Douglas Sirk
When Sirk on Sirk first appeared in 1971, Douglas Sirk’s rediscovery was still underway. He ¬hadn’t made a film since Imitation of Life (1959), the Lana Turner weepie that grossed more for Universal than any other film in the studio’s history. He had retired to Switzerland and was directing theater in Munich, one play a year: Cyrano de Bergerac, The Tempest, Schiller’s The Parasite, Tennessee Williams’ The Seven Descents of Myrtle. When the director commenced the series of conversations with film scholar Jon Halliday that became Sirk on Sirk, he had forgotten many details of his own career. “I was talking to Hilde [Mrs. Sirk] yesterday after you’d gone,” he told Halliday, “and she says I did make a film called All That Heaven Allows. Can you tell me a bit more about it?”
Fortunately, his memory improved as the project continued. The most recent edition of Sirk on Sirk includes material withheld until Sirk’s and other people’s deaths, including the observation that Rock Hudson, whose career Sirk built in the ’50s, “seemed to me to lie near the middle of the sexual spectrum, but when he met up with Ross [Hunter, Sirk’s producer], that was it. The studio had a heck of a time trying to hide Rock’s homosexuality.” We also learn why Sirk (aka Detlef Sierck, until his emigration to America) failed to leave Germany until 1937: he had a son, Claus Detlef, whom he hoped to get out. His first wife, Claus’ mother, had become a Nazi—in reaction, Sirk thought, to his remarriage to a Jew; because his second wife was Jewish, his ex was able to get a court order preventing Sirk from seeing the son. Claus Detlef’s mother pushed him into the Hitler Youth and a career as a child actor. In the mid ’30s, Claus became the male Shirley Temple of the Third Reich. (Sirk never found the opportunity to rescue him, though at one time they worked on adjacent soundstages at Ufa; Claus was killed at the Russian front in 1944.) As Sirk says of an entirely different matter, “You must remember that the ridiculous and the grandiose dwell very close together.”
It’s an aphorism suitable to Sirk’s career. He brought a scholarly knowledge of classical dramatic structures and metaphysics to the industrially churned, cartoonlike narratives of the movie business, recognizing their deep affinity on the level of myth. This happy wisdom was shared, instinctively, by many an ignorant mogul. After Sirk’s fourth Nazi-¬era film broke box office records, “they knew I had the golden touch, which you have to have in movies.” A lucky thing for Sirk, whose leftist sympathies otherwise would have landed him in a concentration camp.
Sirk on Sirk takes us through the theater world of the Weimar Republic, where Sirk won prominence as a director of both classic and contemporary plays, aligned with the movement away from Expressionism heralded by Brecht and Weill, Odon von Horvath, and myriad lesser figures like Arnult Bronnen and Hanns Johst who rolled with the zeitgeist and later became Nazis. Sirk’s theater résumé for most years between 1922 and 1934 reflects a vast appetite for work; in the 1925–26 season alone, he directed plays by Shaw, Bronnen, Pirandello, Grabbe, Shakespeare, Werfel, Sardou, and Schnitzler.
When many German artists saw the writing on the wall and began timing their exits, Sirk, who believed the Nazis were a passing aberration, continued staging blatantly leftist productions, including a 1929 The Threepenny Opera that was “extremely harsh more so, I think, than Brecht had intended.” Sirk’s problems with the Nazis became serious in 1930, when he put on a Sacco and Vanzetti drama by Bernhard Blume, In the Name of the People, which was banned in Nazi-¬dominated parts of Germany. When his production of Kaiser and Weill’s The Silver Lake opened just after Hitler came to power, the “SA filled a fairly large part of the theater and barracked away, and there was a vast crowd of Nazi Party people outside with banners and God knows what, yelling and all the rest of it.” Hans Rothe, a theater historian, later wrote that “this was the occasion when the curtain rang down on the German stage.” Weill fled Germany the next day.
Asked about his “passionate interest in failure” mentioned in a Cahiers du Cinema interview, Sirk corrects Halliday’s French: “échec means much more than [failure]: it means no exit, being blocked. . . .” Échec well describes Sirk’s situation. “You know, someone you had known for quite some time, who was perfectly rational, you’d see a couple of weeks later, literally, spouting all that terrible Hitler crap.” After the Rohm purge in 1934, when Hitler consolidated his control over the army, Sirk realized what the future would bring. Yet he stayed on, hoping to save Claus Detlef. Sirk was living in Fassbinder’s Lili Marlene.
As the theater world Nazified, Sirk became a favorite target of the Volkischer Beobachter. Sirk’s actors, eager for advancement, were running to the Nazis with tales of the director’s subversive remarks. “What I had been denounced for was that on a particular day, seven years before, in Bremen, I had been sitting around with my actors and we had been talking about our idea of paradise. Because I had mentioned a South Sea island, the woman was assumed not to be an Aryan; lying in a hammock was considered to show that I despised hard work; the glass of wine demonstrated that I enjoyed indulging in frivolity. . . .”
Since his theater work was drawing far too much negative attention, Sirk made a conscious effort to attract the film world’s attention with his cinematic staging of Twelfth Night in Berlin; this desperate strategy worked. Ufa hired him. Ufa Studios were still in private hands, and most of its employees were discreetly anti-¬Nazi. Sirk directed three Ufa films in 1935, another three in 1936, each in two versions (foreign market and domestic). With his seventh film, 1937’s Zu Neuen Ufern (To new shores), he launched the soon-¬to-¬be-¬stellar career of Zarah Leander, whom the Nazis hoped would replace Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo in the public’s hearts. Money talked the same winning language in Nazi Germany and Hollywood. The golden touch kept Sirk relatively safe from attacks. Reich officials urged him to divorce his Jewish wife, and to that end issued her a passport in 1936. She fled to Rome, where Sirk joined her in ’37, on the pretext of location scouting.
It’s no small Sirkian irony that Sirk’s Hollywood career was governed by many of the same constraints as his work in Hitler’s Reich. The studios wanted a product that reliably produced particular emotions, the stories had to end happily, and certain social issues were completely taboo. Aside from a documentary on the Christian Brothers winery in Napa Valley and a movie called Hitler’s Madman, shot in one week for Metro, Sirk directed nothing in America until 1944, having signed a seven-¬year writer’s contract with Harry Cohn, a legendary prick. (“He was carrying a riding whip, which made him look like a Southern plantation owner, although he ¬wasn’t . . . because at least those guys had a bit of culture, and Harry Cohn had absolutely nothing.”) Before signing with Universal, Sirk spent a year working a chicken farm he’d bought in the San Fernando Valley, then two years farming alfalfa in Pomona County.
Sirk had little to do with the Santa Monica émigré circle associated with Salka Viertel—Thomas Mann, Peter Lorre, Fritz Lang, Bertolt Brecht. (“Nearly all of them were living in the past, because they had very little to do, or were often completely out of work altogether.”) Unlike his fellow exiles, Sirk was interested in America. He describes his farming ventures as the happiest times of his life, and speaks of his enthusiasm for Melville and Thoreau. He found something to like in the blocky, morally black-¬and-¬white approach of American films, and in the naïveté of American audiences. He also found ingenious ways to introduce ambiguity into the scripts he was given, to make love stories into “off-¬love” stories, and to deliver the mandatory happy ending as the ironic kind of deus ex machina that Euripides introduced into classical drama, pleasing to the masses, and utterly unconvincing to the sophisticated viewer.
The mortal heaviness of Sirk’s greatest Hollywood films, like Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels, is harsher than the bleakest noir, because the compelling characters in these films, the secondary leads, fail at whatever it is they want, a failure that undermines any audience-¬pleasing resolution of the main stars’ problems. The real ending of All That Heaven Allows is the moment when Jane Wyman’s horrible children give her a television set to replace Rock Hudson. The film goes on, Wyman and Hudson finally get together. But nobody remembers this epilogue, or the one that follows Juanita Moore’s funeral in Imitation of Life. As Sirk puts it, “Everything seems to be OK, but you well know it isn’t. By just drawing out the characters you certainly could get a story—along the lines of hopelessness, of course. . . . Lana will forget about her daughter again. . . . Gavin will go off with some other woman. Susan Kohner will go back to the escape world of vaudeville. Sandra Dee will marry a decent guy. . . . But the point is you don’t have to do this. And if you did, you would get a picture that the studio would have abhorred.”
Sirk’s remarkably clear-¬eyed appraisal of what worked and what went wrong in his life as well as his movies, expounded with dry humor and casual anecdotal brilliance, makes Sirk on Sirk one of the very best books of the Faber interview series, an “assisted autobiography” that reveals how much someone truly clever can get away with in the least auspicious circumstances.
When Sirk on Sirk first appeared in 1971, Douglas Sirk’s rediscovery was still underway. He ¬hadn’t made a film since Imitation of Life (1959), the Lana Turner weepie that grossed more for Universal than any other film in the studio’s history. He had retired to Switzerland and was directing theater in Munich, one play a year: Cyrano de Bergerac, The Tempest, Schiller’s The Parasite, Tennessee Williams’ The Seven Descents of Myrtle. When the director commenced the series of conversations with film scholar Jon Halliday that became Sirk on Sirk, he had forgotten many details of his own career. “I was talking to Hilde [Mrs. Sirk] yesterday after you’d gone,” he told Halliday, “and she says I did make a film called All That Heaven Allows. Can you tell me a bit more about it?”
Fortunately, his memory improved as the project continued. The most recent edition of Sirk on Sirk includes material withheld until Sirk’s and other people’s deaths, including the observation that Rock Hudson, whose career Sirk built in the ’50s, “seemed to me to lie near the middle of the sexual spectrum, but when he met up with Ross [Hunter, Sirk’s producer], that was it. The studio had a heck of a time trying to hide Rock’s homosexuality.” We also learn why Sirk (aka Detlef Sierck, until his emigration to America) failed to leave Germany until 1937: he had a son, Claus Detlef, whom he hoped to get out. His first wife, Claus’ mother, had become a Nazi—in reaction, Sirk thought, to his remarriage to a Jew; because his second wife was Jewish, his ex was able to get a court order preventing Sirk from seeing the son. Claus Detlef’s mother pushed him into the Hitler Youth and a career as a child actor. In the mid ’30s, Claus became the male Shirley Temple of the Third Reich. (Sirk never found the opportunity to rescue him, though at one time they worked on adjacent soundstages at Ufa; Claus was killed at the Russian front in 1944.) As Sirk says of an entirely different matter, “You must remember that the ridiculous and the grandiose dwell very close together.”
It’s an aphorism suitable to Sirk’s career. He brought a scholarly knowledge of classical dramatic structures and metaphysics to the industrially churned, cartoonlike narratives of the movie business, recognizing their deep affinity on the level of myth. This happy wisdom was shared, instinctively, by many an ignorant mogul. After Sirk’s fourth Nazi-¬era film broke box office records, “they knew I had the golden touch, which you have to have in movies.” A lucky thing for Sirk, whose leftist sympathies otherwise would have landed him in a concentration camp.
Sirk on Sirk takes us through the theater world of the Weimar Republic, where Sirk won prominence as a director of both classic and contemporary plays, aligned with the movement away from Expressionism heralded by Brecht and Weill, Odon von Horvath, and myriad lesser figures like Arnult Bronnen and Hanns Johst who rolled with the zeitgeist and later became Nazis. Sirk’s theater résumé for most years between 1922 and 1934 reflects a vast appetite for work; in the 1925–26 season alone, he directed plays by Shaw, Bronnen, Pirandello, Grabbe, Shakespeare, Werfel, Sardou, and Schnitzler.
When many German artists saw the writing on the wall and began timing their exits, Sirk, who believed the Nazis were a passing aberration, continued staging blatantly leftist productions, including a 1929 The Threepenny Opera that was “extremely harsh more so, I think, than Brecht had intended.” Sirk’s problems with the Nazis became serious in 1930, when he put on a Sacco and Vanzetti drama by Bernhard Blume, In the Name of the People, which was banned in Nazi-¬dominated parts of Germany. When his production of Kaiser and Weill’s The Silver Lake opened just after Hitler came to power, the “SA filled a fairly large part of the theater and barracked away, and there was a vast crowd of Nazi Party people outside with banners and God knows what, yelling and all the rest of it.” Hans Rothe, a theater historian, later wrote that “this was the occasion when the curtain rang down on the German stage.” Weill fled Germany the next day.
Asked about his “passionate interest in failure” mentioned in a Cahiers du Cinema interview, Sirk corrects Halliday’s French: “échec means much more than [failure]: it means no exit, being blocked. . . .” Échec well describes Sirk’s situation. “You know, someone you had known for quite some time, who was perfectly rational, you’d see a couple of weeks later, literally, spouting all that terrible Hitler crap.” After the Rohm purge in 1934, when Hitler consolidated his control over the army, Sirk realized what the future would bring. Yet he stayed on, hoping to save Claus Detlef. Sirk was living in Fassbinder’s Lili Marlene.
As the theater world Nazified, Sirk became a favorite target of the Volkischer Beobachter. Sirk’s actors, eager for advancement, were running to the Nazis with tales of the director’s subversive remarks. “What I had been denounced for was that on a particular day, seven years before, in Bremen, I had been sitting around with my actors and we had been talking about our idea of paradise. Because I had mentioned a South Sea island, the woman was assumed not to be an Aryan; lying in a hammock was considered to show that I despised hard work; the glass of wine demonstrated that I enjoyed indulging in frivolity. . . .”
Since his theater work was drawing far too much negative attention, Sirk made a conscious effort to attract the film world’s attention with his cinematic staging of Twelfth Night in Berlin; this desperate strategy worked. Ufa hired him. Ufa Studios were still in private hands, and most of its employees were discreetly anti-¬Nazi. Sirk directed three Ufa films in 1935, another three in 1936, each in two versions (foreign market and domestic). With his seventh film, 1937’s Zu Neuen Ufern (To new shores), he launched the soon-¬to-¬be-¬stellar career of Zarah Leander, whom the Nazis hoped would replace Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo in the public’s hearts. Money talked the same winning language in Nazi Germany and Hollywood. The golden touch kept Sirk relatively safe from attacks. Reich officials urged him to divorce his Jewish wife, and to that end issued her a passport in 1936. She fled to Rome, where Sirk joined her in ’37, on the pretext of location scouting.
It’s no small Sirkian irony that Sirk’s Hollywood career was governed by many of the same constraints as his work in Hitler’s Reich. The studios wanted a product that reliably produced particular emotions, the stories had to end happily, and certain social issues were completely taboo. Aside from a documentary on the Christian Brothers winery in Napa Valley and a movie called Hitler’s Madman, shot in one week for Metro, Sirk directed nothing in America until 1944, having signed a seven-¬year writer’s contract with Harry Cohn, a legendary prick. (“He was carrying a riding whip, which made him look like a Southern plantation owner, although he ¬wasn’t . . . because at least those guys had a bit of culture, and Harry Cohn had absolutely nothing.”) Before signing with Universal, Sirk spent a year working a chicken farm he’d bought in the San Fernando Valley, then two years farming alfalfa in Pomona County.
Sirk had little to do with the Santa Monica émigré circle associated with Salka Viertel—Thomas Mann, Peter Lorre, Fritz Lang, Bertolt Brecht. (“Nearly all of them were living in the past, because they had very little to do, or were often completely out of work altogether.”) Unlike his fellow exiles, Sirk was interested in America. He describes his farming ventures as the happiest times of his life, and speaks of his enthusiasm for Melville and Thoreau. He found something to like in the blocky, morally black-¬and-¬white approach of American films, and in the naïveté of American audiences. He also found ingenious ways to introduce ambiguity into the scripts he was given, to make love stories into “off-¬love” stories, and to deliver the mandatory happy ending as the ironic kind of deus ex machina that Euripides introduced into classical drama, pleasing to the masses, and utterly unconvincing to the sophisticated viewer.
The mortal heaviness of Sirk’s greatest Hollywood films, like Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels, is harsher than the bleakest noir, because the compelling characters in these films, the secondary leads, fail at whatever it is they want, a failure that undermines any audience-¬pleasing resolution of the main stars’ problems. The real ending of All That Heaven Allows is the moment when Jane Wyman’s horrible children give her a television set to replace Rock Hudson. The film goes on, Wyman and Hudson finally get together. But nobody remembers this epilogue, or the one that follows Juanita Moore’s funeral in Imitation of Life. As Sirk puts it, “Everything seems to be OK, but you well know it isn’t. By just drawing out the characters you certainly could get a story—along the lines of hopelessness, of course. . . . Lana will forget about her daughter again. . . . Gavin will go off with some other woman. Susan Kohner will go back to the escape world of vaudeville. Sandra Dee will marry a decent guy. . . . But the point is you don’t have to do this. And if you did, you would get a picture that the studio would have abhorred.”
Sirk’s remarkably clear-¬eyed appraisal of what worked and what went wrong in his life as well as his movies, expounded with dry humor and casual anecdotal brilliance, makes Sirk on Sirk one of the very best books of the Faber interview series, an “assisted autobiography” that reveals how much someone truly clever can get away with in the least auspicious circumstances.
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