Essay about analyzing two films

Left: Douglas Sirk, 1954. Above left: Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. Above right: Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, Robert Keith in WRITIEN ON THE WIND.

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Douglas Sirk: Melo Maestro McCourt, James Film Comment; Nov/Dec 1975; 11, 6; ABI/INFORM Complete pg. 18

Aoo.so I say: .weneedalilm criJ;i.cism not based on adolescent bad taste. Most of to- day's leading film critics came to their call- ing by way of the trash they lapped up in Palaces, Orpheums, and Bijous from Los Angeles to London, from Omaha to New York .... It is for this reason that the Fords and the Hawkses and Hitchcocks, even the Walshes, Vidors, and Sirks ... become great film makers, subjects for study and admiration -artists.

-John Simon, New York Magazine, August 25, 1975.

Who knows Douglas Sirk? ... Douglas Sirk is the most neglected director in the whole of American cinema .... There is no serious study, no sign or festival to salute one of the most interesting and exciting personalities in the entire history of the cinema.

- "P. B." in Dictionnaire du Cinema, cited by Jon Halliday

in Sirk on Sirk, London 1971

Co)l"dhions are ~-IJlProving. The Thousand Eyes, those gallant Gotham pic- ture people, have brought the American Sirk out of the vaults and put him on view, and The New York Cultural Center fol- lowed up with a Sirk series. History will contribute. And when The Lost find it necessary and appropriate to blast Sirk in the company of Ford and Hitchcock, Hawks and Vidor, the battle lines are stretched in neon. Sirkian cinema, become a cause in which to enlist, begins showing up regularly on television. We can thrash it out in the living room. Imperfect, but be- guiling. ("You're staying in? Watch IMITA- TION OF LIFE. I'll telephone during The News.") The Sirkite commences to enter- tain lovely dreams. He sees headlines: ANDREW SARRIS TRANSPORTS SIRK INTO THE PANTHEON/LANA REMI- NISCES/ROCK RECALLS/DOROTHY DELNERS ...

None of this is likely to make a pill's dif- ference to those among The Literate Serious, who, having long since been effectively si-

lenced on Hitchcock and Ford, and a little more lately on Hawks, will yet inveigh fiercely against Sirk. A mocking tirade might run this way:

TLS: "The Sirkian cinemuh? Hah! All that heaven allows to be written on the wind by tarnished angels is an imitation of life! Hah! Snort!"

or, more simply:

TLS: '"The Weepies!' Snort! Debased!" The Sirkite invokes parallels: Expressionist expression; operatic involvements (adapt- ing for Sirkian argument the metaphoric credi of I Viscontiani and Les Ophulsiens ).

TLS: '"No, n~! It is too much to ask. I cannot listen to the argument. It is worse than listening to that lunatic theme song from the favorite of you Sirkites' pictures-WRITTEN ON THE WIND. It is worse than reading Fanny Hurst. Do you read Fanny Hurst?"

It hits the Sirkite the hard way. TLS are still listening to motion pictures. In despair he thinks perhaps Griffith, the oldest great master, was right. Sound was a ghastly mistake. Or yet rather, syllable. For the sound of movies is still the movement of the image; the syllable is the text. What by analogy is the sound of "Che gel ida man ina," of "Si, per ciel," of "Dove sono," of "Che faro"? Synesthetic dilemmas ...

The wrath of at least the liberal wing of TLS might (perhaps) be (in some measure) (pick one) abated if the record of Sirk's artistic-intellectual development were charted.

Sierk, Hans Detlef, a.k.a. Douglas Sirk. Born 1900, Hamburg. Studied law, philos-

ophy, and the history of art. Painted, and translated Shakespeare: The Sonnets (Hamburg, 1922); translated The Tempest, Cymbeline, Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor. Translated Pirandello's Six Char- acters in Search of an Author. Apprenticeship in the Deutsches Shaauspielhaus in Mu- nich. Directed Moliere, Buchner, Strind- berg, and Brecht, as well as Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline. Worked in German films until forced to leave Germany in 1938. Arrived, by way of France and Holland, in America, where he became one of the group of distinguished German artists-expatriates.

by James McCourt

Above left: Robert Stack, Jack Carson, Dorothy Malone, Rock Hudson in THE TARNISHED ANGELS. Above right: Karen Dicker, Juanita Moore, Terry Burnham, Lana Turner in IMITATION OF LIFE.

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There is not much in these "credentials" to ratify genius in filmmaking. Yet the Sirk- ite evangelist, who simply exults in the pic- torial energy, wit, irony, pathos (juxtapose two or more of the above) is more than en- titled to appeal with all guns drawn to the open-eyed and open-witted (those younger fortunate, for whom revelation in motion pictures is as rare as the advent of individual grace is anywhere). The Sirkite will point out how his hero husbanded his resources, forged an utterly vivid, per- sonal style, and used it politically-in a personal politics: a dissection of the con- sequences of falsity. Moving pictures ex- ploring static, moribund delusions. Cool, objective explication, exposing selfs' de- ceptions.

THE SIRKITE DEPOSITION In an appreciation of four Sirkian mas-

terpieces of the Fifties, we celebrate his bravura, as it worked simultaneously with and against popular, melodramatic rna-

terial ("The Weepies"), turning story circumstances into Sirkian-stances. Sirk staging pictures, creating impressions of austere isolation on the all-too-over- crowded gigantic wide-screen, became the supreme circumventor (Sirk-Inventor) of the meretricious in mid-century Holly- wood. (And since the Orpheum facts have long since convicted us of and sentenced us to living there in our fantasies, our Sirk is a true redeemer. That's a religion, in- deed.)

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (1955), Universal-International. Ross Hunter,

producer. Director of photography: Rus- sell Metty.

Sirk: "In melodrama it's of advantage to have one immovable character against which you can put your more split ones .... The picture is about the antithesis of Thoreau's qualified Rousseauism andes- tablished American society."

TLS are not smiling. Rock Hudson as a noble savage? Jane Wyman, America? Agnes Moorehead, America's shadow?

Jane Wyman, a widow with two grown, but not grown-up children (one a pom- pous, callow boy, the other a ridiculous girl-student of Freudian psychology), falls in love with the man who comes to trim the trees: Rock Hudson. Friend Agnes Moorehead warns: "Carrie! Your Gar- dener!" Jane enlists, on the side o£ love. Rock meets Jane's town friends. No possi- ble communion. Jane vacillates. Then re- neges. Rock departs. Jane alone, her chil- dren departed, realizes her mistake, but does not ask for a second chance. She sits

instead in front of an empty reflection, in a switched-off television tube-a perfect Sirkian mirror. Suddenly she changes. She rushes to Rock, only to find him not- at-home. She departs. He returns in time to see her departing. He calls out, he slips, he falls, he concusses. (What more could anyone ask to happen?) Jane sits up with him through the night. At dawn, he wakes. They are together forever. (What more could heaven allow?)

The picture is simply plotted, gloriously shot, featuring New England (beautifully contrived postcards) Fall and Winter as seen through the enormous window of the

barn Rock Hudson had built for himself and Jane to live in. Weather is a primary force throughout. Love blooms in full leaf, wanes in dead Winter, when the ever- green trees are chopped down and taken to the town for Christmas. Love is reaf- firmed in Midwinter-Spring, with the thaw-glazed field of snow blanketing the barnyard "in a silence deep and white."

Jane Wyman lives in a tight little world in a tight big house with room dividers and latticed front windows, barring her from a new life. She is widowed, worried, trapped, resigned, riddled with "decen- cy," and alone. Rock Hudson's barn is one great open space, out of the town; the window is one great sheet of glass. All within is serene. Hudson, the builder, possesses a certain modesty-in-strength, a Galahad quality, a Siegfried bearing: of a frank and open nature, innocent of cere- bral guile, blessed with patience .... The Rock Hudson/Jane Wyman combination was the perfection of fantasy-Galahad to the rescue. The lady rescued. America, if she had listened to Thoreau.

Official mid-century America, overfed, victorious Fifties meets the Thoreau- truth-teller. ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS is Sirk's most wistful, elegiac statement. The picture says "Would that it were .... "

• WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956),

Universal-International. Albert Zugsrnith, producer. Director of photography: Rus- sell Metty.

Sirk: "Just observe the difference be- tween ALL THAT HEAVEN A.LLOWS and WRITTEN ON THE WIND. It's a different stratum of society in ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, still untouched by any lengthen- ing shadows of doubt. Here in WRITTEN ON THE WIND, a condition of life is being por- trayed, and in many ways anticipated, which is not unlike today's decaying and crumbling American society."

The Sirk picture of Sirk pictures, con- summate.

A rich brother and sister, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, two hellions, go on the rampage. Stack flies from Texas oil land to New York with his best friend (the once-more poor but truly honest Rock Hudson), corrals the most elegant woman in New York, Lauren Bacall (who else could better claim that title, then as now), and brings her back to Texas. She is daz- zling and devoted and placates his demons for a time. Malone, having been desperate after Hudson since childhood, fails to cor- ral him, and concocts revenge. Malone to Stack, referring to herself, taunting: "She saw the end of a marriage, and the begin- ning of a love affair." It is untrue, of course, but when Stack, who has been (wrongly) advised by the family doctor of his proba- ble impotence, is confronted with Bacall's eventual pregnancy, he attacks her and she miscarriages. Lost and violent, Stack

FILM COMMENT 19

MELO MOODS: Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone in (left)

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tries to kill his best friend, and is, of course, killed trying. Malone, on the stand, sole witness to the killing, gives up and exoner- ates Hudson. She is left her dead father's millions and who-knows-what life. Told in flashback.

The perfect Sirkian plot. His life-long preoccupation with split-character, di- vided selves, pitted against integrated character, played twice at once in a per- fectly paired quartet. Divided Stack against co-ordinated Bacall-"elegant" here signifying whole, instinctive, sup- portive, redemptive (traditional good- woman functions in pictures). Split, twist- ed, de:::perate Malone beating herself against the Rock.

The picture opens in a blast of wizard self-assurance, quick bold cuts from the ex- terior of the mansion as a car screeches up the drive; to below stairs where the first words are spoken by the sibylline black servants ("I heard talk .... There's going to be trouble, etc. ... "); to the entrance hall, all gaudy neo-classic pillars, crystal chan- delier, sweeping staircase, and huge (lat- ticed) windows; to an upstairs bedroom window framing the sensuous blood- thirsty Malone looking down at a severe angle at her revenge as the drunken Stack staggers into the hall below and quantities of dead leaves swirl in his wake. Then to the room where Bacall awakens. The cam- era pans on a desk calendar and, as the dead leaves are swirling below in the hall, the dead of the calendar yield to the wind and blow backward to the beginning of the picture's time.

Almost all of the picture is shot in barren settings, oil fields zooming past as Malone drives to a roadhouse in her sports car: the roadhouse, all tacky decor and jukebox that plays "Temptation," the sterile house itself, the tank-town. Twice, once on the Stack-Bacall honeymoon, in Florida in the moonlight oceanscape, and once in an oasis in Texas, a small river and pool where Malone goes to hear the voices of her childhood-her brother and the man she desires-does nature enter to enforce the contrast, to imply hope, to suggest possi- ble redemption. But in the honeymoon scene there is the eventually fatal revolver hidden under Stack's pillow, and in the sylvan Texas scene, Malone only hears the voices of the past and hears herself taunt- ing her brother, bargaining for the best friend's affection. The character is bruised and the performance is seductive and touching (among Oscar's better choices). Why can't the friend love the sister? We discover why, or how not, soon enough.

Stack acquires Bacall (Stack's acquisitive compulsion to have the best, Malone's compulsive venality, these are bred into the Texan-American Hadleys), and he's obsessed with Hudson, to the extent that he feels supplanted as a son, hating him and loving him, pitifully, fraternally, ask- ing when dying how they came so far from the river. It's some family romance: Stack,

20 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975

Malone, Hudson. It is a family that must perish-and Bacall must do it, unwitting- ly, directly -and it is a family as paradigm of society. (Sirk has blessedly never made a "message" picture in his career. As a cinematic genius whose trumps are irony and flamboyance, he works around The Literate Serious in sudden and vivid broad strokes.)

Malone goes berserk one night in her room, plays "Temptation" at top volume on the hi-fi and does a wild masturbatory Salome dance in front of Hudson's picture. But Herod is not present in the father. He (Robert Keith) is a sick old man who stag- gers up the stairs while the dance is on, suffers an entirely appropriate cerebral hemorrhage at the top of the stairs and tumbles back down, dead, the way (we fi- nally understand) the man-killer in Malone would really like Hudson to do. The cross-cutting in closeup of this maenad and that sick progenitor is electric. There had never been a nutritive mother. The offspring are withering ...

Bacall has nothing quite so attractive to do. What she does do is maintain tension. Oddly enough, and gratifyingly, this ac- tress, whose entire career was founded on smart back-talk-elegant lip, ready mouth-plays the seriously-wronged wife without a trace of miscast wanness. In casting terms it was like asking a thor- oughbred to just stand there and rear its head from time to time. It's a perfect bal- ance.

In the end, Stack dead, Malone the heiress clasps a model oil derrick while sit- ting at the desk under her father's picture. Electra in Dollarland. Hudson and Bacall drive away ... naturally.

• THE TARNISHED ANGELS (1957),

Universal-International. Albert Zugsmith,

producer. Director of photography: Irving Glassberg.

Sirk: "In a way THE TARNISHED ANGELS grew out of WRITTEN. You had the same pair of characters [Stack and Malone] seek- ing their identity in the follow-up picture; the same mood of desperation, drinking, and doubting the values of life, and at the same time almost hysterically trying to grasp them, grasping the wind. Both pic- tures are studies of failure .... In both WRITTEN ON THE WIND and THE TARNISHED ANGELS it is an ugly kind of failure, a com- pletely hopeless one."

In quite another way it was that THE TARNISHED ANGELS grew OUt of "written." It came from Faulkner's Pylon. Are TLS impressed? Like as not not. It is interesting nonetheless that Sirk speaks more about the literary inspiration he tried to work into his vision on this picture more than any other. He tells Jon Halliday he used to read Eliot's "Prufrock" aloud to Rock Hudson in order to let him hear his character, a Faulknerized Eliotesque outside man. To Stack he read from The Waste Land- Phlebas the Phonecian and death by wa- ter. Methods ...

Rock Hudson, a newspaper reporter in New Orleans in the Depression, sets out to explain to himself for his readers (the viewers) the motives behind the wild daredevil fliers-ex-World War I ace Robert Stack; his wife, Dorothy Malone, a parachute jumper; and their sidekick- mechanic Jack Carson. The air circus is the existential arena. Malone is prostituted to an airplane dealer to further her husband's ambition, and Stack commits suicide in the upshot, crashing his plane into the water. Hudson and Malone contact, but separate. The fliers, apotheosized, cannot live on the ground. They are the terrible angels who visit. When they betray themselves as human beings, they vanish.

WRITTEN ON THE WIND and (right) THE TARNISHED ANGELS.

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Sirk: "The story had to be completely un-Faulknerized, and it was."

Jon Halliday: "Outstandingly the best adaptation to the screen of any Faulkner, acknowledged as such by Faulkner him- self."

Faulkner is verbal music; Sirk is pictorial. Shooting in black-and-white, technically a come-down in 1957 (the U-I executives didn't trust the story), the picture looks exactly right as it happens. In the Fifties, America thought of the Depression as very much a black-and-white period, because

. its moving pictorial records-as opposed to the Hoppers and Shahns on still canvas-were all old newsreels and old movies in black-and-white. The Seventies can put the Thirties into color; the Fifties would not. The Fifties were a supposed technical triumph in themselves.

Working in black-and-white, shooting planes against worried skies, planes zoom- ing around pylons in lunatic aerie! carousel, shooting Malone, blown into the wind and hurtling toward earth until the parachute opens, Sirk is right in the realm of sudden and violent movement he favors. The scenes on the ground, crowded, crammed rooms eerily lit and as indebted to ~he grotesque in German cinema as anything he has done, point up the ironic treatment of the desperate, not- truly-heroic fliers-the Sirkian alternative response to, say, Hawks's DAWN PATROL or Walsh's FIGHTER SQUADRON, where the men prove themselves heroically. The tar- nished angels don't prove a thing.

It is a picture about sad losers, "nar- rated" by the there-and-not-there cynical Hudson. In contrast to his earlier "melo'' masterpieces, the emphasis in THE TAR- NISHED ANGELS is far less on enlarged characters than on action-really un- action, reckless, positive inertia which kills human response, vitiates human concern.

A kind of thriller that confounds satisfac- tion. A picture that steps, but doesn't finish. TLS might be seduced ...

• IMITATION OF LIFE (1959}, Universal-

International. Ross Hunter, producer. Di- rector of photography: Russell Metty.

Sirk: "And IMITATION OF LIFE is more than just a good title, it is a wonderful title: I would have made the picture just for the title, because it is all there-the mirror, and the imitation .... "

Andrew Sarris: "What was needed with this material [ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH] was the ironic perspective Sirk's cooly contempla- tive style provided for such projects as IMI- 'D\TION OF LIFE and ALL THAT HEAVEN AL- LOWS. Neither indulging his glossy charac- ters, nor indicting them, Sirk had the gift of making them come alive through win- dows, mirrors, and other shimmering sur- faces. More important, Sirk confronted the absurd anguish of shrunken souls with shiny faces head-on."

Would-be actress-mother Lana Turner meets itinerant negress-mother Juanita Moore on the beach at Coney Island when their daughters strike up a play- friendship. Juanita Moore becomes Lana Turner's unpaid maid at first. Lana Turner sacrifices romance for her only love, her career; the black and white daughters grow up together. Lana prospers. The light-negress child, Susan Kohner, finds negritude unbearable, finds she can pass for white. Beaten by a boy (Troy Donahue) for imitating, she leaves home and de- scends to sleazy nite-club work. She struggles and makes her way. Her mother seeks her out and in the confrontation is forced to masquerade as Kohner's child- hood mammy. Lana Turner reaches higher and higher into stardom (an Italian film di- rector enlists her artistic services), and her

daughter, Sandra Dee, drifts along in the background. In the end, grief kills Juanita Moore. The climax of the picture is Juanita Moore's grand and moving funeral, for which she has saved all her life, at which Susan Kohner makes a sudden, stabbingly appropriate appearance. In the wake of the noble black woman's death, the remaining principals are faced with the consequences of their imitation lives' careers. Susan Kohner is seemingly redeemed and recon- ciled.

Sirk's last picture, a defiantly trium- phant melodrama-a kind of tightrope walk to greatness.

Sirk: "I feel IMITATION OF LIFE and WRIT- TEN ON THE WIND ... have something in common; it's the underlying element of hopelessneSS .... In IMITATION OF LIFE you don't believe the happy ending, and you're not really supposed to. Everything seems to be O.K., but you well know it isn't."

The entire picture is trompe l' oreille and a feast for the discerning eye from beginning to end. Never has Lana Turner's unctu- ously sincere pear-toned elocution been better pitted against the utter vacuity of her gaze, the deadly precision of her MGM comportment-that walk, that invisible thick of the World's Great Quotations bal- anced on that perfectly poised head. Those Jean Louis gowns. It's all there, perfect im- itation of vitality. If ignorance is a delicate and exotic fruit, whose bloom is gone if ever once touched, the Lana Turner character in IMITATION OF LIFE is the Queen of the Mangoes. The perfection of seem- ing, she can no more be touched-moved to real action-than Narcissus can kiss his image in the reflecting pool. As perfect a contrast and balance to the Juanita Moore character as is black to white, in color.

Susan Kohner, a neophyte, triumphed as the Sirkian split-character. (IMITATION: another quartet: Turner and Moore, Kohner and Dee.) The scene in which Kohner is slapped down by the boyfriend is shot on the oblique, through a plate- glass window reflected. Reflection, chance seeing, reinforces for the viewer the pathos of the girl's secret, and allows the character her desperate alternative.

And desperate it is. Susan Kohner, sit- ting in a chorus line of chairs, joylessly kicking up one leg, holding a grotesque champagne bottle in the ugliest nite-club in the world (Sirk directing CABARET ... !}, and immediately thereafter backstage, turning her back to her mother, sitting in her dressing-table chair, wounded and cruel. Her last permission, her final admis- sion is to her mother, to be embraced one final time. The next embrace is of the flower-decked coffin. Embracing death; leading life. For Sirk, deus-ex-machina, the anodyne.

Poet, debunker, triumphant charlatan, stunner, Hollywood visionary, and mag- nificent obsessor. Douglas Sirk resides in Picture People's Paradise. ·~{;

·

FILMCOMMENT 21

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Jan Dawson is a frequent contributor to Sight and Sound, The Monthly Film Bulletin, and Time Out (London). Manny Farber is a film critic for City Magazine (San Francisco); his collection of criticism, Negative Space, has been published in paperback under the title Movies. Stephen Farber is FILM CoMMENTs Los Angeles correspondent, and writes frequently for The New York Times. Roger Greenspun writes film criti- cism for Penthouse and the Soho Weekly News. John Hughes recently directed the film u.s. 76. Wayne Kabak is a student at both the Columbia Law School and the Columbia School of Journalism. James McCourt is the author of Marwdew Czgowchwz. Patricia Patterson writes the City film column with Manny Farber . Graham Petrie teaches at MacMasters University in Hamilton, Ontario. Elliott Stein has prepared an expanded edition of Leon Barsacq' s Le Decor du cinema for publi- cation by New York Graphic Society .

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FILM COMMENT 63