The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (389 page)

Siodmak’s return to Germany was accompanied by a general slackening, and
The Rough and the Smooth
, made in England, and
Custer of the West
(though commonplace) are rather better than the German pictures.

That’s what I wrote about Siodmak in 1975. All I want to add is that it’s not enough. Siodmak was more than just an entertainer. Looking closely at
Criss Cross
is what opened my eyes. Yes, it’s a noir thriller, seemingly, with a cleverly constructed script by Daniel Fuchs. But Lancaster’s doomed hero in
Criss Cross
—a sweet, tough sucker, a very subtle character—helps explain the fatalism of
The Killers
. And there are links to the irony and humor in
The Suspect
and
Uncle Harry
, rare studies of plain decency driven to break the law. Siodmak had not just a great eye but a way of seeing life. He was an artist, and he deserves fuller retrospectives.

Douglas Sirk
(Claus Detlev Sierck) (1900–87), b. Hamburg, Germany
1935:
’Twas een April; April, April; Das Madchen vom Moorhof; Stutzen der Gesellschaft
. 1936:
Schlussakkord; Das Hofkonzert; La Chanson du Souvenir
. 1937:
Zu Neuen Ufern; La Habañera
. 1939:
Accord Final; Boefje
. 1943:
Hitler’s Madman
. 1944:
Summer Storm
. 1946:
A Scandal in Paris
. 1947:
Lured
. 1948:
Sleep, My Love
. 1949:
Slightly French; Shockproof
. 1950:
Mystery Submarine
. 1951:
The First Legion; Thunder on the Hill; The Lady Pays Off; Weekend with Father
. 1952:
Has Anybody Seen My Gal?; No Room for the Groom; Meet Me at the Fair
. 1953:
Take Me to Town; All I Desire
. 1954:
Taza, Son of Cochise; Magnificent Obsession; Sign of the Pagan
. 1955:
Captain Lightfoot; All That Heaven Allows
. 1956:
There’s Always Tomorrow; Written on the Wind
. 1957:
Battle Hymn; Interlude; The Tarnished Angels
. 1958:
A Time to Love and a Time to Die
. 1959:
Imitation of Life
. 1975:
Sprich mit mir wie der Regen
(s). 1977:
Sylvesternacht
(s). 1978:
Bourbon Street Blues
(s).

Chairs and professorships in cinema studies, proliferating college courses on the art of film, institutes, archives, doctoral dissertations—all have hauled the movies into the academic world. But teachers of film to Americans, for instance—and nowhere is the lust for worth more pronounced—should still be wary of choosing raw American cinema for their material. If they do, then be sure that the directors are such as Orson Welles, John Ford, Hitchcock, John Huston, or Martin Scorsese. If they want to risk an academic dean reappraising their program, or students doubting their own loyalty, begin with the roots of cinema—melodrama—and base a course on Griffith, Lon Chaney, John Stahl, Val Lewton, Frank Borzage, Joan Crawford, and Douglas Sirk.

Cinema—as an entertainment, an art form, an academic topic, or an institution—is addicted to melodrama. What greater contrast of chiaroscuro is there than that between burning screen and darkened audience? Take any photograph of an intent audience, and it is an image from Fuseli: of pale faces staring out of the night. What medium is so dependent on sensation, with the screen so much larger than life and the constant threat that in a fraction of a second the image we are watching can change unimaginably? And what are the abiding themes of cinema but glamour, sexuality, fear, horror, danger, violence, suspense, averted disaster, true love, self-sacrifice, happy endings, and the wholesale realization of those hopes and anxieties that we are too shy to talk about in the daylight? Why is it dark in cinemas? So that the compulsive force of our involvement may be hidden.

Long live melodrama, and let us stress the quality of Douglas Sirk. The son of Danish parents, Sirk spent his early life in Skagen, but was a student in Munich immediately after the First World War, and then at Hamburg. His subsequent work in the theatre, as playwright and director, is given extra dignity by such biographical morsels as translation of Shakespeare sonnets and attendance at some of Einstein’s lectures. Hardly a worthwhile theatrical classic is omitted from the list of Sirk’s productions, at Bremen from 1923–29 and at Leipzig from 1929–36. As Nazi hostility constrained work in the theatre, Sirk moved into the German cinema (as Detlev Sierck, still) and worked at UFA.

Allowing for Sirk’s inexperience and Germany’s deliberate advance on the horrors, it would be understandable if those first films were uneasy or muffled. In fact, they immediately fell into the graphic fluency that distinguishes his later work. They also showed a rapid and uninhibited grasp of the principles of the melodramatic movie. In one sense they are studio concoctions: costume films, made with loving care for sets and clothes; studies of bourgeois society that employ ponderous love stories to illuminate the lifelessness and hypocrisy within that class. Their abiding cinematic themes are music, sumptuous interiors that are always “drawn” by the camera rather than “shown,” and anxious beautiful women. The meaning of the films is a subdued attack on society; they know that social decorum smothers love and lovers. This is the secret hope of most audiences in that it would explain and excuse their sense of failure and disappointment. Melodrama is timeless, and the films of Sirk, Stahl, and Leisen are much closer to the Buñuel of
L’Age d’Or
than we are supposed to believe. For melodrama soothes away the romantic wound that bleeds in Buñuel.
Zu Neuen Ufern
is his best German film, and intriguingly like Hitchcock’s
Under Capricorn
. The beautiful Zarah Leander (also in
La Habanera
) is a singer (how often music and musicians figure in Sirk) imprisoned in Australia for a crime committed by her lover. But whereas in
Under Capricorn
, the love between Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten is saved, in
Zu Neuen Ufern
Leander is betrayed by her fluctuating lover.

A gap follows in Sirk’s career. Moving westwards, he paused in Switzerland and Holland, and then went to America, first for Warners, but eventually to Columbia. His early years there were not happy, even if they led to several striking films. Columbia at first gave him no work, but let him freelance:
Hitler’s Madman
, made for Seymour Nebenzal and taken up by MGM, a version of the Heydrich assassination, overshadowed by Fritz Lang’s
Hangmen Also Die;
another Nebenzal project,
Summer Storm
, a poignant dramatization of Chekhov’s
The Shooting Party
with George Sanders as one of Sirk’s finest “weak, interesting” men;
A Scandal in Paris
, with Sanders as the Parisian detective Vidocq; and
Lured
, a superbly atmospheric nineteenth-century thriller.

These films, all made quickly and cheaply, proved Sirk as a great stylist, reason enough for his neglect in an era of “forceful, sincere” directors, such as Zinnemann, Kazan, Wise,
et al.
I mean by “stylist” that Sirk is always thinking through lighting, camera movements, flexible composition, the values in settings, interiors, and costumes. There are no ugly or gross shots in Sirk. But, answer his critics, the material is trite. To which the proper reply is that the material is the style. Cinema lends itself to melodrama and Sirk’s grace eases into appearance the furtive emotional life that we decline to admit.

Columbia only belatedly recognized Sirk, and in 1949 he returned to Germany. But by 1950 he was back in America, with Universal International. His work there is one of the isolated triumphs of the dying 1950s. In outlook, Universal was resolutely lowbrow. It does not diminish Sirk the artist to claim that such an attitude was suited to his talent. He seems to have had moderately good relations with producers Ross Hunter and Albert Zugsmith, he relished the presence there of photographer Russell Metty, and excelled in the handling of generally abused players—Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman, Robert Stack, and Dorothy Malone. Furthermore, he kept a last contact between movie melodrama and large audiences.
Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels
, and
Imitation of Life
are the swansong of compelling tears. Visually, they are made with a fluidity and density that are still barely acknowledged.

Supporters of Sirk’s films point to their social criticism, and to the signs of seriousness coming through as he prospered. I think this is a disservice to the real Sirk, and a fallacy.
Written on the Wind
may be seen, in hindsight, as a study of insecurity in wealthy America. The same could be said of
Bigger Than Life
. But that is retrospective criticism. I do not believe that either Sirk or Ray could have spelled out that analysis as they made the films.
Written on the Wind
is as good as it is because of Sirk’s conviction with the form of visual narrative, and because of the quality of overwrought performance he has gained from Stack and Malone.

Equally,
The Tarnished Angels
is not Sirk seizing on respectability and filming a long-cherished project, Faulkner’s
Pylon;
but the happy coincidence of a somber, pretentious novel and the very director to fasten it down to the particulars of cinematic life.
Pylon
is a thundery book. But on screen, Sirk has the threatened romantic self-belief of Stack and Malone, the growing intelligence of Hudson, the constant pessimistic darkness of the interiors, and the sublime images of the flying sequences. That is, for me, Sirk’s finest film, partly because he has resolved the novel’s tension between poetry and hokum.

The more turgid seriousness of Remarque’s novel makes
A Time to Love and a Time to Die
rather less of a film. The literary approach is dogged and uniform and, though the film is wonderful to look at, Sirk is daunted by the war background, and by the lusterless central playing. Melodrama on film is often a world in which a few people live amid shadow: the image sustains the thought that romantic dreams are the pivot of life. In
A Time to Love
, the CinemaScope frame bravely takes on the whole German context but cannot help but be diluted by it. So much of the film is authentic, whereas Sirk’s basis is the “imitation of life” that flourishes in immature self-obsession.

Sirk shows cinema’s great capacity for uncovering the lives of ordinary people. The sensibility is musical but lowbrow. What other medium can pick out the seriousness in vulgarity without condescension?

The last three works listed in the filmography are short fiction films made at the Munich film school. They are adaptations of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Schnitzler, and they are said to be remarkable.

Alf Sjöberg
(1903–80), b. Stockholm, Sweden
1929:
Den Starkaste
(codirected with Axel Lindblom). 1940:
Med livet som insats; Den Blomstertid
. 1941:
Hem fran Babylon
. 1942:
Himlaspelet/ The Road to Heaven
. 1944:
Kungajakt; Hets/ Frenzy
. 1945:
Resan bort
. 1946:
Iris och Lojtnantshjarta
. 1949:
Bara en Mor
. 1951:
Froken Julie/Miss Julie
. 1953:
Barabbas
. 1954:
Karin Mansdotter
. 1955:
Vildfaglar
. 1956:
Sista Paret ut
. 1960:
Domaren
. 1966:
On
. 1969:
Fadern/The Father
.

Sjöberg deteriorated, almost as if abashed by the eminence of his former scenarist, Ingmar Bergman. Perhaps it was a hard thing—at fifty-five or so—to become the number two in Sweden. But this interpretation obscures the fact that Sjöberg was once a major talent, with a handful of very inventive films.

He trained at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and went on the stage in 1927. His first film is an oddity, an utterly realistic story set in Lapland. During the 1930s he was the foremost stage director in Sweden. He became a director during the difficult war years and made two films that showed an astonishing range and sharpness considering Sweden’s neutrality:
The Road to Heaven
is a beautiful fairy tale in which a young man sets out for heaven to ask for the life of his girl to be returned after she has died. Its easy creation of a spirit world amid idyllic countryside is entirely natural.
Frenzy
, however, is a claustrophobic study of sexual insecurity related to guilt and sadism that makes a very striking comment on fascism.

That film was scripted by Bergman and introduced the young Mai Zetterling. Sjöberg used her again in
Iris och Lojtnantshjarta
, about a maid left pregnant by a young officer of good family. Atmospheric, psychological, and melancholy, it shows Sjöberg’s increasing camera mobility.
Bara en Mor
concerns a young woman who scandalizes society by bathing naked and is thus forced into a life of lonely drudgery; it is virtually a vehicle for the vibrant Eva Dahlbeck.

But Sjöberg’s finest period is in the early 1950s.
Miss Julie
, played by Anita Bjork, is a remarkable version of Strindberg that avoids flashbacks by having past and present on screen at the same time. As so often with Sjöberg, such ingenuity seems uncontrived in the very fluid realization. Indeed, Sjöberg has a more flexible camera style, and employs movement and perspective more than is usual in Sweden. This is best demonstrated in
Barabbas
, a very complex film involving flashbacks, great use of shadow, and a marvelous period reconstruction.
Karin Mansdotter
, another period piece, is a version of Strindberg’s play,
Erik XIV
, and a compelling study of increasing madness growing out of the corruption of the court.