Douglas Sirk: the Director Who Loved His Characters : Movies. Overripe and overwrought, his films have divided critics for years. Four of his most memorable are being screened at the Nuart.
Given the type of films he became famous for, Douglas Sirk, the master of heedless melodrama, is not a director you’d expect to be controversial. His series of sleek “women’s picturesâ€--unabashed weepies like “Written on the Wind†and “Imitation of Lifeâ€--were enormous popular successes in the 1950s but have divided critics in the years since.
While no one questions that John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, et al were great directors, it is still possible (though it’s getting harder) to get into an argument about Sirk. Champions such as critic Andrew Sarris rhapsodized about Sirk’s “formal excellence and visual wit,†but Pauline Kael, Sarris’ opposite number on many occasions, claimed the director had no more than “a talent for whipping up sour, stylized soap operas in posh settings.â€
Although Sirk screenings in theaters are rare, the Nuart in West Los Angeles is devoting a week starting today to a kind of crash course in Sirkiana. Four of the director’s best-known 1950s films will be shown (1954’s “Magnificent Obsession,†1956’s “Written on the Wind,†1958’s “The Tarnished Angels†and 1959’s “Imitation of Lifeâ€), and those with the fortitude to see them all will have ample material to make up their minds.
The series starts tonight and Saturday with “Written on the Wind,†which plays like “Giant†on amphetamines. It’s one of Sirk’s films that got multiple Oscar nominations, including best supporting actress for Dorothy Malone (she won in this her 39th film over 14 years) and best supporting actor for Robert Stack (who lost to Anthony Quinn in “Lust for Lifeâ€).
Stack plays Kyle Hadley, of the Texas oil Hadleys, a feckless millionaire who’s capable of flying to New York for a steak sandwich or Miami for a swim, and this in the days before every Silicon Valley parvenu had his own plane. Kyle’s usual companion is the very down-to-earth Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson, Sirk’s John Wayne), a friend since childhood of whom everyone says, “The kind of assets he’s got you can’t buy at Macy’s.â€
What could come between these two pals except two women. Both men fall in love with sophisticated Manhattan executive secretary Lucy Hadley (Lauren Bacall, looking a bit lost), and both have to cope with the shenanigans of Kyle’s sister, Marylee Hadley (Malone), a party girl who compensates for her unrequited love of Mitch by living it up with every man in town. It’s that kind of a movie.
Very much in the same vein is “Imitation of Life†(screening Sunday and Monday), which for a time was the most successful film Universal ever made, even though contemporary critics lambasted it as “about the wettest wallow in cheap sentiment that Hollywood has sent us for years†and “an almost unbelievably ridiculous film.â€
Taken from the Fannie Hurst novel that had been previously filmed in 1934 starring Claudette Colbert, “Imitation†follows two women whose relationship with their daughters leaves a great deal to be desired. Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) is so hell-bent on being a successful actress that she neglects both nice-guy boyfriend Steve Archer (John Gavin) and the daughter who grows up to be Sandra Dee.
Lora’s black maid Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) has it even worse: Her truculent, light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner, Oscar-nominated as was Moore), is determined to pass for white, and the agonies she suffers in a race-conscious America cause some critics to view this as Sirk’s subversive and pessimistic attack on the self-satisfied ethos of the 1950s.
In Black-and-White, and CinemaScope
Closing out the Sirk series on Tuesday through Thursday of next week is the fascinating Rock Hudson-starring double bill of “The Tarnished Angels†and “Magnificent Obsession.â€
“Angels†is adapted from “Pylon,†a novel the film’s trailer insists is “William Faulkner’s most shocking love story.†It’s the only one of the four films to be shot in black-and-white (albeit in CinemaScope), and the only one not to have aspects of “Lives of the Rich and Famous†in its makeup.
“Angels†reunites the trio of Stack, Malone and Hudson from “Written on the Wind,†though poverty, not wealth, is now their common ground. Stack plays Roger Shumann, a World War I ace trying to re-create his glory days as a racing pilot, Malone his sexy, parachute-jumping wife Laverne, and Hudson the hard-living New Orleans reporter who gets obsessed with their risky lives. This is an example of Sirkian realism, which means that although Shumann has a noticeable hole in his shirt, it’s a very small and neat one.
With “Magnificent Obsession,†based on the book by Lloyd C. Douglas, it’s back to wallowing in soapy water with a plot so outrageous that even Sirk told critic Jon Halliday, in the fascinating book-length interview published as “Sirk on Sirk,†“this is a damned crazy story if ever there was one.â€
(Like “Imitation of Life,†“Magnificent Obsession†had been previously filmed in the 1930s by director John Stah.)
It’s Hudson again as arrogant playboy Bob Merrick, “a stupid, spoiled darn fool†in everyone’s estimation. In short order, Merrick is a contributing factor in the death of saintly surgeon Dr. Wayne Phillips, falls in love with the doctor’s widow, Helen (Jane Wyman), and then precipitates an accident that leads Helen to go blind. Soon Merrick is back in medical school, saying “remove the dressing†like he was ordering Thanksgiving dinner, reestablishing contact with Helen and . . . this is one you should experience for yourself.
Taken as a whole, these 1950s Sirks are clearly overripe and excessive in a way that must be seen to be disbelieved. Not helping is their common tendency to have billboard dialogue, with characters routinely saying things like: “I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been in my whole sorry life,†“I’ll have you, marriage or no marriage,†and “Let’s clear out of this stinking burg.â€
‘The Tenderest Films I Know’
The remarkable thing about these films, however, is that Sirk took them completely seriously, not only in putting his meticulous craftsmanship at their service, but in investing himself wholeheartedly in these people and their problems. Said German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a major Sirk advocate whose “Ali, or Fear Eats the Soul†is a beautiful remake of another Sirk-Hudson-Wyman collaboration, “All That Heaven Allowsâ€: “Sirk has made the tenderest films I know; they are the films of someone who loves people, and doesn’t despise them as we do.â€
As to all that outsize melodrama, Sirk advocates feel it’s so over the top it meets reality going the other way. “The essence of Sirkian cinema is the direct confrontation of all material, however fanciful and improbable,†wrote Sarris. “Even in his most dubious projects, Sirk never shrinks away from the ridiculous.â€
Even Kael seemed to understand this. “It’s the kind of bad movie you know is bad,†she wrote of “Tarnished Angels,†“and yet you’re held by the mixture of polished style and quasi-melodramatics achieved by the director.â€
If you can think about Douglas Sirk that way, you might even respect yourself in the morning.
* Douglas Sirk retrospective. Today through Thursday at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 478-6379.
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