KING OF HOLLYWOOD MELODRAMA
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“There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can’t reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections. If you try to grasp happiness itself your fingers only meet glass. It’s hopeless.”
“If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.”
“I love the Western.”
DOUGLAS SIRK 2
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY -
THE CINEMA OF DOUGLAS SIRK
BY GEOFF MAYER
In the mid 1950s Andrew Sarris walked out of a screening of Magnificent Obsession (1954) as a way of registering his ‘aesthetic disapproval’ of Sirk’s sentimental tearjerker. A few years later Sarris became one of Sirk’s most dedicated champions and he was screening his films for film studies students at Columbia University. A few years earlier Jean-Luc Godard’s review of A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), in Cahiers du Cinema (April 1959) began the long road of rehabilitating Sirk’s reputation after many years of indifferent, even hostile, newspaper reviews. Thomas Elsaesser’s 1972 article “Tales of Sound and Fury, Observations on the Family Melodrama” intensified interest in Sirk by attracting a whole new body of supporters fascinated by the director’s formal skills – notably his use colour, mise-en-scène, composition and camera movement. Following the Elsaesser article, Sirk’s name was associated with ‘melodrama’ in Film Studies although this association represented a different perception of melodrama. Thereafter Sirk’s ‘family melodramas’ were appropriated by a host of writers, including Laura Mulvey, eager to cite a small number of Sirk’s ‘family melodramas’ as evidence of the director’s critique of mainstream American values in the 1950s. In recent years interest in Sirk has moved beyond this selective, and limited, view of the director. The real benefit of this collection of Sirk’s films is that it not only contains most of the key melodramas of the 1950s – such as Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life, it also offers less well-known, but equally important, melodramas such as There’s Always Tomorrow and All I Desire, as well the rarely-seen Tony Curtis comedy No Room for the Groom and Sirk’s favourite film, the western Taza, Son of Cochise. 3
CAREER OVERVIEW
Douglas Sirk directed his last American film, Imitation of Life, at Universal in 1958. Although the film was a great financial success, grossing over $6 million, Sirk decided he had to get out of Hollywood and, with his wife, left for the solitude of an apartment by a lake in Lugano in Switzerland. Sirk felt like a ‘divided character’ in the United States as his intellectual interests and European sensibilities did not always sit easily with Hollywood. However, this ‘clash’ between Sirk’s aesthetic interests and cultural values and Hollywood’s prevailing aesthetic and dominant values provided the basis for his great American films. He was able, more than any other director in the 1950s, to infuse and counterpoint familiar stories and representations with undercurrent’s of unease, despair and, at times, irony. Sirk’s happiest period in America was in the period from 1940 to 1942 when he was unemployed. After his contract was terminated by Warner Brothers he purchased a small chicken farm in the San Fernando Valley with his last thousand dollars. He eventually sold the chicken farm and moved with his wife to Pomona County and grew avocadoes and raised a few cattle – not very successfully. During this period Sirk was dependent on the charity of a nearby farmer who sent over two sons for nearly a year to assist in running the farm. This generous act may have influenced the director as his films are not hostile to everyday Americans. While he might point to the factors that constrain and limit their lives, he is a sympathetic observer. Douglas Sirk was born Hans Detlef Sierck in Hamburg and although there is some conjecture as to his actual birth date, most studies list it as 1900. However, the second edition of Jon Halliday’s book, Sirk on Sirk, suggests that he was born in 1897 in Germany to Danish parents although he grew up in Denmark where his father was a newspaperman. In 1919 Sirk enrolled at Munich University. Later he moved to universities in Jena and Hamburg where philosophy and art 4
history became his major interests. To help pay for his education Sirk worked as a journalist. It was during this period that Sirk began painting while pursuing another passion, the theatre, and he obtained a minor position at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, one of the city’s most prestigious theatres. In 1922, after a director at the theatre became ill, Sirk produced his first play. When the play became a major critical and commercial success, his career as a theatre director was assured and he remained a theatre director for the next fifteen years in Hamburg, Chemnitz, Bremen and Leipzig. In 1923, while moving from Chemnitz to Bremen, Sirk stopped off in Berlin where he accepted a short-term position in the film industry as a set designer. Later, a few weeks before Hitler came to power, Sirk was approached for the top position at the Staatstheater in Berlin but the Nazis opposed this appointment as Sirk’s second wife, Hilde Jary, was Jewish. While staging a play in Berlin in 1934 Sirk was approached by producers from Ufa, a film studio that was not aware of his earlier problems with the Nazis. After three short films, he directed his first feature film in 1935, and in the next two years he directed eight films for Ufa. However, Sirk was finding life in Germany unpleasant and when he obtained a passport to ostensibly scout for locations in Rome for a new film, he joined his wife, who had left for Rome a few weeks earlier. Suspicious that he may not return to Germany, a producer and two German police officers visited Sirk in Rome and he had to feign an illness to prevent them taking him back to Germany. After they left, Sirk wrote a letter denouncing the Nazis and, with his wife, took a plane to Zurich. However, Lydia Brinken, his first wife, denounced Sirk’s relationship with Jary and he never saw his son Claus again. Claus later died fighting for Germany on the Russian Front during the Second World War. Sirk and his wife left Germany with virtually no money and they went into hiding in Paris. After a number of abortive projects they left for Holland where he directed one feature film, Boefje (1939). While working on Boefje Sirk received a telegram from Warner’s inviting him to direct an American version of his 1937 German film, Zu Neuen Ufern. Sirk rewrote the film in Hollywood but Warner’s decided not to make it and terminated his contract. Although he accepted a contract to write screenplays for Columbia, his first American film emerged form the desire of a group of 5
German émigrés to make an anti-Nazi film. Sirk directed Hitler’s Madman in 1942, an extremely low budget independent film that condemned the actions of German General Heydrich who slaughtered the male inhabitants of the village of Lidice before his assassination. Sirk, who had met Heydrich in Germany, only had one week for filming although Louis B. Mayer, who liked the film, gave Sirk extra time to shoot additional scenes after MGM purchased the rights. Between 1944 and 1948 Sirk consolidated his position in Hollywood with four films released through United Artists – Summer Storm (1944), an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s novel The Shooting Party starring George Sanders and Linda Darnell; A Scandal in Paris (1945), starring George Sanders and the turn-of-the-century mystery Lured (1946) starring Lucille Ball and, again, George Sanders who became a lifelong friend to the director; Sleep, My Love (1947), a story similar to Gaslight with Don Ameche as the husband who tries to drive his wife, Claudette Colbert, insane. After three more films, including the underrated noir film Shockproof (1948), Sirk became disenchanted with Harry Cohn, the autocratic head of Columbia, especially after Columbia softened Shockproof’s tough ending, and he returned to Germany in 194950. However, his homecoming did not last long: he discovered the German film industry was in a terrible condition and he soon returned to Hollywood. After one more independent film, The First Legion (1950), starring Charles Boyer, Sirk was offered a seven-year contract with Universal, the studio where he would establish his reputation in the 1950s. In the early 1950s Sirk became a house director at Universal directing various genres including the comedy-musical Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1951), which was his first colour feature and starred Charles Coburn, Piper Laurie and Rock Hudson, the western Taza, Son of Cochise as well as the Sign of the Pagans (1954) starring Jeff Chandler as Marciannus and Jack Palance as Attila the Hun. In 1951 Sirk noticed Hudson in a supporting role in the boxing film Iron Man (1951) and after testing him a number of times, selected him for stardom. Although the director realised that Hudson was a limited actor, especially in the early 1950s, he detected something which, he argued, was largely hidden from the human eye and could only be fully detected by the camera. 6
MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION
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A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE
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Sirk would work with Rock Hudson in eight films: Has Anybody Seen My Gal?; Taza, Son of Cochise (1953); Magnificent Obsession (1953); Captain Lightfoot (1954); All That Heaven Allows (1955); Written on the Wind (1956); Battle Hymn (1956) and The Tarnished Angels (1957). Three of these films, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels are among the best American films produced during the studio period. A fourth, Magnificent Obsession (1954), was a huge commercial success for Universal and elevated Hudson to film stardom and consolidated Sirk’s position at Universal. Universal in the late 1940s and early 1950s was basically the home of medium to low budget westerns, action films, crime melodramas, Abbott and Costello comedies, such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), and series films such as Francis the Talking Mule (1950) and Ma and Pa Kettle (1949). Plus the long running series of Audie Murphy westerns. However, the commercial success of Magnificent Obsession, together with the Anthony Mann directed films starring James Stewart, encouraged the studio to produce more big budget films while maintaining their roster of low and medium budget genre films.
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SIRK’S ‘MELODRAMAS’
Sirk’s well-known ‘melodramas’ – such as Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, There’s Always Tomorrow and Imitation of Life – are not traditional melodrama in the sense that this term is applied to both theatre and film. Film melodrama, as a dramatic form, evolved largely from the ‘sensational’ theatre that was so popular in the last decade of the nineteenth century and it became the basis of the serials that dominated the cinema until 1919. Action and spectacle characterised melodrama which was predicated on polarised presentations of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and a clear cut resolutions where virtue triumphs over villainy after prolonged suffering where virtue is persecuted. Sirk was fully aware of the potential and appeal of melodrama but he was not interested in reprising the ideological and formulaic structure of traditional ‘blood and thunder melodrama’. His 1950s films, such as Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life, emerged out of a special sub-mode known as ‘modified melodramas’ which eschewed the action and spectacle of sensational melodrama for the joys of pathos and emotional entanglements, often within a domestic setting. Sirk extended the form by focusing on a more problematic world. Instead of perpetuating a clear dichotomy between the black and white world of ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ Sirk was more interested in those gray areas between the extremes of the moral spectrum. This is evident even in his western, Taza, Son of Cochise, together with films such as There’s Always Tomorrow and All I Desire where the drama is internalised rather than melodrama’s traditional externalisation of the drama.
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NO ROOM FOR THE GROOM
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ALL I DESIRE
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THE CRITICAL REPUTATION OF DOUGLAS SIRK
After The Tarnished Angels was released in the United States in January 1958, following its release in Britain in December 1957, Bosley Crowther, the long-time New York Times film critic, wrote: Mr. Faulkner’s jaded story does have some flavor of the old barnstorming tours of the early air-circus fliers, but there is precious little of it in this film, which was badly, cheaply written by George Zuckerman and is abominably played by a hand-picked cast. The sentiments are inflated – blown out of all proportions to the values involved. And the acting, under Douglas Sirk’s direction, is elaborate and absurd … When [Rock Hudson] returns to the office in New Orleans and tells his editor what has happened – what an awful tragic thing has occurred to some beautiful, poetic people – the bulging picture bursts at its seams. The hot air pours from it in loud hisses, and collapses like the empty thing it is. Unfortunately, this is typical of the criticism that Sirk endured for much of his time in Hollywood.
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THE FILMS IN THIS COLLECTION
NO ROOM FOR THE GROOM (1952)
In the early 1950s Universal starred contract players Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie in a series of genre films, such as the Arabian nights films The Prince Who Was a Thief (1951) and Son of Ali Baba (1952), the racing car melodrama Johnny Dark (1954) and the Douglas Sirk comedy No Room for the Groom. Piper Laurie also starred opposite Rock Hudson and Charles Coburn in Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952), Sirk’s first colour film and his first film with Rock Hudson. No Room for the Groom differs from the rosy, nostalgic tone of Has Anybody Seen My Gal? as it is one of Sirk’s more strident films. It is a neurotic comedy where the director, uncharacteristically, withholds sympathy from his principal characters. The humour, at least in the first half, emanates from a series of seemingly cruel obstacles which prevent newlywed couple Alvah Morrell (Tony Curtis) and Lee Kingsmead (Piper Laurie) from consummating their marriage. Californian vineyard grower Morrell weds Lee during the Second World War in Las Vegas but, following a bout of chicken pox, is shipped overseas for ten months. Returning home on a month’s leave he discovers that Lee has not told her mother, Mama Kingsmead (Spring Byington), that they are married as Mama wanted Lee to marry wealthy cement plant owner Herman Stroupe (Don DeFore). Stroupe, however, not only covets Lee but also Alvah’s vineyard as he wants to construct a road through his vines. Sirk transforms this material into a critique of American life that, in his later films, was treated in a more problematic manner where the formal elements replaced the more literal presentation of this film. This strident quality is reinforced by the casting of Spring Byington against type as the vicious, scheming Mama Kingsmead. Instead of her usual sweet, slightly confused persona, in films such as Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Byington is a monstrous matriarch with no redeeming qualities. 14
Sirk, in a mid-1970s interview with Michael Stern, indicated he ‘was pleasantly surprised after recently viewing the film: “It still seems sharp to me. It never becomes doctrinaire. It never preaches values. It is always dissolving itself into funny situations”. When Tony Curtis complained that he was just the clown in the film Sirk told him “you are the whole antithesis of the picture…You have to fight against everything, the whole establishment. You are all the values in the film. And he was very good.” Sirk was, in the anti-Communist climate of the early 1950s, questioned by the FBI with regard to the film’s attitude towards the benefits, or otherwise, of American corporations. ALL I DESIRE (1953)
Based on Carol Brink’s novel Stopover, the film starred Barbara Stanwyck as Naomi Murdoch, a mother who left her family ten years earlier for a career on the stage. With a faltering career, Murdock decides to visit her estranged family, consisting of husband Henry (Richard Carlson), daughters Joyce (Marcia Henderson) and Lily (Lori Nelson) and young son Russ (Billy Gray). While Naomi initially left her family to escape the constraints of small-town life, and an affair with local businessman Dutch Heinemann (Lyle Bettger), she returns to find nothing substantially has changed. Yet, as Sirk shows when Naomi watches her family from the distance of an outside window, her desire for integration within the family overpowers her realisation that this desire is, ultimately, a fantasy – as she soon discovers when she enters the home. While Brink’s novel ends with her leaving the family once again, an ending which Sirk initially wanted to retain, producer Ross Hunter demanded a more uplifting finale. Once Sirk accepted the positive ending, he reworked the film so that Naomi’s decision to stay is rendered plausible without removing all of the reasons why she left in the first place.
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TAZA, SON OF COCHISE
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TAZA, SON OF COCHISE (1954)
In The Western, Phil Hardy describes this film as perhaps “the oddest of the cycle of Indian films of the fifties’. Hardy notes that the film’s narrative was attacked as ‘hopelessly compromised’ while critics savaged Rock Hudson’s performance. The film concerns Taza’s attempts to fulfill the dreams of Cochise, his dying father, who strove for peaceful co-existence with the US Cavalry and the white settlers. The futility of this dream, however, is exposed by the Cavalry’s insistence that Taza’s Chiricahua Apaches relocate to a harsh reservation. On the other hand, as Hardy notes, the film was celebrated in France for its lyrical, poetic imagery and its sympathetic presentation of Indian life. Taza, Son of Cochise belonged to a series of pro-Indian films produced in Hollywood in the early 1950s. This cycle included Broken Arrow (1950), Anthony Mann’s Devil’s Doorway (1950), The Savage (1952), Sitting Bull (1954) and Apache (1954). Undoubtedly, from the critical perspective of sixty years later, the film is weakened by the casting of Hudson as a Native American. Nevertheless, it is a film of startling beauty with some of Sirk’s most poetic imagery – beginning with the opening image of an Apache filmed amidst the dramatic beauty of Arches National Monument Park. The entire film was filmed in the national park and nearby Moab. While the ideological basis of the story was compromised, the film was consistent with the tentative criticism of white imperialism that was in vogue in Hollywood in the early 1950s although most of these films tried, unconvincingly, to present some form of reconciliation at the closure. Based on Taza’s misguided belief that his tribe can retain its dignity by acting as a force able to police Indian disturbances without the interference of the Cavalry or white law, he is subjected to a series of humiliations, including the film’s climax where he is forced to fight elements of his own tribe - including Gray Eagle (Morris Ankrum), the father of Taza’s sweetheart Oona (Barbara Rush), Taza’s brother Naiche (Bart Roberts who was also known as Rex Reason) and Geronimo (Ian MacDonald). The film was originally released in 3-D but Sirk found this process more of a hindrance than a help. Jeff Chandler has one brief scene in the film as Cochise and he appeared unbilled although he was one of Universal’s major stars in the 1950s. Chandler initially refused the role as he portrayed Cochise in the earlier westerns, Broken Arrow and The Battle of Apache Pass (1952). 17
MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION (1954)
This was Sirk’s first large budget film and the film which transformed Rock Hudson into a major star. The project was initiated by actress Jane Wyman who took the idea for a remake of John Stahl’s 1935 film which starred Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor. Sirk’s initial reaction when offered the project was deep depression as, after trying to read Lloyd C. Douglas’ book, he felt that he would be “buried under this thing”. However, after reading a treatment of the story he became interested in its irrational quality although it was, in his words, “a damned crazy story”. Once he committed to the project, Sirk embraced its madness and it is one of the director’s most stylised achievements. As a university student Sirk began a lifelong interest in painting. Combined with his studies in art history, Sirk draws upon this knowledge to redeem Douglas’ risible story. He jettisons any sense of naturalism and employs a battery of formal elements to move beyond its literal story to portray the emotions of his characters. This is not, however, a subversive film as Sirk fully embraces the inherent ‘madness’ of the story while trying to penetrate the film’s surface via lighting, composition, colour and music to portray the underlying moral occult, the real basis of the drama. Hence when Helen Phillips, blind due to an accident caused by Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson), receives disappointing news concerning the possibility of restoring her sight, the film withdraws from the brightly lit room of the specialists to a darkened drawing room where Helen tells her stepdaughter Joyce (Barbara Rush) that the “night is the worst time”. Although there is no logical explanation for this shift into darkness, there is an emotional basis for the change. Magnificent Obsession is a key Sirk film and a corrective to those wishing to generalise about Sirk’s subversive, detached approach. Although he was always aware of the sentimental, often irrational basis of his stories, he embraced his characters, not despised them.
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ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (1955)
ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS
Following the commercial success of Magnificent Obsession, Universal were eager to re-team Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson and Sirk. All That Heaven Allows is a superior film to Magnificent Obsession as Sirk was presented with a logical, coherent script. To this story he deployed his usual skill involving colour and composition to reiterate the film’s dominant theme involving female powerlessness. This theme is articulated by Cary’s daughter when she describes the ancient Egyptian practice of consigning the wives to the tomb of their husbands. Hence Sirk transforms Cary’s house into her tomb that is made complete by the delivery of a television set. Sirk’s desire for a more problematic ending was thwarted by producer Ross Hunter and, once again, having accepted this decision Sirk embraced it so excessively that, in effect, he threatens the whole premise of the ending. While Cary is re-united with Ron, her desire for a virile male is neutralised by his injuries and she, once again, is relegated to the traditional feminine role of carer. 19
THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW
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THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW (1956)
An endearing aspect of There’s Always Tomorrow concerns the casting of the two main characters - Barbara Stanwyck as Norma Miller and Fred MacMurray as Cliff Groves. Audiences attending this film in 1956 would have been aware that Stanwyck and MacMurray had co-starred in a number of films in the past – from the Preston Sturges scripted sentimental romance Remember the Night in 1940, to their most famous film, the tough film noir Double Indemnity (1944), followed by the western The Moonlighter in 1953. Hence when vivacious, worldly Norma Miller re-enters the life of jaded businessmen Cliff Groves after an absence of many years, audiences may well have readily accepted the logic of Groves’ decision to leave his family. Sirk appears well aware of their onscreen relationship that is reinforced by the film’s repetitive use of “Blue Moon”. These aspects combine to suggest lost opportunities while reiterating the impossibility of recapturing the past. Hence cinematographer Russell Metty transforms Cliff ’s otherwise ordinary house into, in Cliff ’s words, ‘a tomb of his own making’. An intriguing, largely unexplained, aspect of There’s Always Tomorrow concerns Norma motivation in re-entering Cliff ’s life. As Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, Stanwyck seduces Fred MacMurray into killing her husband. In There’s Always Tomorrow she tells Cliff that she didn’t mean for him to fall in love with her – but this appears not to be the total truth. Sirk later admitted that the film was affected by an unfinished thought in All I Desire where Stanwyck, in a similar role, returns to a world of domesticity after abandoning it earlier in her life. While Sirk considered the film a failure, and he regretted the fact it was not made in colour, There’s Always Tomorrow is one of the most powerful critiques of American middle class family life in the 1950s. While Cliff ’s barren life is equated with that of Rex the Robot, a new toy manufactured in Cliff ’s factory, Sirk’s critique is tempered by compassion for his characters as he fully understands the causes of their plight and he sympathises with their torment.
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THE TARNISHED ANGELS (1958)
The Tarnished Angels, based on William Faulkner’s novel Pylon, is Sirk’s most pessimistic, fatalistic American film and his clearest expression of how social and economic forces restrict the free will of the individual. The 1930s Depression also motivates the film’s tendency towards the baroque imagery and foregrounds the sense of fatalism that pervades this, and other films. The Tarnished Angels, based on a different plot and different setting, represents a variation on his 1956 film Written on the Wind. Both films are concerned with tormented masculinity, sexual repression and vulnerable characters suffering amidst corrupt social institutions. This parallel is reinforced by the casting of Robert Stack, Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone. Stack, particular, is brilliant as the doomed flier, a character similar to his tragic figure in Written on the Wind. The film is set in New Orleans in 1932 during the midst of the Great Depression. Although Sirk rarely addresses the effects of the Depression, it permeates the film and provides the motivation for key moments in the drama. The plot concerns pilot Roger Schumann (Robert Stack), a hero of World War 1, who lives only to fly. He ekes out a living for himself and his wife LaVerne (Dorothy Malone) by racing around the pylons at air shows throughout the United States and Canada. Away from his plane Schumann can barely exist and his relationship with his son and wife is tentative at best. LaVerne supports the family with her own act, a risqué parachute jump in a flowing white dress. The humiliation this brings to all concerned is paralleled by his request that she do whatever possible to convince a crass businessman, Matt Ord (Robert Middleton), to lend Schumann a broken down plane after his own plane is damaged in a race. Rock Hudson has one of his best roles as journalist Burke Devlin and the film gave Hudson a rare opportunity to display a range of emotions – from love to vulnerability to anguish. In most of his earlier films for Sirk, especially All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, Hudson’s function was merely to project a sense of emotional stability amidst great instability. In The Tarnished Angels Hudson’s world disintegrates as the film proceeds. 22
In fact, there are no stable positions and no stable characters in the film. Everybody is denied what they desire – except, perhaps, Roger Schumann. Unlike the sumptuous colour schemes in films such as Taza, Son of Cochise, Magnificent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows, The Tarnished Angels was filmed in black and white as the studio did not have much faith in its commercial potential. Sirk even claimed that screenwriter George Zuckerman was only able to interest Universal producer Albert Zugsmith in the film because of the scene involving Dorothy Malone’s parachute jump in a long white dress which exposed the actress’s shapely figure – a scene which Sirk had to convince Malone to participate in. Despite Bosley Crowther’s criticism of the acting, The Tarnished Angels offers the viewer the pleasure of watching Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone and Robert Stack at the top of their form. This is especially true of Robert Stack, an underrated actor who never achieved top-flight stardom. As the World War 1 hero unable to adjust to domestic life, he is riddled with guilt and inner turmoil. He is torn between his vocation, an overpowering psychological need to fly around the pylons, and a domestic world in which he cannot cope. Stack’s ‘dividedness’ is compounded by the suggestion that his son Jack may have been fathered by Roger’s loyal mechanic Jiggs ( Jack Carson), a motif that is raised in the film’s opening scene and continues until the final moments. The Tarnished Angels is not a typical Hollywood melodrama. It does not leave the viewer with any sense that the world is morally just. Instead, as Sirk explained to Jon Halliday: I am not interested in failure in the sense given it by the neo-romantics who advocated the beauty of failure. It is rather the failure which invades you without rhyme or reason …. In both Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels it is an ugly kind of failure, a completely hopeless one… the concept of échec is so good: there is no exit. 23
A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE (1958)
THE TARNISHED ANGELS
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In 1929 Sirk divorced his first wife and married a Jewish woman, Hilde Jary. After Hitler came to power in Germany his first wife, Lydia Brinken, denounced Sirk’s relationship with Jary and Brinken obtained a court order barring Sirk from contact with his eight year-old son Claus. Brinken encouraged Claus to support Hitler’s Youth Movement and he starred in films promoting the Movement. After fleeing Germany with Jary, Sirk never saw his son again. After the war Sirk returned to Germany and searched for Claus who had been sent to the Russian Front towards the end of the war and was subsequently reported as missing in action. Sirk asked interviewers not to report these events during his lifetime. However, it is clear that A Time to Love and a Time to Die was shaped by some of these events and his contempt for Germany during this
period. He told Halliday that he liked Erich Maria Remarque’s story involving a “landscape of ruins and two lovers. But again, a strange kind of love story, a love conditioned. Two people are not allowed to have their love. The murderous breath of circumstances prevents them. They are hounded from ruin to ruin.” He also included a scene showing young German boys leaving for the Russian Front and one can’t help but speculate that this scene was very personal as he noted that “I put a lot of myself into the love part of the picture. It is a story very close to my concerns, especially the brevity of happiness.” A Time to Love and a Time to Die was poorly received in Germany and Sirk claimed that the film was banned in Israel. This puzzled the director and he was criticised for not making the film more explicitly anti-Nazi. However, he wanted to eliminate even more of the anti-Nazi material because “less is very often stronger than more. But I didn’t have a free hand.” IMITATION OF LIFE (1959)
Imitation of Life was Sirk’s final feature film. It was also Sirk’s most commercially successful film and a fitting end to his Hollywood career. In many ways Imitation of Life is a formal companion to Magnificent Obsession. Both are based on dated, sentimental stories that Sirk was able to redeem mainly though his skilful use of light, contrast, colour and textures that transformed the prosaic plot into one of the peak achievements of the studio system. Adapted from Fanny Hurst’s 1933 novel, which was previously filmed by John Stahl in 1934. Sirk made no attempt to render the material in a naturalistic manner. His presentation of a divided world is largely achieved through the use of windows, balustrades and screens. Also he confronts, rather than denies, the story’s contrivances and use of coincidence while skillfully exploiting the dramatic effect of interruption in many scenes where desire is constantly frustrated.
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Sirk explained to Jon Halliday that he “tried to make it into a picture of social consciousness – not only of a white social consciousness but of a Negro one too. Both black and white are leading imitated lives.” Its subject matter attracted the attention of the Production Code, an industry based censorship system formulated in 1930 and tightened in 1934. While the ostensible focus of the Production Code Administration was on representations of sex and nudity, it often intruded upon representations of social issues such as race and miscegenation. In Sirk’s film this includes the vicious beating of Sarah Jane Johnson (Susan Kohner) by Frankie (Troy Donohue) after he discovers that Sarah Jane is the daughter of a black woman. Imitation of Life concludes with a funeral. Sirk explained that this was his intention: “In Imitation of Life, you don’t believe the happy end, and you’re not really supposed to. What remains in your memory is the funeral. You sense it’s hopeless.” When Jon Halliday told the director that this sequence looks like his farewell to Hollywood, Sirk did not deny this interpretation and admitted that in “my mind I guess I was leaving Hollywood, yes, even before I made the picture. I had enough. I most likely would have left even if illness hadn’t coincided.” Sirk’s departure at the peak of his success puzzled the studio as was not the typical career move in Hollywood. Yet for Sirk it was typical. It was also appropriate, that Sirk ended his career with the funeral, as Tag Gallagher remembers when he first saw the film in 1959 in Philadelphia at the age of 16: “we came out afterwards, most of us were crying. The theatre owner’s wife was standing in the lobby with a box of Kleenex. Many gratefully took a tissue to dry their eyes. This is what Sirk wanted. The critics had barfed all over the film, hating it as a ‘soap opera’ for the same reasons Sirk, and we, loved it.”
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IMITATION OF LIFE
TEXTS CITED 1. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’ reprinted in Christine Gledhill, ed., Home is Where the Heart Is. London, British Film Institute, 1987. 2. Tag Gallagher, ‘White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk’ in Senses of Cinema, 2005.
3. Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk. London, Secker and Warburg, 1971.
4. Phil Hardy, The Western. The Aurum Film Encyclopedia. London, Aurum Press, 1983.
5. Michael Stern, ‘Two Weeks in Another Town. Interview with Douglas Sirk’ in Bright Lights Film Journal, 1977.
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