Near the end of Midnight Movies, the seminal book on cult film he co-wrote with Jonathan Rosenbaum, J. Hoberman recalls his early attempts to run a rep cinema of sorts. In 1972, in a “bombed-out old church on West Thirty-sixth Street,” he and a pal founded the “Theater of Gibberish” and screened “mostly Sirk and Fuller” pictures, mainly to facilitate Hoberman’s own education in those directors’ oeuvres. “We used to get listed in the Voice,” Hoberman recalls, “but we couldn’t advertise the Sirk films by name. One of the sixteen-millimeter distributors mentioned that they were very popular in old-folks homes, rest homes, and hospitals, so we cited that and Rock Hudson in the ads. The local Sirk freaks—all seven of them—got the message and turned up.”
How times have changed. These days it seems that just about every higher-education-aspiring American young person who signs up for a single Film Studies course—or, God help him or her, actually majors in Film Studies—has a pallette load of Sirk shoved down his or her throat, and some of the manly men who follow Hollywood Elsewhere seem not to have enjoyed the experience one bit. Nor do they like being told that they don’t know what they’re on about. “We understand them, but we think they’re shit,” one commenter notes of the Sirk work.
These commenters are responding to HE proprieter Jeffrey Wells’ post called “Respectful Sirk Takedown”—and boy, is that title wrong on maybe five levels—in which, spurred on by a YouTube clip from Sirk’s 1957 Imitation of Life, Wells unloads on the director. The acting in the clip—which features Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner—is “awful.” The dialogue has a “comical phoniness.” And so on. Sirk’s critical rep constitutes some kind of shell game perpetrated by elitist dweebs who aver that “you have to be a serious cineaste to recognize Sirk’s genius, and that if you don’t recognize it then you need to think things through because you’re just not as perceptive as you need to be.”
I responded to Wells’ post in several, probably too many, comments. Here’s the stuff, I guess, that sums up my objections most coherently:
[Well]‘s putatively “respectful” takedown of Sirk is so choked with resentment that it’s simultaneously self-canceling and impossible to formulate a rationale response to. I happen to think that a lot of the critical response to Sirk takes the “subversive” angle too far. I don’t think, for example, that there’s anything particularly “coded” about Imitation of Life; it’s a completely sincere statement on race in America that works within the conventions of a Ross Hunter/Fanny Hurst melodrama. Of course because Sirk was an absolute visual master he imbues those conventions with added value, employing a mise-en-scene that often expresse[s] exquisite irony, but I don’t think that’s same thing as putting anything over on the audience. I agree that one ought to check out The Tarnished Angels, There’s Always Tomorrow, and particularly A Time To Love And A Time To Die to get a fuller measure of the artist.
But [Wells is] clearly not interested in having an intelligent discussion of Sirk. Tired of trouncing the Eloi, he arbitrarily decides to have a go at the “dweebs,” or as he sometimes calls them, the “monks,” the “cloistered” “urban” types he’s got some sort of complex about because he thinks they’re lording it over him or something.
What’s maybe a little bit genuinely interesting about Wells’ attitude with respect to Sirk’s reputation, and the attitude of the meat-tossers whooping it up in the comments thread, is the “these elitists are trying to con us” perspective. Wells makes no bones about letting everybody know how “progressive” his actual politics are, but in rants like these he exhibits pretty much the exact kind of resentment that’s the lifeblood of Andrew Breitbart’s entire career. To backtrack a bit to the sentiments that inspired some of the observations in my above-excerpted comment, Wells cites Roger Ebert as a proponent of the kind of obfuscation that gets Wells so riled up, to wit, Ebert’s pronouncement that understanding a Sirk film “takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpieces, because Bergman’s themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message.”
The thing is, and no disrespect to Roger Ebert intended, I believe that he’s precisely wrong. I reiterate: Sirk never speaks in code, and his “conceal[ment]” is not what makes him a great filmmaker…and the early champions of the director understood this utterly. In The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris wrote, “The essence of Sirkian cinema is the direct confrontation of all material, however fanciful and improbable. Even in his most dubious projects, Sirk never shrinks away from the ridiculous, but by a full-bodied formal development, his art transcends the ridiculous, as form comments on content.” (For “ridiculous,” read “Sandra Dee,” and you’ve got a basis for a defense of at least some of what Wells finds objectionable about the Imitation of Life clip.) Not too many years later, in an appreciation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson outlined Fassbinder’s affinities with Sirk, whom the younger filmmaker revered and collaborated with: “He has taken a number of tactics from the Sirk melodramas (the flamboyant lighting, designing décor and costumes that indelibly imprint a character’s social strata, being patient with actors and playing all the movie’s elements into them, backing your dime-store story and soap-opera characters all the way) and stapled Sirk’s whirlwind into a near-silent film style which is punctuated with terse noun-verb testiness.” (Emphasis mine.)
I infer that the “code-talking” Sirk is the one that’s taught in Film Studies classes, then, which is too bad. I don’t accept that as an excuse, though. Autodidact cinephile that I am, I came to Sirk my own way, and I’m very happy I did.
The top screen cap is from Sirk’s superb 1956 There’s Always Tomorrow, out very soon in a wonderful U.K. Eureka!/Masters of Cinema edition, and shortly after that on domestic DVD in a Universal multi-disc set devoted to co-star Barbara Stanwyck, which will also include Sirk’s All I Desire.
Having never been to college (and, in fact, barely graduating high school), I never went through these Film Studies classes that seem to engender so much resentment towards Sirk, Ford, and a host of other worthies (I actually got into an argument with A Certain Online Film Critic who said Stagecoach was boring).
I never found a Sirk film to be anything less than entertaining– but I’m also a ginormous Rock Hudson fan, finding him to be a captivating screen presence and solid, at times subtle, actor.
… What?
When LexG has become the de facto “Way to go” guy on Wells blog, you can rest assured that a once great film site has devolved into the “The Man Show.” But really Glenn, you know Wells is a sociopathic bully with some of the worst taste to ever grace a computer screen. Folks who can’t find some value in Sirk or at the very least his compositions are simply not operating a mutual level of film respect. They are Entry-Level Eloi.
That Wells post is pridefully shallow, and the homophobia and sexism that crops up in comments almost immediately is pretty telling. Not to mention that saying “I happened to watch this earlier today” and then “it’s just about unwatchable” is just bad writing. Nonetheless, in general, the watered-down cultural studies “it might look like crap, but it’s actually subversive” school of critical interpretation can be wearying and applied almost infinitely. But I have no idea if that applies to Sirk because…yikes…I’ve never seen any of his films despite reading about him for years now. Any advice on which one to start with?
The mouthbreathers at HE should look at some of Sirk’s earlier films. Shockproof, his unlikely collaboration with Sam Fuller, is a hoot. It shows up occasionally on TCM. Lured, Sleep, My Love, and Thunder on the Hill are all a lot of fun. Wish Tarnished Angels, condemned by Hudson as a dirty movie, was more readily available.
Three things:
What happens to subtext when you read it? Doesn’t it become…text?
Lots of people really aren’t as perceptive as they need to be. Not all of them are bad people. I’m one of them, in fact. When did humility go from “virtue” to “not okay”?
Who in the world is Jeffrey Wells?
Okay, I know the answer to the third one. But rather than being baffled by his existence, I’m baffled that otherwise perfectly rational human beings continue to justify it by acknowledging his insanity. Remember Chuck Stephens? Feed the troll, and it grows.
Appreciate all your comments, Glenn, there and here.
What I personally found most disturbing there, I guess, was the misogyny and (not-so) latent homophobia that seemed to run through many of the commenters’ anti-Sirk screeds.
Yet not surprising.
In so much current reviewing, on and off the web, paid and unpaid, it seems that the mostly male, loudly heterosexual writers have two standards – one for popular movies aimed ostensibly at females, one for popular movies aimed ostensibly at males.
The former – with their lush settings and romantic stories – are castigated for being “mindless,” “consumerist,” “daydreaming” trash.
The latter – with their over-the-top action and male bonding – are praised for being “escapist,” “exotic,” “genre-bending” pleasures.
But why is a “girls” movie dismissed out of hand and a “boys” movie given serious consideration? Romantic entertainments seen as immature, and shoot-em-up thrillers seen as edgy? Why is one totally absurd and the other a fine night out?
The girl-haters-club will accept dewlapped action heroes singlehandedly taking on entire gangs, but have a movie show a rich middle-aged woman in love and they start snickering and throwing their popcorn. Both movies provide wish-fulfillments. Why is only one wish valid?
I have my problems with various Sirk works. But you know? I have them with John Ford movies too. (His sense of humor is particularly cruel and crude – but that’s another thing.) I guess I just believe that you take a movie as a whole – style AND content. And limiting your appreciation to one, rigidly-ruled kind of content only limits you.
Saw THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW at the Telluride fest in the late 80s and am happy that it’s finally getting a DVD release.
I actually DID take a film class in college that had a Sirk film on the syllabus – WRITTEN ON THE WIND. It was my first Sirk, and all I remember, really, was thinking Rock Hudson and Robert Stack were really good, and finding much of my professor’s blathering to be white noise (at least as it concerned the actual film – is it applied to my actual grade is something else).
I have to admit that my appreciation for Sirk’s brand of melodrama has been slow to evolve, but it IS evolving, and I think Sarris’s quote is pretty much hitting the nail on the head. You have to be open to the sincerity of Sirk (and the Nicholas Ray of JOHNNY GUITAR, which I saw recently) to “get” it, and freeing yourself from several rock-hard layers of irony for the two hours it takes to watch one of these movies is a bit much to ask of some people. Still, of the few Sirk films I’ve seen, my favorite is, in my experience, his least typical: LURED. It has Boris Karloff AND Lucille Ball, so…
Also, the reveal of Hudson on the beach in that crucial scene in MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION is brilliant.
I dig “Lured” lot too. AND “A Scandal In Paris.” AND the recently released-on-DVD “Summer Storm.”
Hell, I love “Has Anybody Seen My Gal.” I guess I am a Sirk freak after all.
Probably an oversimplification, but I’d say the “film studies” crowd and the “manly men” dissenters are both displacing onto Sirk their own contempt. Since neither apparently think a melodrama pitched solidly at mid-century moviegoers could possibly convey such rich themes and character portraits without in some way deliberately going over the head of its intended viewers, they invent a director who cunningly tripped up or desultorily pandered to his audience. Whereas the glory of Sirk is precisely that his engagement with genre was without condescension or embarrassment.
Irony was one of his tools, naturally. Several of his endings fadeout on smiles and warm embrace without taking step one to resolve any of the underlying fissures that led to tragedy barging its death’s head through the door in the first place; his titles are often magnificently double-bottomed, lushly romantic at first read but increasingly grim (Sirk identified All That Heaven Allows as actually implying “stingy”) when you think back. But to consider that his dominant mode ignores so much of what makes his films so wonderful.
I don’t revere the wisdom of crowds as unassailable, but the 50s women drenching their handkerchiefs (and the husbands, dragged protesting to the theater, wiping some irritant from their eye) had it right and the academics and (perhaps especially) the flippant misogynists have it wrong. Sirk’s films are direct and sincere, sometimes brutally so. They don’t have to be everybody’s cup of tea, but they’re too immediately human to be boxed up behind a scaffolding of theory or dismissed as silly fluff.
Tom Russell: “…I’m also a ginormous Rock Hudson fan, finding him to be a captivating screen presence and solid, at times subtle, actor.
… What?”
You’ll hear nothing from me. Among my non-film-geek friends, few of my opinions receive quizzical stares more than my admiration for Hudson. (The winner, sadly, remains whenever Jerry Lewis comes up.)
Rob: “Any advice on which one to start with?”
Short answer, The Tarnished Angels.
Rambling, contradictory answer, since he’s one of my favorites: There’s plenty to love in the early thrillers Michael Adams and Bill mention, as well as Sirk’s comedies (seconding Glenn’s love for Has Anybody Seen My Gal); and Sirk’s war pictures are very underrated I think. But you should start with the melodramas, because no one has filmed domestic dwellings as brilliantly as Sirk, cataloging how clear paths, crossroads, and dead-end traps can be framed by the objects we’ve surrounded ourselves with while our lives were going on. If the TV set and perforated screen in All That Heaven Allows, the windows to the back porch in There’s Always Tomorrow, or the staircase in Written on the Wind don’t make you a Sirk fan, nothing will. Not, again, because of set design; because of how perfectly Sirk captures the humans walking those sets.
Hudson was a very good actor. There’s nothing strange about that opinion. His abilities were plain as day. The tabloid-fodder he became, through no fault of his own, make people think he’s some camp figure, but he wasn’t. The guy could act, and had an amazing presence on screen.
Also, isn’t Wells a big James Dean fan? I don’t know that I believe Wells has ever had a single, sincere opinion that wasn’t wrapped in several layers of defensiveness and bad faith, but I’m pretty sure he’s claimed an affinity for Dean in the past. Is he so obtuse that he can’t see the clear line between Sirk and, say, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE?
Answer: probably!
Yeah, that defense of Sirk’s face-value immediacy didn’t read so pretentiously till after I posted. Sorry about that.
Bruce – It didn’t read pretentiously to me (maybe because I agree with most of it 😉 ).
I second The Tarnished Angels as the best Sirk for Beginners movie.
Wonderful respnse Glen – well said. Thanks so much for writing this.
Excellent stuff, everyone – well said and well worth saying.
Errol Morris gave a most eloquent, thoughtful introduction to THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW when he screened it at Telluride in 1989; I wonder whether he ever published any of his remarks. It’s good that Universal is finally bringing this out on DVD.
As a teacher of some of those horrible Film Studies classes, I should note, Sirk is always my hardest sell in Intro to Film Studies (where I show him alongside Eisenstein, Vertov, Renoir, Hitchcock, Rossellini, and other titans); students are like, “Wha…?”
But all it takes is two hours of intelligent, considered group discussion to recognize the power of Sirk’s films. He knew what he was doing. He played certain blinkered ideologies to the hilt, to exploit their ridiculousness. (The man was a German Brechtian.) He was a political progressive who also understood the capacity of filmic space and mise en scene to communicate power relations, emotional states, subtle shifts in the meaning of language.
But so what?!! If you have to discuss it in order to arrive at it, I guess it’s just a lot of hot air an elitism, yes?
Best defense I can manage of Wells:
It IS easy to be turned off by academic discourse, especially when it DOES have as subtext, if not outright text, that “you’re too stupid to see the subtext and subversion” (something that *some* hosannahs to Sirk do do; e.g., the remark above about “mouth breathers”).
Especially since Sirk doesn’t need such tactics. I’ve only seen three Sirk films, but the two I do think are great – ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS and IMITATION OF LIFE (MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION is the “can-take-or-leave” third) – are as straightforward as they come. And even Gen-X’er moi enjoyed them as the melodramatic weepies that they are.
I’m glad you posted this Mr. Kenny. I saw your original comment yesterday and thought it was great but didn’t feel like wading in at H‑E nor did I feel like making a post of my own and drawing more attention to Wells.
The dude has soul cancer and it depresses me he’s taken at all seriously, not just by twit commenters, but by actual industry types who haunt his blog and lend the joint credibility.
What irritates me is his presumption of holding some kind of cultural higher ground (his constant rants about the Eloi and the popcorn munchers) when in fact his own tastes are about as middlebrow as they come. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but spare us the superiority routine.
The Sirk post is especially funny because his two main paranoias collide. On one hand he’s repulsed by the middle class housewife audience Sirk’s films seem designed for, but at the same time he feels inferior to the film dweebs who remind him he’s just another popcorn muncher himself.
He wants it both ways. He wants to be a man of the people and he wants to hold the keys to the high culture castle. He wants to have his cake and eat it too, but in this case he chokes on it.
Miller Chill. ‘Nuff said.
MarkVH: HAH! He’s never going to live that one down.
Victor: Yeah, it IS easy to be turned off by the academics, and Wells isn’t entirely off base in this regard (he often has a kernel of sanity in his rantings), but as Kenny points out, Wells isn’t interested in debate or discussion. He’s content to toss out stink bombs and stir up the shit. This is why he’s the AM Talk Radio host of movie bloggers…and also why he’s successful at it.
So here I was, curled up on the divan in my Jean Harlow feather-trimmed robe, nibbling at the bottom of the bonbons to make sure I was getting only the good ones, and then I have to go and click on that link and get Jeffrey Wells barging in like Wallace Beery to harsh my mellow.
I wasn’t going to respond–I’m convalescing from the blogathon, after all–but the HE comments thread was the deciding factor.
http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/2010/02/imitation-of-takedown.html
Oh, and good comments all here, but a particular “amen” to Mr. Whitty.
Siren, that’s an awesome post. Thank you, Madame.
I was desperately hoping The Siren would write something about this and then, lo and behold, she does! Awesome.
And thank you, Glenn, for this post and your responses over at Hollywood Elsewhere. I have nothing to add to the discussion because everyone here has already said everything that needs to be said in response to Wells and his gang, but I just wanted to offer an atta boy.
Hudson was a terrific actor as anyone who’s seen SECONDS can validate. And he is just awesome macho fun in PRETTY MAIDS IN A ROW.
Michael Sicinski: “But all it takes is two hours of intelligent, considered group discussion to recognize the power of Sirk’s films.”
Since the power of Sirk’s films is pretty much immediately apparent–he’s no invisible stylist–isn’t the resistance of your students based upon their own preconceptions of the possible merits of a glossy Hollywood women’s weepie (assuming that’s what you show them) rather than their inability to discern Sirk’s meaning? A robot doll marching in lockstep to the table’s edge or a second-floor landing that constantly barricades daughters against mothers are the type of imagery so crisply lucid they come across as inevitable, despite the obvious care put into their beautiful composition.
Sirk should be discussed, absolutely, and there’s plenty to plumb for in his films. But there is a strain of Sirkian who thinks it isn’t enough to look below the surface; that, in fact, the “real” story of what’s going on in his films is all subterranean, a cunningly concealed strata that rails against the melodramatic conventions pinning Sirk’s characters down to their cruel, helpless fates. That’s what I disagree with, not the notion that these films aren’t worthy of serious thought and study. (Such as the Siren’s typically perfect comments linked above.) If any previous comments of mine seemed broadly anti-academic enough to offend, I apologize.
Bruce, I’m afraid your assertion that the “power” of Sirk is “pretty much immediately apparent” suggests you haven’t been around college kids in a while. For someone born in 1990, there’s very little that’s “immediate” about Sirk. I get your point, but in my limited experience Sirk remains the one of the trickiest of filmmakers to get students to connect with.
The MoC “Theres Always Tomorrow” came out on Monday, and it is lovely.
I studied Sirk in College in a Film Studies class, and yes, he was sold to us as a smuggler of subversive themes into straight melodrama. But we were shown the film (“All That Heaven allows”) first and allowed to think about it. We were, more or less, adults, and the post-screening debate was interesting because Sirk’s command of the medium allows for, or even demands arguments over interpretation. Crucially, we were all able to make up our own minds, indeed we were expected to. I don’t think anybody with any wit walks away from a lecture or tutorial 100% in agreement with their teacher, and thats is what University is supposed to teach to some extent, isn’t it? How to think for yourself?
The whole HE thing is depressing, and I don’t really want to read that site anymore. But it may have been what originally led me here, so Glenn, you should reconsider, perhaps. Maybe one day your comments can be filled with idiotic rants and name-calling, too…
One of my fave movies by Sirk is “Has Anybody Seen My Gal,” with its early appearance by James Dean. I saw it on the American Movie Classics channel, back when they used to show American Movie Classics.
When I was an undergrad at NYU, I took a course with Donald Bogle called “Images of the Other: African-Americans in Film and Television.” This is the only Film Studies course I’ve ever taken, by the way. One of the movies we watched for the class was the Sirk version of “Imitation of Life.” The way we approached the film was completely at odds with the “subversive” angle. Rather, we looked at “Imitation of Life” as a statement on race in the 50’s. If anything, some of the students found the picture too sincere. I wish the “subversive” meme had not been planted in my brain before I’d encountered Sirk’s films themselves. It actually stands in the way of my appreciation of the work.
It’s been a long, long time since I last saw “Rock Hudson’s Home Movies.” Honestly having trouble remembering how the Sirk collabos are treated in Rappaport’s film essay.
I need to see more Sirk, by golly. “Imitation of Life” was screened in a film studies class, and as I recall the professor did a decent job of pointing out some of the intricacy of mise-en-scene and camerawork. “Subversiveness” may or may not have come up, but I do recall (this might be my own naïveté speaking) being mildly surprised by how explicit all of the racial politics were. Some of that sincerity business that Glenn writes of. In any case, it didn’t send me out to see more, but reading posts like this sure get me in the mood.
That, and watching the clip over at HE, which is neither “unwatchable” nor “awful.”
Which brings me to my next point – don’t smoke Hollywood Elsewhere. I think my favorite line from the whole post is the bizarre passing jab at Ford:
“Aaaah, the old concealment game! John Ford used to do this also, but you can watch Ford’s films, or at least savor what’s good about them (despite the Irish sentimentality).”
In such a heady stew or nuttiness, two phrases in particular stick out: “concealment game” – in which I’m reminded of certain sexual euphemisms, and “Irish sentimentality,” to which I can only reply: whatsatnow?
I’ll be on the lookout for Concealment Games and Irish Sentimentality – a John Ford critical inquiry by Jeff Wells.
You can think of Sirk as subversive in that the movies offer sharp observations on middle-class society, within the confines of a genre that was always designed to appeal to that segment of society. But suburbanites have never been quite as prickly about being critiqued as some seem to think. In any movie theater in the 1950s there were doubtless many women watching that famous television scene in All That Heaven Allows and thinking “Oh god, that’s a little too true.” In fact, a 50s housewife probably had a much better idea of what Sirk was driving at than most critics at the time, sniffing at what they called overbaked melodrama.
It is depressing to see how Hollywood Elsewhere threads, more often than not, descend into a dick-measuring contest, as it were. I try now to only post in a few of them.
Having said that, as I said on the Sirk thread on HE back when it was still relatively free of that (emphasis on relatively), I’m afraid I’m not a Sirk fan. And no, I didn’t have to watch him in college – the only film-related courses I took were “Music in Film and TV” and “Literature and Film,” neither of which had the occasion to show any of his films (for the former, Frank Skinner’s name never came up) – so I didn’t have him shoved down my throat the way Disney films were shoved down my throat as a kid. I didn’t watch a Sirk film until I moved down to New York City and started working in video stores. And while I can appreciate Sirk as a stylist, I do find the movies he did under Ross Hunter soap opera (and I have a problem with the idea a story in movies, particularly narrative-driven cinema, exists merely to be “transcended”, but that’s a whole other discussion), and I especially do not like the acting of the likes of Rock Hudson (nothing to do with “camp” – the only movie I’ve ever liked him in is SECONDS), Jane Wyman, and Lana Turner (I do like Dorothy Malone in WRITTEN ON THE WIND, and the parts of IMITATION OF LIFE involving Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner are justifiably praised, as is that film’s treatment of race). The reason why I like FAR FROM HEAVEN isn’t because of Haynes’ meticulous re-creation of the 50’s, and how Sirk created the 50’s, but because Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, and Patricia Clarkson, among others, are better and more emotionally direct than their 50’s counterparts.
I do like the pre-Hunter Sirk films I’ve seen, like SHOCKPROOF and LURED. Still, if you want to talk about “women’s” films and studies of middle-class suburbia, I think Max Ophuls’ THE RECKLESS MOMENT (an aside: now that Criterion has put out marvelous editions of most of Ophuls’ major French movies, I wish they’d do a couple of his American ones, particularly LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN and this) is better than Sirk’s Hunter films in almost every conceivable way, as is the acting of Joan Bennett and James Mason in the lead roles.
As one who’s only seen two Sirk works (ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS and WRITTEN ON THE WIND, both of which are terrific), I don’t think I can throw anything out that hasn’t already been said. Mainly, I just wanna agree with the guy above me, in that hell yeah PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW is awesome stuff. Worth digging up for Rock fans who haven’t yet seen it – it’s like a hippie-softcore drive-in flick colliding with LORD LOVE A DUCK.
Anyway, enough of that useless yammering.
I recall a recent Wells post wherein he expressed an extreme distaste for “Pretty Maids.” For some reason I find that amusing.
I remember when “Seconds” came out (when I was seven!), that the predominant tone of the press around it was that it was some kind of “breakthrough” work for Hudson. I like him generally—always have—but he is particularly good and offbeat in the Frankenheimer.
Jamie asks: “Who in the world is Jeffrey Wells?”
Answer: Nobody. Not in any world that matters, anyway. Just one of countless nobodies so fearful and resentful of “not getting” something that he doesn’t even know what he’s not getting. So he makes up incoherent crap that I would never read, except to find out what Glenn is responding to.
Now let’s talk some more about Douglas Sirk: What consistently amazes me about his movies is how skillfully he orchestrates melodrama and makes it work, even on people who think they’re superior to it and can’t possibly be affected by it. Tell me the scene with the television in “All That Heaven Allows” (the picture Todd Haynes’ remade – straight as the original – as “Far From Heaven”) isn’t devastating, even if you ARE inclined to view it as “campy.” It can (and does) work both ways simultaneously. But Sirk’s sensibility is the very opposite of ironic distance. As Glenn says, he’s not standing back and playing “subversive” games. The critique of ’50s & ’60s consumer values is right up-front for all to see, not “coded” into the “subtext.” (Those aren’t scare quotes – I’m actually quoting from what’s been said above.)
I’m reminded of an interview I did with Walter Hill (a manly director, don’t you know) years ago regarding “Johnny Handsome” with Mickey Rourke. He said when he was first offered it he turned it down because it was a “lurid melodrama.” A few years later, it came around again and he found he wanted to make it – because it was a “lurid melodrama.”
Hmmm.… we should consider Gore Verbinksi the stylistic contemporary of Michael Curtiz because he makes adventure movies? I am still waiting for Eloi Manning –who is he?– answer John M.‘s question about who Mr. Manning is studying under.
The misogyny and homophobia of the comments on Well’s thread are pretty horrible, not to mention a lot of the discourse on film to be found there. Wells’ comments on Sirk are up there with Tom O’ Neil’s post on SUNRISE a few years back.
Eloi Manning sounds like Wells in disguise. I have no doubt he posts agreements under other monikers just as I know he edits people’s comments when not banning them.
By remarkable coincidence, just reread Orwell’s essay on Tolstoy’s “respectful takedown” of Shakespeare: “But here there arises a difficult question. If Shakespeare is all that Tolstoy has shown him to be, how did he ever come to be so generally admired? Evidently the answer can only lie in some sort of mass hypnosis, or ‘epidemic suggestion’. The whole civilized world has somehow been deluded into thinking Shakespeare a good writer, and even the plainest demonstration to the contrary makes no impression, because one is not dealing with a reasoned opinion but with something akin to religious faith.” It’s pretty obvious that this is a bad approach to ANYTHING, and invariably reveals more about the insecurity of the writer (Orwell suggests that Tolstoy is offended by King Lear because he recognizes himself in it).
I’ll give another atta boy to Glenn and the Siren (atta girl?) and say that I adored Sirk from my first viewing of one of his films (Imitation of Life, in an entry-level film studies class in college.)*
* Hi John Magary!
Can we get Jeffrey Wells in a room with Glenn, Alison Anders and Scorsese to duke this out and film the resulting mêlée? I’d pay good money to see that critical slaying.
Piqued the interest of a couple of UK critics while Twittering about this last night; needless to say, they were aghast.
Almost makes me love ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS even more (if that’s possible).
Also, the MoC disc of THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW is, indeed, wonderful. Perhaps a “minor” release for them, but no less indispensible.
Agree with lipranzer’s comment about the wonderfulness of RECKLESS MOMENT, which prefigures Sirk’s melodramas in many ways. Mason’s quiet portrayal of desperation is heartbreaking, one of his best performances.
No one has mentioned the John Stahl IMITATION OF LIFE, which I’ve always preferred to Sirk’s version, mainly because Colbert is more credible than Turner.
As for Wells being Eloi Manning, that would require him knowing who Eli Manning is, which I doubt given his professed ignorance of and indifference to sports. That doesn’t disqualify him as a manly man, does it?
I don’t know, Giles, I never think of any MoC release as “minor!” And I think “Tomorrow” is one of Sirk’s best.
Just in terms of size of the package (as it were, madam), I meant, not the picture itself, which is terrific.
If you’ve ever seen Wells in a real debate you’d be disappointed. He’s a pussy. Look how he caved on Bill O’Reilly – ‑he had the chance to go on the air and tear this guy up like he does to right-wingers on his site. Instead he shriveled up and mumbled, “I;m just a guy with a big mouth and a blog.” Way to man up!
My apologies to Eloi Manning for daring to presume he be Wells. He’s worse, the kind of guy that chuckles at the hate Wells drop on people with different views, giggles as Wells bans them, high-fives Lex for his MAN SHOW rants, then j’accuses those who disagree with Wells as wimps and haters, etc. You’re not Wells, you’re a groupie.
I did film studies at university in the 90s, and the sum total of all the Douglas Sirk films we got shown was two scenes from Written on the Wind, one of which was the opening credits. I didn’t see the film in full until just a few years ago and I didn’t like it. Though we *did* see Johnny Guitar (to use another example previously cited)… which I didn’t like either. No accounting for individual taste… which doesn’t stop the Wells piece from being an extended troll, of course, by someone apparently desperate to prove themselves a free-thinker by comparison with the rest of us sheep.
I’ve been away fro the discussion, so I’m late in responding / clarifying. (Sorry.) But YES, I completely agree. Most of what makes Sirk profound IS right there for all to see. No excess deconstructive spelunking necessary.
I was speaking specifically of the skeptics. In (to take my most direct anecdotal evidence) my 101 classes, a good half to 2/3 of folks immediately respond to IMITATION OF LIFE and the clips of other Sirks I show. But there are some – and I don’t think this is completely due to their youth – who are dumbfounded by Sirk. What is this guy up to? For THOSE folks, serious discussion and some careful formal analysis is almost all that’s needed to bring them around.
(I mean, I never want to put the social/political OVER the formal with Sirk, because it’s so all of a piece, and the formal is so self-evident, AND the films are so magnificent as “weepies” that reading against the grain is not necessarily required. But some students are so, you know, up their own ass with respect to racial privilege that certain aspects of IMITATION “don’t make sense.” Someone has to help them accept that, yes, white people can sometimes be self-absorbed douchebags, and some of the film’s “ridiculousness” is just the result of Sirk’s honest depiction of this sad fact.)
I agree with everything said above and am eagerly looking forward to my copy of THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW coming in the mail, but I have to say that I didn’t get all the praise for MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION when it came out last year. That was a movie that didn’t work for me even on its own very peculiar terms.
I wasn’t aware of Jeffrey Wells other than his name being familiar as an Oscar blogger until I was asked by another site for my opinion on his assault on Mo’Nique for “dissing” the New York Film Critics by going ahead with a long-planned family vacation (right before starting her TV show) instead of picking up her New York award in person. Actually reading the drivel that makes up his web page, I was appalled by his racism as well as his pathetic striving to come off as a macho kind of film reporter guy (Jim Bacon rather than Lawrence J. Quirk).
Put him out of mind again until I saw a link somewhere to his Sirk hissy-fit. When someone doesn’t “get” Sirk it’s telling me that on the most basic level, he or she when watching movies doesn’t actually see movies. I mean how can you see the toy robot falling over in There’s Always Tomorrow, the boy riding the mechanical horse in Written on the Wind, the boy stuck in the carnival airplane in Tarnished Angels, the newspaper headline in Magnificent Obsession declaring a world crisis or practically any scene in Imitation of Life and not see that this is visual symbolism that makes Bergman look like an amateur clod. And that’s not even getting into his use of space and his Brechtian devices.
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who doesn’t appreciate Sirk has no place in my life. (Of course I was fortunate to have a college professor – Michael Stern who later traded in film studies for writing about Road Food – who was an absolute Sirk devotee, so much so that in the comedy class he taught, he showed no Chaplins or Sturges, but made sure we became familiar with No Room For The Groom.
And I am grateful to Wells for one thing – I hadn’t previously known about this website, Glenn. It’s great!
“I mean how can you see the toy robot falling over in There’s Always Tomorrow, the boy riding the mechanical horse in Written on the Wind, the boy stuck in the carnival airplane in Tarnished Angels, the newspaper headline in Magnificent Obsession declaring a world crisis or practically any scene in Imitation of Life and not see that this is visual symbolism that makes Bergman look like an amateur clod.”
Yea to the mechanical horse and carnival airplane (or the model of the oil derrick on Dorothy Malone’s dad’s desk), but now that I’ve seen There’s Always Tomorrow, nay to the toy robot. The photography of the toys was probably my least favorite thing about the movie. And I think the difference is something very simple. When Stack looks at the boy riding the mechanical horse, there’s a character in the film actually looking at and reacting to said boy, it’s not just the camera-eye fixing on some piece of the mise en scene, unobserved by the people in the movie, that the director wants to tell us is symbolic of the plight of the characters. To me the stuff with the robot is the epitome of amateur clod.
“When someone doesn’t “get” Sirk it’s telling me that on the most basic level, he or she when watching movies doesn’t actually see movies.”
Excellent. This discussion had been so rational up till now (though obviously, I’ve disagreed with the majority of pro-Sirk posts here, they’ve all been reasonable and well-thought out), and then someone has to throw in old “If you don’t like so-and-so, or such-and-such a movie, then you don’t know movies!” canard. Auteurist critics of the 1960’s tried that with HATARI, while Paulettes did the same thing with MISSION TO MARS this past decade. To paraphrase Woody Allen, that was wonderful; I love being reduced to being a cultural philistine.