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Douglas Sirk
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Opinion on the melodramas of Douglas Sirk has flip-flopped since his key films were released in the 1950s. At the time, critics ridiculed them and the public lapped them up. Today most viewers dismiss them as pop trash, but in serious film circles Sirk is considered a great filmmaker--a German who fled Hitler to become the sly subverter of American postwar materialism.
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In Douglas Sirk's emotionally and visually extravagant final film IMITATION OF LIFE, a life's work of subverted melodrama and razor-sharp social commentary are brought to a resounding and baroque climax. In a role that closely resembles and perhaps parodies her own life, Lana Turner plays Lora Meredith, an aspiring actress and single mother who meets Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a black and similarly single and struggling mother. When they move in together, Annie assumes the role of domestic servant and the two women struggle together to raise their two daughters. Annie's daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), favors her father whose skin tone resembles her own extremely light skin, and she slowly comes to resent her mother's black identity. Transcending the feminist labeling that IMITATION OF LIFE risked, the film freely mixes Meredith's rags to riches (with a hefty moral price tag) tale with Annie's scarring struggles to teach her daughter to accept her identity. As Meredith climbs higher and higher in her glamorous rise to stage and screen stardom, she ignores her vulnerable daughter Susie (Sandra Dee) and creates a devastating contrast for the racial and social tragedy that transpires in her own household.
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In ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, Douglas Sirk's haunting suburban morality play, Jane Wyman plays Cary Scott, a wealthy middle-aged widow in love with a younger man considered by those around her to be far below her social standing. Her torrid affair with Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), a handsome, earthy gardener, quickly creates unbearable societal pressure for Cary. Giving in to the scathing criticism of her stodgy neighbors and her materialistic children, Cary severs contact with Ron. She then discovers--perhaps too late--that her heart cannot be so easily caged.
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Far From Heaven (USA, 2002), Todd Haynes’s homage to Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas, has been received in two major ways by film critics. Some critics have wondered “why, in any case, an imitation Sirk was needed, what appetite or interest it might fill” (Kauffmann 2002, 20). These critics have suggested that Haynes’s film has neither a political project nor an aesthetic raison d’être. Other critics have argued that Haynes’s film represents “a movie Douglas Sirk might have made in 1958—if, that is, Universal Studios had been prepared to release a movie bearing on homosexuality, interracial romance, and the civil rights movement” (O’Brien 2002, 1). These critics have cited Haynes’s ability to address “taboo” subjects like homosexuality and interracial romance as an indication that American society has “progressed” in its sensitivity to matters of race, gender, and sexuality since the social rights movements of the 1960s.
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Bathed in lurid Technicolor, melodrama maestro Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind is the stylishly debauched tale of a Texas oil magnate brought down by the excesses of his spoiled offspring. Features an all-star quartet that includes Robert Stack as a pistol-packin' alcoholic playboy; Lauren Bacall as his long-suffering wife; Rock Hudson as his earthy best friend; and Dorothy Malone (who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar© for her performance) as his nymphomaniac sister.
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"As megged by Douglas Sirk from Robert Blees' moving and understanding screenplay [adaptation by Wells Root, based on the 1935 screenplay], the Ross Hunter production, impressively mounted, commands dramatic attention. Characters become alive and vital and infuse spiritual theme with a rare sort of beauty.
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Douglas Sirk