The Films of Douglas Sirk
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In Sirk’s great 50s melodramas, six of which are showing in a seven-week series of matinees at the Music Box starting April 15, the material surroundings are so powerful they can seem to dictate the characters’ actions and even their identities. Decorating schemes, flowers, picture windows, cars, and planes have a mysterious vitality and agency. In Written on the Wind (1956), about a Texas oil heir, Kyle (Robert Stack), and his friend Mitch (Rock Hudson), who are both in love with Lucy (Lauren Bacall), Kyle flies Lucy to Miami to impress her. A pan of her unimaginably opulent hotel suite creates a blinding labyrinth of glitzy details; colors that ought to blend, such as blues and greens, seem utterly disjunct, fragments of an incomprehensible world. Lucy flees. She doesn’t want to be part of a cheap seduction, but also it seems no flesh-and-blood human could survive in that dizzying profusion of surfaces and reflections.
Throughout Sirk’s films, compositions fall into fragments. Cuts seem to split the space; camera movements alienate rather than connect. Often this is accomplished with great subtlety: inside the drugstore, the shadows of passersby can be seen on the sidewalk, rhythmic disruptions that rob the characters of their power. In a similar scene in All That Heaven Allows (1955), the occasion is happier–dancing after a dinner party in a warmly lit interior–but a skylight shows leaves in silhouette blowing ominously across the roof. Later in the film, in which a well-off widow (Jane Wyman) is ostracized for an affair with her much younger gardener (Rock Hudson), she’s seen from outside the house, standing alone at her window observing Christmas carolers. The camera moves in to engage us in her isolation, but it draws so close to the window that, as we become more aware of the glass, the space seems to fracture, leaving her profoundly distanced, even “walled up”–the term one character uses to describe widows. Though All That Heaven Allows has a happy ending, it’s undercut by the gardener’s ongoing redecoration of his home to make it more suburban.
When: Sat-Sun 4/15-4/16, 11:30 AM
