush, Scott Grimes
Dead End Drive-In (Brian Trenchard-Smith)
Deadly Friend (Wes Craven)
Deadtime Stories (Jeffrey Delman)
Demons 2 (Lamberto Bava)
Dolls (Stuart Gordon)
E-G
Escapes (David Steensland)
Extremities (Robert M. Young)
F/X (Robert Mandel)
Fair Game (Mario Andreacchio)
The Fly (David Cronenberg)
Notable cast: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis
From Beyond (Stuart Gordon)
Notable cast: Barbara Crampton, Jeffrey Combs
The Golden Child (Michael Ritchie)
Gothic (Ken Russell)
Notable cast: Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Natasha Richardson
Here's the most recent list I compiled for Crypticon.
As with most previous lists, I started with a preliminary list before turning to social media to crowd-source for more. I'm grateful to everyone who contributed suggestions.
What counts: cats, dogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, rabbits, rats, etc.
What doesn't: chickens, cows, horses, pigs, and other farm animals.
What about invertebrates? Furry mammals preferred!
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (Ernest Dickerson, 1995)
Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (John Harrison, 1990)
David Johansen fights a cat!
They Only Kill Their Masters (James Goldstone, 1972)
The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
Jed, the Siberian Husky
The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (Eli Craig, 2010)
U-Z
The Uncanny (Matthew Leutwyler, 2015)
The Uninvited (Thomas and Charles Guard, 2009)
The Voices (Marjane Satrapi, 2014)
When Evil Lurks (Demián Rugna, 2023)
Killer Mastiff
White God (Kornél Mundruczó, Hungarian, 2014)
The Wrath of Becky (Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote, 2023)
Willard (Daniel Mann, 1971)
Ben, the rat, pictured above left with Bruce Davison as Willard
The Crypticon Seattle panel Good Boy! (Pets in Horror) took place on Sat, May 2, at 3pm with moderator Brien Gorham and panelists Todd Johnston, Eric Li, and me. Click here to listen to Eric's recording of the panel.
Please see this list at the Scariest Things for more details about some of these films. Images from Bloody Disgusting (Sigourney Weaver with Jonesy in Alien), The Guardian (Indy in Good Boy), and the IMDb (Willard poster).
Here are two more lists I compiled for culturally-specific panels at Crypticon.
I didn't do any crowd-sourcing in these instances, so I'm more familiar with many of these films. Co-panelist and Crypticon programmer Jason Weiss came up with even longer lists; I've incorporated his Mexican and Spanish suggestions and may add his French ones later, in addition to other updates. For now, the first list ends in 2018 and the second in 2019.
As usual, I've ignored most sequels, though a few films, like [Rec], have spawned several. In order by release date, plus director, notable writers and/or cast members, country of origin (where relevant), and a few notes.
- The Beauty and the Beast / La Belle et la Bête (Jean Cocteau and René Clément; Jean Marais, 1948)
- Diabolique / Les Diaboliques(Henri-Georges Clouzot; Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, and Paul Meurisse, 1955)
- Eyes Without a Face / Les Yeux sans Visage (Georges Franju; author Jean Redon; Édith Scob and Alida Valli; composer Maurice Jarre, 1960)
Other works: abattoir documentary The Blood of Beasts / Le Sang des Bêtes (1948; included with the Criterion Collection edition). May have influenced: Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966) and Face/Off (John Woo, 1997).
- Daughters of the Darkness (Harry Kümel; Delphine Seyrig, English-language, Belgian, 1971) - Malpertuis (Harry Kümel; Orson Welles, Sylvie Vartan, and Jean-Pierre Cassel, Dutch, 1971)
- Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis; Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle, 2001)
- High Tension / Haute Tension (Alexandre Aja; Cécile de France, Maïwenn, and Philippe Nahon [from Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone; we also mentioned Noé's Irréversible], 2003)
Also: The Hills Have Eyes remake (Aaron Stanford, 2006) and Mirrors (Keifer Sutherland; co-written by High Tension's Grégory Levasseur, 2008).
- Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008)
Influenced: Us (Jordan Peele had Lupita Nyong'o watch it to prepare).
- They Came Back / The Revenants (Robin Campillo, 2004)
Serialized as The Revenants / The Returned (2012-2015). Other work: BPM (Beats per Minute) (Cannes Grand Prix, César Award for Best Film, 2017).
- Inside / À l'Intérieur (Julien Maury, 2007)
- Amer (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, French-Belgian, 2009)
- The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears / L'Etrange Couleur des Larmes de Ton Corps (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2013)
- Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2017)
- Let the Corpses Tan / Laissez Bronzer les Cadavres (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2017)
- Revenge (Coralie Fargeat; Matilda Lutz, 2017)
English-language films with a French pedigree: Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, and Night of the Demon; and two with Catherine Deneuve:Roman Polanski's Repulsion and Tony Scott's The Hunger.
SLICING UP EYEBALLS WITH SPANISH-LANGUAGE HORROR FROM LUIS BUÑUEL TO GUILLERMO DEL TORO AND BEYOND
Unlike the French films, many of the Spanish titles were dubbed into English, so only so many are actually in Spanish, even as the filmmakers are all native Spanish speakers, though--just to confuse the issue further--I've included made-in-English films from Spanish-speaking directors. I've also listed the mostly-free services by which I streamed some of these titles.
- Un Chien Andalou / An Andalusian Dog (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Spanish, 1929)
- Drácula (George Melford, Carlos Villarías as Conde Drácula, Cuban/American, 1931) [YouTube]
- The Body Snatchers / El Ladron de Cadaveres (Fernando Mendez, 1957)
- The Vampire / El Vampiro (Fernando Mendez, 1957)
- Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960)
- The Awful Dr. Orloff / Gritos en la Noche (Jesús Franco; Howard Vernon, Spanish, 1961)
Generally considered the first horror film produced in Spain.
- The Curse of the Crying Woman / La Maldición de la Llorona (Rafael Baledón, 1961)
- The Exterminating Angel / El Angel Exterminador (Luis Buñuel, 1962) [YouTube]
- Even the Wind Is Afraid / Hasta el Viento Tiene Miedo (Carlos Enrique Taboada, 1968)
- The Book of Stone / El Libro de Piedra (Carlos Enrique Taboada, 1969)
- The House That Screamed / La Residencia (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, Uruguayan, 1969) [Tubi]
- Night of the Bloody Apes / La Horripilante Bestia Humana (René Cardona, 1969)
- She Killed in Ecstasy / Mrs. Hyde (Jesús Franco, 1971)
- Vampyros Lesbos / Las Vampiras (Jesús Franco, 1971)
- The Blood Spattered Bride / La Novia Ensangrentada (Vicente Aranda, 1972)
- Tombs of the Blind Dead / La Noche del Terror Ciego (Amando de Ossorio, Spanish, 1972) [Vudu]
- The Corruption of Chris Miller / La Corrupción de Chris Miller (Juan Antonio Bardem [Javier Bardem's uncle], 1973)
- Count Dracula's Great Love / El Gran Amor del Conde Drácula (Javier Aguirre, 1973)
- The Holy Mountain / La Montaña Sagrada (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)
- Horror Rises from the Tomb / El Espanto Surge de la Tumba (Carlos Aured, 1973)
- El Orfanato / The Orphanage (JA Bayona, Geraldine Chaplin cameo, Spanish, 2007)
- [Rec] 2 (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2009)
Geraldine Chaplin made seven films, including Cría Cuervos (1976), with then-partner Carlos Saura--and over 30 films with Spanish-speaking filmmakers. Ana Torrent from Cría Cuervos stars in Spirit of the Beehive.
- Julia's Eyes / Los Ojos de Julia (Guillem Morales, 2010)
- Psiconautas, los Niños Olvidados / Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero, animated, Spanish, 2016)
- The Untamed / La Región Salvaje (Amat Escalante, 2016)
- We Are the Flesh / Tenemos la Carne (Emilano Rocha Minter, 2016)
- El Bar / The Bar (Álex de la Iglesia, Spanish, 2017) [Netflix]
- Veronica / Verónica (Paco Plaza, 2017)
- La Casa Lobo/ The Wolf House (Joaquin Cociña and Cristóbal León, Chilean, stop motion, 2018)
- Vuelven / Tigers Are Not Afraid (Issa López, Mexican, 2017) [Prime]
- The Platform / El Hoyo (Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, Spanish, 2019) [Netflix]
- La Llorona / The Weeping Woman (Jayro Bustamante, Guatemalan, 2019)
Note: the Spanish Civil War took place between 1936-39. Related: Francisco Franco held power between 1939-1975. A number of these films, like Spirit of the Beehive and Pan's Labyrinth, make reference to these developments.
Since I posted a list of horror westerns last year after moderating a panel at Crypticon, I figured I should probably post lists from other subgenre or country-specific panels in which I've moderated and/or participated over the years.
In every case, I put together a preliminary list before crowd-sourcing for more. I compiled this Canadian one in 2018 for a panel called Horror From Around the World. Since then, Jason Weiss and I have moderated panels on French and Spanish horror; I'll also post those lists at some point. If you see any key Canadian titles missing, please feel free to let me know.
In order by release date, plus directors and notable cast members.
1960s - 1970s
The Mask (Julian Roffman; cowriter Slavko Vorkapich, 3-D, 1961)
Cannibal Girls (Ivan Reitman, 1973)
The Pyx (Harvey Hart; Karen Black and Christopher Plummer, 1973)
Black Christmas (Bob Clark; Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, and Andrea Martin, 1974)
Ilsa; She Wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975)
Shivers (David Cronenberg, 1975)
Sudden Fury (Brian Damude, 1975)
House by the Lake/Death Weekend (William Fruet; Brenda Vaccaro, 1976)
The Haunting of Julia (Richard Loncraine; Mia Farrow, Keir Dullea, and Tom Conti, 1977)
Rabid (David Cronenberg; Marilyn Chambers, 1977)
Rituals (Peter Carter; Hal Holbrook 1977)
The Brood (David Cronenberg; Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed, 1979)
1980s - 1990s
The Changeling (Peter Medak; George C. Scott, 1980)
Prom Night (Paul Lynch; Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen, 1980)
Terror Train (Roger Spottiswoode; Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Johnson, 1981)
Happy Birthday to Me (J. Lee Thompson; Melissa Sue Anderson and Glenn Ford, 1981)
My Bloody Valentine (George Mihalka, 1981)
The Pit (Lew Lehman, 1981)
Scanners (David Cronenberg; Jennifer O'Neill and Patrick McGoohan 1981)
Curtains (Richard Ciupka and Peter R. Simpson, 1983)
Of Unknown Origin (George Pan Cosmatos, 1983)
Videodrome (David Cronenberg; James Woods and Debbie Harry, 1983)
The Fly (David Cronenberg; Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, 1986)
Pontypool (Bruce McDonald; Stephen McHattie, 2009)
Splice (Vincenzo Natali; Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, 2009)
The Wild Hunt (Alexandre Franchi, 2009)
Tucker and Dale vs Evil (Eli Craig; Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk, 2010)
American Mary (Jen and Sylvia Soska; Katherine Isabelle, 2012)
Enemy (Denis Villeneuve; Jake Gyllenhall and Sarah Gadon, 2013)
Back Country (Adam MacDonald, 2014)
Black Mountain Side (Nick Szostakiwskyj, 2014)
Pyewacket (Adam MacDonald, 2017)
What Keeps You Alive (Colin Minihan, 2018)
Thanks to all who contributed suggestions, especially my Seattle Film Critics Society colleague, Sara Michelle Fetters, who often writes about horror at Moviefreak.com. All images from the IMDb (Olivia Hussey in Black Christmas, Claudette Nevins in The Mask, and Georgina Reilly in Pontypool).
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 fromSamuel 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 on the set of Michael Gordon's Pillow Talk
The late-1950s, though, was an odd time for Sirk to leave the States, just as his work was 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 other commercially-successful directors, like 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 of 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.
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Kathy Fennessy is former president of Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
As Veirs recollects, "Once I met her, I instantly connected with her and wanted to get involved. She showed me some of her previous short films, and I liked those a lot, so I dove right into the project."
As for her fall plans: "My band the Tortured Souls and I are touring the West Coast, and then we're making our fifth record together." [The result was 2007's Saltbreakers.] Sadly for Seattleites, she intends to relocate to Portland afterward, but don't count out further collaborations between these two talented Northwesterners. 
Michael Seiwerath is NWFF's executive director, a post he took over from cofounder Jamie Hook in 2001. (Hook founded the organization with Deborah Girdwood in 1995.) 
