When a popular artist finally gains critical acclaim it’s tough to decide who to cheer for first: the artist now justly recognized or the critics who have finally smartened up. Such is the case with director Douglas Sirk, whose career is being exhaustively profiled in Cinematheque Ontario’s “Masters of Melodrama”—along with a mini-retrospective of his most enthusiastic disciple, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Sirk was critically derided during the 1950’s as a mere purveyor of lushly mounted “women’s pictures” with paperback-profound titles like Imitation of Life or All That Heaven Allows or Written on the Wind. Over the last couple of decades, though, his oeuvre has been reevaluated by the critical-academic community and is now more highly regarded than that of most of his “serious” Hollywood contemporaries. What’s happened is that they have caught up to a public that was in Sirk’s corner all along: All his films are stupendously watchable; they made money—many were hits—and he was probably able to get more profundity and style on the screen through the side door than somebody like Orson Welles was ever allowed to shovel in up front.
But it’s not hard to see why a serious-minded Eisenhower-era critic raised on a diet of East of Eden and On the Waterfront might find Douglas Sirk a bit difficult to digest. Consider the storyline from Magnificent Obsession: Mr. Irresponsible, millionaire playboy, survives a boating accident with the speedy intervention of an emergency crew equipped with the community’s only resuscitator. On the other side of the lake, a beloved physician-philanthropist dies because the needed resuscitator isn’t there. Mr. Irresponsible, wracked with guilt, decides he must take Dr. Philanthropist’s place as the community’s quiet benefactor. Overplaying his hand, he also tries to take Dr. Philanthropist’s place at home with his wife. Spurning his advances, Mrs. Philanthropist is hit by a car and is struck blind. While recuperating, she develops a friendship with a guy she meets on the beach, unable to see that it’s Guess Who.
Mr. Irresponsible anonymously pays for her to see the finest specialists in Europe. He visits her there, and she falls in love with him. He tells her who he actually is. She breaks off the relationship. The European specialists turn out to be powerless, so Mr. Irresponsible decides to give up this millionaire thing, goes to medical school, and becomes a famous brain surgeon. Not too many years later he learns she’s fallen into a coma. He rushes to the scene, operates, restores her sight, and is there at her bedside when she awakes. A heavenly choir sings, and our serious-minded critic loses his lunch on the way back to his typewriter.
I can sympathize. To one raised outside the melodramatic loop, an encounter with Magnificent Obsession—or any other of his 50’s films—can be pretty disconcerting: The speed with which plot complications pile up against each other is breathtaking (like a video of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead stuck on fast forward); characters just up and say what’s on their minds directly and bluntly; and the search for love and its myriad setbacks is the centre of existence for everyone—maybe even for God as well. It’s philosophically simple and easy to digest—all the crackers are from way down there in the heart of the barrel, where they’ve had a chance to get all warm and fuzzy—and Sirk aims straight for the heart, using strictly below-the-belt techniques.
To spend time in the company of a Sirk film is to be seduced into accepting melodrama as legitimate artifice, and once you’ve bought into the process—for me, it happened about midway through the opening credits to Written on the Wind—it proves an astonishingly flexible genre. Take A Time to Love and a Time to Die, released in 1958 and one of the best (and least-known) American war movies ever made. It is a startling film: In an era of chauvinistic U.S. war movies peopled by caricature Nazis and the clones of Sgt. Rock, Sirk chose to shoot a paraphrase of All Quiet on the Western Front in actual bombed-out German locations, giving us WW2 from the point of view of the losers, both military and civilian.
Not surprisingly, he finds the most important action away from the front, in a romance between a German soldier on leave and a woman he meets while searching for his parents through the rubble of his home town. Their affair is tragic, on-the-run, and portrayed with enough conviction to make you believe that what they are going through—not gunshots exchanged between soldiers—is the real tragedy of war. A Time to Love and a Time to Die is Sam Pekenpah’s Cross of Iron directed as if it were Kings Row—which turns out to be an even better idea than it sounds.
Being even better than it sounds is a trait of Sirk’s work, especially for one unfamiliar with the real sophistication of his apparently weeping universe: Behind every tear is a dig at contemporary society; bubbling up through the soap is a wail of horror at what people will do to remain unhappy.
What seems little more than a parade of well-off women’s romantic misalliances is more like a cry of dismay at the hellish trappings of contemporary American life: all the men who aren’t Rock Hudson are weak, alcoholic or deceitful; the suburb is a women’s prison; and kids are like pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (When two grown children abandon their mother after destroying her romance in All That Heaven Allows, they buy her a television set. “Turn the dial,” they tell her, “and you have all the company you want.”) Even the titles are heavy with social irony: There is no tomorrow in There’s Always Tomorrow; in All that Heaven Allows, nothing is allowed.
Given this implicit social critique, it has been fashionable of late to dress Sirk up as some sort of a lefty subversive. This does him no favor, since he’s after something potentially more difficult, and that is taking melodrama seriously: Our emotional lives are what is most important to us; social convention does kill the quest for love; the stuff that glues us together as a society does tear us apart as individuals. To him, these axioms obtain no matter who’s on top socially; there is no implication that the poor have it any better. (The rich certainly get no help from their social position: In There’s Always Tomorrow, wealthy toy manufacturer Fred MacMurray feels like a robot in his suburban existence. You can almost see his eyes mist over when he runs into old flame Barbara Stanwyck—no doubt reminiscing about the good ol’ days when life meant something and the two of them plotted to bump off her husband in Double Indemnity.)
Sirk’s films still work forty years on because he reaches us in the way we prefer to reach each other. To accept them on their own terms is to open yourself up to all sorts of unexpected delights—like Rock Hudson in his pre-Doris Days (if he had been hit by a car in 1959 he might well have become the thinking woman’s James Dean); or the magnificent suffering of Jane Wyman and the burnt-out seductiveness of Dorothy Malone (overheated in Written on the Wind and downright overdone in The Tarnished Angels); or an astonishing visual style where characters run an obstacle course through a world of suburban interiors lit as if they were dungeons from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Cumulatively, Sirk’s movies are as close to self-recommending as you are likely to get: Designed for the multitudes, they are finally starting to catch on with the merely smart.
Published in the Globe and Mail, 1997
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