Print: The Chronicle: 11/15/2002: Douglas Sirk: Magnificent Obsession

FILM

Douglas Sirk: Magnificent Obsession

By THOMAS DOHERTY

"Sirkian" is an adjective little-known outside the refined realm of academic film studies, but to the cognoscenti the term is as evocative as appellations like "Chaplinesque" or "Hitchcockian." Heralded by swelling strings, a lush melodrama exposes a buttoned-down and girdled milieu where anguished lovers are entwined in a cold-war containment policy more gendered than geopolitical. Orchestrating the artistry -- or ladling out the kitsch -- was the maestro of the Hollywood soap opera, 1950s vintage, the auteur of sobs and sacrifices, Douglas Sirk.

Appropriately, Sirk himself has always unleashed passionate emotions among cohorts of fervent acolytes and sneering detractors. Yet, while academic gatekeepers have readily admitted the comedies of Charles Chaplin and the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock to the cinematic pantheon, the melodramas of Douglas Sirk have been made to stand outside the door like bastard offspring trying to pass for highborn cousins. A tale of academe and the art house, the story of Douglas Sirk unfolds amid wrenching polemics, smoldering exegesis, and heart-stopping hermeneutics. Thus, the release this month of an extravagant hommage by the director Todd Haynes, bearing the Sirkian title of Far From Heaven, is bound to stir passions.

In a Sirk film, the flashback to the beginning would be cued by minor chords. Born Claus Detlef Sierck on April 26, 1900, to Danish parents in Hamburg, Germany, he spent a precocious childhood immersed in art, literature, and the theater. As a young man, he heard Einstein lecture on relativity, met Kafka, and befriended the editor Max Brod. Settling in to a career in the theater, Sierck gained prominence as a regional director in Chemnitz, Bremen, and Leipzig during the twilight of the Weimar Republic and the dawn of the Third Reich, staging works by such varied writers as William Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht. In 1934, he switched media vocations and moved to Ufa, the legendary German film studio, where he directed nine films before fleeing Germany in 1937 -- a good idea for a man with a Jewish wife. On the eve of World War II, he landed in Hollywood, Americanized his name, and began his career anew.

Sirk's first American film was Hitler's Madman (1943), a wartime thriller about the assassinated SS officer Reinhard Heydrich -- played by look-alike John Carradine -- whom the director had once met at a party (the Nazi, not the actor). By the end of the decade, Sirk had carved out a minor niche with a lineup of stylishly mounted faux-European fluff, such as A Scandal in Paris (1946) and Slightly French (1949).

So far, Sirk was just another lucky German refugee making good in the California sun, but, at Universal-International in the 1950s, he met his métier, refurbishing the most maligned of all Hollywood genres, the women's melodrama. " The word 'melodrama' has rather lost its meaning nowadays: People tend to lose the 'melos' in it, the music," Sirk later told an interviewer, Jon Halliday. For the next decade, he conducted melodic variations on the familiar refrains of a lovesick genre, turning the creaky tunes into symphonies of repressed desire.

Known around Hollywood as "women's weepies," the very titles of Sirk's films conjure up white-gloved matrons sniffing into their hankies during stolen afternoons at the matinees: All I Desire (1953), Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), There's Always Tomorrow (1957), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), and Imitation of Life (1959).

Emotionally overwrought and expressively stylized, the films measured their impact by the tear-duct catharsis squeezed from their target audience. "A film guaranteed to touch the heartstrings of middle-aged women, who, occasionally, must think of such romance," promised Variety of the December-May love affair between Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in All That Heaven Allows.

In 1959, at the height of his success, Sirk retired and settled in Europe, never to resume his Hollywood career. He claimed, to Halliday, to have "outgrown" an American audience that "tolerated only the play that pleases, not the thing that disturbs the mind." The American audience repaid the snub. Sirk's films were soon forgotten or scorned.

In the 1970s, however, two intersecting film forces conspired to reclaim Sirk for a new generation: feminism and Fassbinder. The rise of feminist-fueled film studies in the American university system encouraged a second look at a director who had depicted the shackles of the "feminine mystique" before it had a name. Concurrently, the advocacy of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the most prolific, self-destructive, and talented voice of the New German Cinema, gave the once-retrograde Sirk a hip allure among cinephiles for the very qualities that a previous generation of hipsters had snickered at: Sirk's gawdy expressionism and maudlin emotionalism. In the academy and in the art house, Sirk partisans labored to make a profound auteur out of the slick craftsman.

Feminists sought to do for the weepies of Douglas Sirk what the boys had done for the westerns of John Ford: to lend critical respect to a denigrated genre. If horse operas could be great art, why not soap operas? A series of deft readings set about recasting the schmaltz into substance.

The British journal Screen, the forum of choice for high-altitude film theory, fostered much of the critical action, but the realignment was summed up in the punning title of the film critic James Harvey's 1978 article for Film Comment, "Sirkumstantial Evidence." Far from being a shill for Eisenhower-era conformity and Hollywood convention, critics argued, Sirk was a subversive fifth columnist, slyly chipping away at the shibboleths of his genre and his time.

Reread, revised, and thus redeemed, the mawkish melodramas were transformed into poisonous darts fired at the heart, not the heartstrings, of America in the 1950s. (Of course, the revisionist readings doubled as dispensation for wallowing in the waterworks. At the University of Iowa in the late 1970s, I well remember, graduate students in film trudged wearily to the exemplary works of the feminist avatar Chantal Ackerman, but flocked to the Sirk screenings with a zeal not entirely scholarly.)

As matching bookends of gender oppression, All That Heaven Allows and There's Always Tomorrow did yeoman's work for the restoration job. Both films showcase the plight of middle-aged adults, smothered by family matters and struggling to breathe free.

In the former, the widow Jane Wyman falls hard for a younger hunk gardener played by Rock Hudson. Alas, the biddies at the country club and her stiff-necked children are aghast. Pressured by peers and brats, she relinquishes her heart's happiness. As compensation, her children bestow upon the now-lonely widow Hollywood's favorite correlative for stunted emotional options -- a television set. (One of the sweetest twists in a Sirk film is that the younger generation is reactionary and intolerant, a legacy, one suspects, of the director's days in Germany.)

There's Always Tomorrow, a kind of "men's weepie" companion piece, is even starker in its portrait of the home front as an equal-opportunity prison. That iconic paterfamilias Fred MacMurray plays a successful toy manufacturer, a breadwinner-father-husband who bears on his shoulders the weight of the world, an unfeeling wife, and a brood of self-absorbed children. Like the mechanical men sold by his company, he is a lifeless drone, going through the motions, running down the clock. Little wonder that when his glamorous old flame (Barbara Stanwyck) walks back into his life, he grabs for her like a lifeline.

On the surface, both films accord with Hollywood expectation in the end -- Jane ultimately abandons her TV for Rock, Fred resists temptation and returns to the bosom of his family -- but the seething resistance to the familial ties that bind radiates long after the end credits have rolled.

For many critics, the harsh depiction of 1950s normalcy was most visible in the look of a Sirk film: the florid set design, dappled color schemes, garish lighting, and out-of-whack framing. However dumb the plot and risible the dialogue, the luscious tapestry on view always repaid repeated scrutiny. Thus, in a meticulous explication of the Technicolor scheme of All That Heaven Allows, in the book Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism, published in 1990 and edited by Peter Lehman, the film professor Mary Beth Haralovich argued that "the film's divergence from conventional Hollywood realism" forced a confrontation with "the oppositional social formations that structure the film." That is, Sirk's excessive technique clashed so violently with the trademark "invisible style" of classical Hollywood cinema that only the willfully blind could fail to notice the collapse of the soap-opera conceit.

Fassbinder did on screen what the feminists did on paper. Like the critics, the director detected a fount of repressed resistance in Sirk's weepies. Praising Sirk to anyone who would listen, Fassbinder declared that his own breakout feature Ali -- Fear Eats the Soul (1974) was a remake of All That Heaven Allows, and he engaged in mutually admiring interviews with Sirk. In an avowed Sirk-inspired style shift, Fassbinder cranked up the "melos" -- the music -- in his own work with subversive melodramas like The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lili Marleen (1981), and Veronika Voss (1982).

Celebrated thus in Screen and on screen, Sirk soaked in the emoluments of critical regard: respectful interviews (notably Halliday's adulatory Sirk on Sirk, published in 1972), conference panels, scholarly studies, and repertory-house revivals. When Sirk died in 1987, even the hard-nosed Variety hailed him as "an artist who had been able to transform even the most dubious soap-opera material into dark meditations on human aspirations, love, and modern society." The centrality of Sirk to the ongoing re-evaluation of issues of gender and genre in film studies is signposted in the film professor Jackie Byers's influential 1991 study, All That Hollywood Allows: Rereading Gender in 1950s Melodrama.

Yet not every film scholar has been willing to perform the critical contortions necessary to disentangle Sirkian melodrama from its sob-sister roots. In How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies, a collection of essays published in 2001, the film historian Robert B. Ray interpreted the revision of Sirk's "dated, forgotten works" as an elaborate con job emblematic of the tension in academic film studies itself, a field "flushed with two incompatible enthusiasms: auteurism and leftist ideology." For the visual imprint of Douglas Sirk to be politically palatable, the director had to be remade as a politically correct auteur, despite the inconvenient fact that, Ray said, "no one who had seen Sirk's movies in the 1950s had gotten their 'real point.'"

Whatever the second thoughts about Sirk's stock among some film critics, filmmakers remain deeply invested in his portfolio -- none more so than the writer-director Todd Haynes. His recently released Far From Heaven imitates the look and tone of the classic Sirkian melodrama while thrusting every simmering subtext into boiling overdrive. A feast for Sirk connoisseurs, it plays as a hybrid of the star-crossed eroticism of All That Heaven Allows, the racial tensions of Imitation of Life (Sirk's enormously popular version of the Fannie Hurst novel about a white businesswoman who makes a fortune from her black maid's pancake recipe), and, especially, the homosexual vibrations wafting through Written on the Wind (in which Rock Hudson, as the pivot of a romantic quadrangle, seems far more attracted to the pal played by Robert Stack than the gals played by Lauren Bacall and Dorothy Malone).

Like Fassbinder, Haynes is a gay filmmaker with a penchant for portraying the discreet charms and indiscreet behavior of the bourgeoisie. Though well-regarded for the ecological mood piece Safe (1995) and the glam-rock musical Velvet Goldmine (1998), Haynes may be best known for his legendary 43-minute short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), a surreal treatise on female body image and pop stardom made entirely with miniature dollhouse sets and a cast of Barbie dolls. (The film is currently unavailable because of legal action over Haynes's use of the Carpenters' music.)

In Far From Heaven, the seemingly plastic, perfectly coiffured wife and mother, Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), presides happily over a life-size dollhouse in the bucolic, tree-lined suburbs of pristine, Oldsmobile-strewn Hartford, Conn., in 1957. She has two children with gender-appropriate interests (ballet for the girl, football for the boy) and a beloved gray-flanneled husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid), who works as an executive in that '50s profession of advertising. When Cathy discovers Frank's late nights at the office are actually spent cruising for homosexual liaisons, the model nuclear family undergoes a core meltdown. Distraught, Cathy seeks solace from her sensitive African-American gardener (Dennis Haysbert, in the Sidney Poitier role as the "Hollywood Negro"). Throughout the tempestuousness, Haynes and the cinematographer Edward Lachman strive to duplicate the sumptuous color palette of Sirk's ace cinematographer, Russell Metty (unfortunately, the film grain and lighting effects of Hollywood in the 1950s prove impossible to replicate with utter fidelity, at least on Haynes's budget).

Haynes is able to render another kind of coloring with more precision. Not for nothing did Sirk melodramas often star Rock Hudson, who, even in the 1950s, seemed an overdetermined heartthrob. (Hudson's unspoken orientation unwittingly speaks its name in All That Heaven Allows, when he urges Jane Wyman to "be a man" and face down the crowd. "You want me to be a man too!" she says brightly. In Far From Heaven, the anguish of the closeted husband weighs heavier than the plight of the housebound wife. Tormented by his compulsion, Frank desperately seeks to be "cured" by the one expert who has all the answers in cold-war America -- the serenely confident psychiatrist.

As an authentic admirer of Sirk, Haynes is not just playing a game of pastiche and collage, riffing smugly on the master while rifling through his signature scenes. But where the Sirk originals were served up straight, the Haynes update can only be imbibed with a strong chaser of irony. Perhaps that dry-eyed outlook is the best measure of how far Hollywood and its audience have traveled, in genre and gender alike, from the heavenly melodramas of Douglas Sirk.

Thomas Doherty is an associate professor of film studies at Brandeis University and the author of Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Temple University Press, 2002).

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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 49, Issue 12, Page B16
From the issue dated November 15, 2002
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i12/12b01601.htm