Douglas Sirk, whose Hollywood career ran from 1943 to 1959, may be the most intellectual filmmaker ever to work in Hollywood (at least, he’d run Terrence Malick, who translated Heidegger, a close second), and it shows in his films, which are the subject of an incomplete but copious, rarity-packed retrospective at Film Society of Lincoln Center (December 23rd to January 6th).
A German émigré (he left in 1937 and came to the United States in 1939), Sirk made some great movies about Europe before finding his footing as a distinctive observer of American life. But, once he got started, he cast his adopted country in a keen poetical-historical light that deserves to be called philosophical. Though Sirk had only one Hollywood writing credit (a pseudonymous one, at that), there’s a thematic consistency and continuity that runs from film to film no less than there would be in the work of a novelist or a playwright developing a complex core of ideas and emotions.
Given the secondhand nature of his scripts—stories based on other writers’ scripts, on novels, or on other films that he remade—he should be seen as the modern classicist that he is, working in the realm of mythology, but with suburbanites, vaudevillians, and pioneers replacing princes, queens, and gods. I’ve written here recently about his mastery of melodrama as a modern, ironic variety of tragedy, and about the powerful visual style with which he invokes that idea. But his thematic continuities, though perhaps less striking, are as much of a contribution to the history of cinema—or, rather, even to the history of thought.
There are two main poles around which his ideas gravitate: crackpot philosophers and identity-shifters. Seeking the dead-centermainstream of American life, past and present—families and towns, businesses and communities—Sirk focusses on singular, and often isolated, figures of change and progress. (I wrote in The New Yorker about his trio of films from 1953 on this subject.) Sirk created (to borrow a phrase) a cinema of outsiders, idealists disguised as mercenaries or clowns, disdained as immoralists or pursued as outlaws, who are nonetheless also the source of coherence, softening morals and shifting values in order to decrease tensions, resolve conflicts, and reconcile opponents in public and private. They bear the future in their willful and lusty energies, and they deliver it with a reckless vortex of disorder and emotional turmoil that’s most often manifested in a shuffling of the romantic cards, a change of partners that portends wider societal changes eddying outward from family life.
The melodramatist was also a master of comedy, and in one great film that’s unfortunately not in the Lincoln Center retrospective, “Week-End with Father” (1951), Sirk introduces his philosophical characters with ironic derision. It’s the New York bourgeois story of Brad (Van Heflin), a widower and executive with two young daughters, and Jean (Patricia Neal), a widow and nonworking mother with two sons, who meet at Grand Central while sending their children to summer camp, and quickly fall in love. When the action shifts from Manhattan to the rustic wild for the camp’s parents’ weekend, the whirlwind romance is threatened by a television actress (Virginia Field) and an athletic he-man (Richard Denning).
There are scintillating comic turns throughout, as the effete businessman is put to the test of nature and found wanting, but the movie’s objects of sardonic satire, the actress and the athlete, actually turn out to be the far-seeing modernizers—a woman who intends to continue her career even after marrying and becoming a stepmother, a physically fit man who has sworn off meat and eats only “health food.” Here, too, Sirk introduces another fillip to his sociological gallery—children who are the real bosses of American life.
The kids in “Week-End with Father” are young, but they’re far from innocent, and they end up pulling the strings (including, in one outrageous scene, literally) on their elders. In “Take Me to Town” (playing December 31st), Sirk offers a trio of headstrong young brothers, the youngest of whom (played by Dusty Henley) is one of the drollest movie kids this side of George Winslow. A child’s will, innocent and free-spirited, is the spark both of “Meet Me at the Fair” and “All I Desire,” but, in Sirk’s view, when children become teen-agers and young adults and face the complexities of life with values and ideas that they’ve merely learned from books, they’re likely to become regressive and repressive. Perhaps no more monstrous children, outside horror films, were ever seen in Hollywood than those who interfere grotesquely with their parents’ lives in “All That Heaven Allows” and “There’s Always Tomorrow.” Sirk’s lesson has a long throw—politics motivated by a demagogic plea “for the children” is a code for reactionary moralism.
The great book-length set of interviews with Sirk by Jon Halliday, from 1970 (more than a decade after the director’s retirement), reveals the span and depth of the director’s theoretical reflections. Any filmmaker’s (or any artist’s) self-explanations should be taken, if not skeptically, at least separately—not as explanations of the work but as a parallel track of thought and creation, as artworks in themselves. Nonetheless, Sirk’s affirmation of the powerful influence that the writings of Thoreau had on him, from adolescence onward, is apparent in his films. He declares that his 1954 romantic melodrama “All That Heaven Allows” (December 24th and 25th—a wickedly superb Christmas movie) is “about the antithesis of Thoreau’s qualified Rousseauism and established American society,” but he also grants that there’s no real need for him to say so: “Walden” is seen, cited, and discussed in a key scene in the movie. Nonetheless, what’s remarkable about Sirk’s placement of “Walden” is that, in the film, its lessons are said to have been delivered not from study but from the personal influence of an independent-minded naturalist (played by Rock Hudson). It’s as if Sirk doubles Thoreau on himself, showing American philosophy not as an academic discipline but as the residue of a way of life, a trace of vital and ongoing experience.
Sirk’s America is a land of freelance, loose-cannon virtual theoreticians arising from all walks of life. In a superb comedy that’s not in the retrospective, “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?”—Sirk’s first collaboration with Rock Hudson, whom he made a star (with “Magnificent Obsession”)—he centers the film (set in the nineteen-twenties) on a rich and famous old man (Charles Coburn) who shows up incognito as a deus ex machina in a family descended from a woman who had turned down his offer of marriage decades earlier. The life lessons that he imparts seem relatively simple and straightforward, but he dredges them not from his position as a respected businessman but, rather, from the rugged and rowdy, disreputable and freethinking life that he led on the rugged upward road to success.
