"The heavenly electricity:" Douglas Sirk's "Summer Storm" (1944)

This, recently released on DVD, really is a must-see, a ter­rif­ic piece of cine­mat­ic storytelling and a key early Hollywood work from the great Sirk. Dave Kehr gave it a nice write-up in the Times last Sunday, but I was so thor­oughly impressed when I sat down to watch it that I began think­ing that Dave’s praise was curi­ously faint. I don’t think it actu­ally was, mind you, merely describ­ing my own strong response to the movie. As Dave says on his web­site, the DVD trans­fer, from VCI, is merely passable—the screen caps here show its softness—but pass­able is good enough for the film to put itself over, and what the pic­ture has to put over is very special.

One of those things is, I think, what could be George Sanders’ very best per­form­ance, as Petroff, a respec­ted judge in pre-revolutionary Russia who falls very hard—and he’s hardly the only one—for grasp­ing peas­ant beauty Olga. He’s at once the embod­i­ment of civ­il­ized ideals and a kind of spe­cies of rot—exactly the sort of con­tra­dict­ory char­ac­ter that Anton Chekhov excelled at cre­at­ing. Of course, Chekhov’s The Shooting Party, on which this pic­ture was based, was writ­ten and set fur­ther back in Russia’s his­tory than when this film is set; the adapt­a­tion, by Rowland Leigh, is a smart one and the time shift is hardly inapt. In any event, Sanders’ Petroff is pitched at per­fect levels of both self-regard and self-loathing, but nev­er approaches the arch; it’s a thor­oughly con­sidered piece of work. As is that of Edward Everett Horton, play­ing a rather buf­foon­ish Count Volsky, aka “Piggy” (see Gentleman Prefer Blondes, almost ten years later), and reach­ing emo­tion­al depths that his boun­ti­ful com­ic per­form­ances nev­er even glanced at. (According to the book Sirk on Sirk, Horton pro­claimed the part as the best he ever had, and Sirk the best dir­ect­or he ever worked with.)

The whole cast is so superb that after a few minutes or so no one cares that every­body in the pic­ture, down to Sig Ruman and Hugo Haas, is speak­ing in a dif­fer­ent accent; Sirk locks down the tone so deftly that Hollywood con­ven­tion becomes its own law here and you just go with it. It seems par­tic­u­larly right that Linda Darnell plays Olga pretty much as a vul­gar young American would-be star­let, pout­ing and say­ing things like “Huh?” and such. But make no mis­take, the film does not dis­dain her; it rather sees her as a kid who’s just try­ing to get some­where, and using what she’s got to make it hap­pen. She’s rather mov­ing in sev­er­al scenes, espe­cially one when she talks about her fear of light­ning and her belief that every­one who dies as a res­ult of “the heav­enly elec­tri­city” is auto­mat­ic­ally sent to para­dise. I should not for­get Anna Lee, as a spurned fianceé, who is nicely under­stated in her decency and sports a dis­tinct resemb­lance to Diane Keaton in her final scenes in the film.

Dave Kehr rightly notes that the film, a rel­at­ively low-budget pro­duc­tion for the time, “does not dis­play the baroque styl­ist­ics of the Technicolor melo­dra­mas Sirk later made for Universal,” and that’s true. What it does dis­play is Sirk’s storytelling eco­nomy and his highly developed sense of emo­tion­al nuance. This is not a pic­ture with a lot of cam­era move­ments, but as Spencer Tracy said in Pat and Mike, what’s there is “cherce.” Particularly in the scene of the wed­ding ban­quet, after Olga will­fully mar­ries the over­seer of Volsky’s estate, in which a couple of deft sweeps over and around the table limn the very pro­nounced class dis­tinc­tions of the vari­ous guests.

Oh, and did I men­tion Linda Darnell is in it? I did? Okay. Still. 

As they say…what the fuck is up?

Also, the film’s punch­line is abso­lutely dev­ast­at­ing and quite eleg­antly phrased. Do not miss this.