Sirk, Douglas

Imitation of Life

Imitation of Life (Two Movie Collection) 1934/1959

Imitation of Life (1959)
The last film in Hollywood of director Douglas Sirk (Written on the Wind), the 1959 Imitation of Life--an adaptation of Fannie Hurst's novel--is an endlessly fascinating film that speaks volumes about the American journey toward materialism and the racial tensions that are inseparable from it. Lana Turner plays a white single mother and aspiring actress who takes in a black housekeeper (Juanita Moore) and her daughter (played by an adolescent Susan Kohner), the latter so light-skinned she passes for white. As the years pass and success mounts for Turner, Moore also becomes more comfortable but her status as a domestic never changes. Meanwhile, Kohner's character, chafing against social constraints, rebels at every opportunity and throws a wrench into the perfect order Sirk chillingly captures through the precise, architectural design of his images. On one hand a '50s weepie and on the other a daring allegory, Imitation of Life is an unusual masterpiece. --Tom Keogh

Imitation of Life (1934)
In this Academy Award-nominated Best Picture, Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers are superb as two women with young daughters who build a fortune together. But success doesn't save them from sorrow with the passing years.

Delilah's light-skinned teenager rejects her mother and her race, while Bea must choose between the man she loves and the daughter who loves him, too. Now all of them will pay the price of love in this spellbinding classic.

Imitation of Life (1959)
Lana Turner heads the outstanding cast with Juanita Moore in the second screen version of this emotionally-charged story about two widows and their troubled daughters.

Lora's search for success causes her to neglect her daughter, while Annie's daughter rejects her culture by trying to pass for white. As the years pass, each of the four women realizes that she has been living out an emotionally fruitless existence.

All That Heaven Allows - Criterion Collection

Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman were so successful in Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession that they reteamed for this, his first melodrama masterpiece. Young hunk Rock is a strapping son of mother nature, a gardener who woos middle-aged, middle class widow Wyman to the snooty disapproval of her conservative social circle and embarrassment of her self-centered children. Wyman discovers a new life with his open-armed friends and back-to-nature lifestyle, but struggles with life-changing decisions in the face of social pressure and vicious gossip. Living the Henry Thoreau dream, Rock inhabits his personal Walden in a rustic country cabin by a bubbling brook, a dream house lit by a giant picture window overlooking an idyllic countryside where deer pose just outside the window. Wyman's elegant but sterile suburban home transforms into a tomb when she sacrifices her love for the "good name" of her children, and the lonely widow sees her future in the pale, colorless reflection of her TV screen. But don't despair just yet: Sirk's heroines are dynamic and resourceful and no Sirk melodrama ends without a heart-tugging, over-the-top twist. German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who championed Sirk as a master and a mentor, remade the film as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul decades later. --Sean Axmaker

Jane Wyman is a repressed wealthy widow and Rock Hudson is the hunky Thoreau-following gardener who loves her in Douglas Sirk's heartbreakingly beautiful indictment of 1950s small-town America. Sirk utilizes expressionist colors, reflective surfaces, and frames-within-frames to convey the loneliness and isolation of a matriarch trapped by the snobbery of her children and the gossip of her social-climbing country club chums. Criterion is proud to present this subversive Hollywood tearjerker in a new Special Edition.

Battle Hymn

Written on the Wind - Criterion Collection

Douglas Sirk puts the opera back into soap opera in this exquisitely baroque melodrama, the epitome of Technicolor gloss. Rock Hudson (as wonderfully wooden as ever) and Lauren Bacall play stalwart examples of altruism, clean living, and good old American ambition, but Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone steal the film as white trash millionaire siblings stewing in self-pity. The plot reads like an episode of Dallas: Texas oil-baron playboy Stack steals good girl Bacall from best friend Hudson while Stack's sister Malone puts her slinky moves on Hudson, the strapping poor boy made good. Toss in impotence, jealousy, alcoholic binges, emotional blackmail, and backstabbing nastiness, mix vigorously with high style and expressionist flourishes, and you've got the most potent melodrama cocktail of the 1950s. Stack twists his arch delivery into the practiced bravado of a boozing womanizer nursing an inferiority complex while Malone sashays and flirts her way through an Oscar-winning performance as a slutty, sassy good-time girl. It's so over the top that it might seem kitschy at first glance, but former theater director Sirk subtly shades his vision in the shadows of film noir and uses the portentous angles and gaudy color to create a vivid, vivacious world of glossy surfaces and social masks cracking under the pressure of responsibility and the pain of lost love. --Sean Axmaker

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.

Lured

Lucille Ball is in fine pre-TV form--still more the glamorous redhead than the slapstick comedienne--in Lured, Douglas Sirk's elegantly handled low-budget whodunit. Ball plays an American nightclub dancer in London, recruited by the police as a decoy for a serial killer--a maniac who finds his victims through the newspaper personal ads. The guilty party isn't difficult to guess, but the script by Leo Rosten is more literate than most such endeavors, and it's fun to watch our out-of-place heroine brazen it out in the London fog. George Sanders is the most cultivated of her suitors, and there's a weird sequence featuring Boris Karloff as a dress designer with crackpot designs on Lucy. Maybe best of all, the film has a crowd of good character actors: Charles Coburn (as a Scotland Yard inspector who becomes protective of his amateur agent), Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Mowbray, Joseph Calleia, and especially George Zucco, a frequent movie villain in a sympathetic role as an avuncular cop. Sirk brings his Germanic precision to the details, and cameraman William Daniels (Greta Garbo's favorite) no doubt had a hand in making Ball look good. Lured was subsequently re-titled Personal Column, much to Sirk's annoyance. --Robert Horton

Scandal in Paris

Suave, sardonic George Sanders eases through one of his most perfectly suited roles in this sly Douglas Sirk comedy, based on the (highly questionable) remembrances of real-life French rascal turned respected lawman and author Vidoq. Sanders plays his aristocratic thief with a blasé attitude and bemused smile. Born in a jail (his home for most of his life, as it turns out), he cons his way up from the gutter to high society. He rechristens himself with a name purloined from a fancy graveyard headstone and lands a position as the Paris chief of police after an elaborate display of Sherlock Holmesian deduction uncovers a cache of jewels stolen from his patron's house (jewels he stole himself, of course). It puts him in the perfect place to plot his biggest caper ever: cleaning out the Bank of Paris. Akim Tamiroff plays his croaking sidekick (a frog to Sanders's prince of crime, or perhaps more accurately a dragon to the sneaky St. George), and Gene Lockhart is his nemesis, the disgraced former chief of police who emerges as less a figure of fun than a sad clown. Sirk shot this little gem on a low budget almost belied by the tiny but richly realized sets, beautifully designed settings that create a Paris in miniature. His Continental wit and Sanders's droll delivery and impeccable manners add a knowing wink to the production. --Sean Axmaker

Glamour Girls: The Leading Ladies (Love Me Tonight / The Blue Angel / Pandora and the Flying Dutchman / The Good Fairy / Lured)

Five different Hollywood queens are represented in Glamour Girls, a fun Kino compendium of Golden Age titles. The entertainment value of this batch almost makes you overlook the fact that the movies have nothing to do with each other. The oldest film is The Blue Angel, the legendary 1930 classic (filmed in Germany by American director Josef von Sternberg) that made Marlene Dietrich an instant star. The story of an eminent professor (Emil Jannings) brought to his knees by seductive showgirl Lola Lola (that's Marlene) never loses its power, and von Sternberg's eye for voluptuous chiaroscuro and exquisite sado-masochism is fully expressed (he and Dietrich would make six more films at Paramount in the following half-decade). One important note: this is the English-language version of the picture (not dubbed, but shot concurrently with the superior German-language version).

Love Me Tonight is the best movie musical you've never heard of, a deliciously clever 1932 romp with Maurice Chevalier as a poor Paris tailor and Jeannette MacDonald as a wealthy aristocrat. Rouben Mamoulian's direction is a landmark of early-sound ingenuity, and the Rodgers and Hart score includes such goodies as "Isn't It Romantic?" (given an epic treatment here), "Lover," and "Mimi." The Good Fairy, from 1935, showcases the wonderful Margaret Sullavan, the throaty-voiced actress whose quicksilver reactions look as fresh and delightful today as they were 70 years ago. Sullavan begins the comedy as an orphan, becomes a theater usherette, and eventually becomes involved with meatpacking magnate Frank Morgan and bewhiskered lawyer Herbert Marshall. The matching of director William Wyler and screenwriter Preston Sturges is not a natural one, to be sure, and Wyler's direction tends to weigh the film down (he was, however, enchanted by Sullavan, whom he married--briefly). The great Sturges patter shines through, and you'll adore Sullavan.

1947's Lured puts pre-TV Lucille Ball in London, where a murderer is killing women he meets through the personal ads. The whodunit isn't difficult to guess, but director Douglas Sirk brings his elegant German precision to the proceedings, and George Sanders and Boris Karloff head a nifty cast of supporting folk. Finally, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) matches Ava Gardner and James Mason in a daft blend of mythology and Hemingwayesque Lost Generation stuff. Ava is surrounded by dashing suitors, but Mason's mystery man lures her into the realm of myth. The movie's got giggle-worthy plot twists and great Technicolor, to say nothing of glamour. --Robert Horton

La Habanera

Das Hofkonzert [Region 2]