Notizie

Douglas Sirk at Universal-International is a two-part overview by Blake Lucas. Part 2 can be found here. Mubi's series, In the Realm of Melodrama: A Douglas Sirk Retrospective, is showing April 2 - June 20, 2018 in the United Kingdom and many other countries.It is often felt that in an ideal world, film directors—or artists of any kind—might carve out their own bodies of work, in freedom, without any interference, beholden to nothing but a personal vision that they labor to express. In movies, it has often not worked that way, and in Hollywood in the years of the studio system especially, directors worked within conditions. One of these was the studio itself, generally conceded to have its own style, and so many other defining aspects—genre preferences, contract players and craftsmen, contract producers with power of their own. But a fair number of directors now widely considered among the...

The European filmmaker directed a series of deceptively complex melodramas in the 1950s.“This is the dialectic — there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art” — Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk was born in Germany in 1900, and began his career in the early 1920s working in theater. In 1922, he directed his first production — an adaptation of Hermann Bossdorf’s Stationmaster Death, and from then on he became one of the most respected theater directors in Weimar Germany. Then, in 1934, he took a job as a film director at Ufa, the biggest studio in Germany at the time.

In 1941, Sirk left Germany and began working as a director in Hollywood. His early films, such as the WWII drama Hitler’s Madman (1942) have largely been forgotten. These early films varied in genre — he directed war films (Mystery Submarine), historical dramas (A Scandal in Paris), film...

Here’s a real gem — a ‘classic’ Chekhov story turned into a compelling tale of lust and murder. George Sanders and Linda Darnell shine as a judge and the peasant girl who intrigues him; Edward Everett Horton is excellent cast against type in a dramatic role.

Summer Storm

DVD

Sprocket Vault / Kit Parker

1944 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 106 min. / Street Date October 20, 2009 (I’m a little late) / available through Sprocket Vault / 14.99

Starring: George Sanders, Edward Everett Horton, Linda Darnell, Anna Lee, Hugo Haas, Lori Lahner, Sig Ruman, Robert Greig, Byron Foulger, Mike Mazurki, Elizabeth Russell.

Cinematography: Archie Stout, Eugen Schüfftan

Art Direction: Rudi Feld

Collaborating Editor: Gregg G. Tallas

Original Music: Karl Hajos

Written by Roland Leigh, Douglas Sirk (as Michael O’Hara), Robert Theoren based on the play The Shooting Party by Anton Chekhov

Produced by Seymour Nebenzal

Directed by Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk, born Hans Detlef Sierck, had a pretty amazing career.

Imitations of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk (December 23 – January 6) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York gathers a substantial number of the German auteur's classic films together with more obscure titles, some of which may deserve elevation into the higher ranks of his oeuvre. Already, in the past few years, There's Always Tomorrow (1956) has crept up the league table of Sirkian melodrama, mainly because it became easier to see and people recognized that it could stand comparison with All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959), or nearly so.Some Sirk movies will, however, never be quite respectable, but in a way I love them for that. His period movies often dive headlong into Hollywood kitsch in a way that his once-despised weepies mainly avoid. There's a trio of movies playing with George Sanders which exemplify this in their different ways. Summer Storm (1944) was Hollywood's...

Imitations of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk (December 23 – January 6) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York gathers a substantial number of the German auteur's classic films together with more obscure titles, some of which may deserve elevation into the higher ranks of his oeuvre. Already, in the past few years, There's Always Tomorrow (1956) has crept up the league table of Sirkian melodrama, mainly because it became easier to see and people recognized that it could stand comparison with All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959), or nearly so.Some Sirk movies will, however, never be quite respectable, but in a way I love them for that. His period movies often dive headlong into Hollywood kitsch in a way that his once-despised weepies mainly avoid. There's a trio of movies playing with George Sanders which exemplify this in their different ways. Summer Storm (1944) was Hollywood's...