Sexual frustrations! Unstable, wealthy, oil-baron alcoholics! Nymphomaniacs!

Please excuse my tawdry opening line, but I didn’t want to “bury the lead,” as they say. Of course, there is a difference between sensationalism and melodrama, but there is also an overlap between these two domains. What led me here? I had an epiphany the other day. Instead of writing about the films I’ve just screened in my backyard (ie: Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday), I’m going to write about films I’m about to watch at my outdoor cinema (ie: Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind). By doing this I can share information with my local friends and neighbors that will, hopefully, stoke their interest and contribute to the between-reel conversation. Readers of this blog can, natch, pick up the baton if they so choose and join along – most of the 16mm films I screen are available in various formats, so they are easy to watch at home.

First up, a cheat-sheet on the director.

Douglas Sirk

His work would have a huge influence on Todd Haynes and John Waters, two edgy and gay directors who are no strangers to approaching the business as outsiders and utilizing their talents to work subversive wonders. Of course, Douglas Sirk was of a very different era and if he had a hard time with Hollywood pool party nudity, I can’t help but wonder how he’d react to seeing some of the early work by either Haynes or Waters – heart attack? Anyway, he was born Claus Detlev Sirk on April 26, 1900 in Skagen, Denmark or in Hamburg to Danish parents (depending on your source). He died on January 14th, 1987. He Germanized his name as a youth to Detlef Hans Sierck when it was expedient to his career as a stage producer and director. But then came trouble, as Ephraim Katz notes in The Film Encyclopedia:

“A leftist in political orientation, he came under increasing pressure from the authorities after the Nazi rise to power and as a result decided in 1934 to switch to films, an industry that because of its international market was less subjected to rigorous control by the Nazi regime than was the theater.”

Working within the German film industry he did some shorts, then features, built up a solid reputation, and then left Germany in 1937 with his second (and Jewish) wife to avoid that whole Nazi nastiness. They traveled to various countries before landing in Hollywood, where he was unknown and he had to rebuild his career again. What with the whole World War II thing, his Germanic name was now a hindrance so he cast it aside and settled for Douglas Sirk.

The interesting thing here is that you have a top-notch director who was top of his class suddenly reduced to taking scraps at the table, and as Katz notes: “He was often forced to contend with ridiculous scripts, ranging in genre from thrillers to maudlin soap operas. That he managed to overcome the handicap and end up with a good number of thoroughly enjoyable films is a tribute to his personal taste and the formal excellence of his visual style.”

Influences, the end of the line, and a post-career boost thanks to various cheerleaders.

Le Malade imaginaire, by Daumier.

Louis d'Orléans dévoilant une maîtresse - Eugène Delacroix

Sirk brought elegance, style, and culture to his work. “His cinema technique was influenced by his interest in painting, particularly the works of Honoré Daumier (1808 – 1879) and Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798 – 1863), which he later claimed left ‘their imprint on the visual style of my melodramas.’ ” (IMDB, Jon C. Hopwood.) On the stage front Bertolt Brecht also comes to mind, albeit not as passionately.

Sirk’s first American film was shot in 1943, but it’s not until the 1950′s that he really got cooking while working at Universal International. Not caring for Hollywood and the excessive lifestyles of its producers or other citizens, Sirk decided to leave the country on a high note in 1959, with his biggest success under his belt: a remake of Imitation of Life starring Lana Turner. Although Sirk got some gushing attention that same year from Jean-Luc Godard for A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), it wasn’t until the late sixties that various key film critics became huge Sirk fans and helped brand Douglas Sirk’s name into the film history books, thanks in no small part to the “auteur” theory.

Written On the Wind

Written on the Wind

Shot in bright Technicolor and released in 1956, this award-winning film was a huge commercial success but it wasn’t popular with everybody – some critics found it ludicrous and lambasted it as a silly melodrama. True some of the dialogue isn’t exactly Shakespeare (“Your daughter’s a tramp!”), but it has nice zingers (“Are you looking for laughs? Or are you soul-searching?”). And although the film stars Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall, Sirk does something surprising here by giving the juicy bits to Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone (Stack was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, Malone won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress). Here’s a TCM excerpt by Mark Frankel on the film:

The film’s style is excessive in every way, from the garish lighting to the blaring music. The whole film is a flashback, and by showing the viewer Stack’s violent death at the beginning, we are assured that any happiness that Stack’s character may find is only temporary. According to Sirk: “Almost throughout the picture I used deep focus lenses which have the effect of giving a harshness to the objects and a kind of enameled, hard surface to the colors. I wanted to bring out the inner violence, the energy of the characters which is all inside them and can’t break through.” Stack and Malone’s characters dream of going “back to the river,” but even this bit of nostalgia seems pathetic because there is no escaping the true source of their sickness. As Sirk himself noted, “they can’t go back, they can’t return.” And so they set themselves on a course of self-destruction.

(For the full article: http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=138983 )

It’s easy to see how the excessive style might have ruffled some feathers. After all, mocking your impotent character with a background of gushing and phallic oil wells might be considered garish. But, hopefully, understanding the intelligence behind the camera will dispel any head-slapping urge and give way to both appreciation and pleasure.