A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.
But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Douglas Sirk.
Douglas Sirk was a German film director best known for his work in Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s. Sirk started his career in Germany as a stage and screen director, but he left for Hollywood in 1937 after his Jewish wife was persecuted by the Nazis.
In the 1950s, he achieved his greatest commercial success with film melodramas Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, and Imitation of Life. While those films were initially panned by critics as sentimental women’s pictures, they are today widely regarded by film directors, critics, and scholars as masterpieces. His work is seen as “critique of the bourgeoisie in general and of 1950s America in particular”, while painting a “compassionate portrait of characters trapped by social conditions”. Beyond the surface of the film, Sirk worked with complex mises-en-scène and lush Technicolor to underline his statements.
Sirk’s melodramas of the 1950s, while highly commercially successful, were generally very poorly received by reviewers. His films were considered unimportant (because they revolve around female and domestic issues), banal (because of their focus on larger-than-life feelings) and unrealistic (because of their conspicuous and distinctive style). Their often melodramatic manner was viewed by critics as being in bad taste.
Attitudes toward Sirk’s films changed drastically in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s as his work was re-examined by French, American, and British critics. As Jean-Luc Godard wrote in his review of A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), “…I am going to write a madly enthusiastic review of Douglas Sirk’s latest film, simply because it set my cheeks afire.”
The major critical reappraisal of Sirk began in France with the April 1967 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, which included an extended interview with Sirk by Serge Daney and Jean-Louis Noames, an appreciation by Jean-Louis Comolli (“The Blind Man and the Mirror or The Impossible Cinema of Douglas Sirk”), and a “biofilmographie” compiled by Patrick Brion and Dominique Rabourdin. Leading American critic Andrew Sarris praised Sirk in his 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, although Sirk failed to qualify for Sarris’ controversial “pantheon” of great directors. From around 1970 there was a burgeoning interest among academic film scholars for Sirk’s work – especially his American melodramas. The seminal work in this field was Jon Halliday’s book-length interview, Sirk on Sirk (1971) which presented Sirk as “… a sophisticated intellectual, a filmmaker who arrived in Hollywood with a very clear vision, leaving behind him an established career in German theater and film”.
Several major revival seasons of Sirk’s films followed over the next few years, including a 20-film retrospective at the 1972 Edinburgh Festival (which Sirk attended), which also generated a book of essays. In 1974 the University of Connecticut Film Society programmed a complete retrospective of the director’s American films, and invited Sirk to attend, but on the way to the airport, for the flight to New York, Sirk suffered a hemorrhage that seriously impaired the vision in his left eye.
Analyses of Sirk’s work, with their emphases on aspects of Sirk’s formerly-criticized style, revealed an oblique criticism of American society hidden beneath a banal facade of plotting conventional for the era – Sirk’s films were now seen as masterpieces of irony. The criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s was dominated by an ideological take on Sirk’s work, gradually changing from Marxist-inspired visions in the early 1970s, to a focus on gender and sexuality in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Film critic Roger Ebert has said, “To appreciate a film like Written on the Wind probably takes more sophistication to understand than one of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpieces, because Bergman’s themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message.”
Sirk’s reputation was also helped by a widespread nostalgia for old-fashioned Hollywood films in the 1970s. His work is now widely considered to show excellent control of visuals, extending from lighting and framing to costumes and sets that are saturated with symbolism and shot through with subtle barbs of irony.
Sirk’s films have been quoted in films by directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder (whose Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is partly based on All That Heaven Allows) and, later, Quentin Tarantino, Todd Haynes, Pedro Almodóvar, Wong Kar-wai, David Lynch, John Waters and Lars von Trier. More specifically, Almodóvar’s vibrant use of color in 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown recalls the cinematography of Sirk’s films of the 1950s, while Haynes’ Far From Heaven was a conscious attempt to replicate a typical Sirk melodrama—in particular All That Heaven Allows. Tarantino paid homage to Sirk and his melodramatic style in Pulp Fiction, when character Vincent Vega, at a ’50s-themed restaurant, orders the “Douglas Sirk steak” cooked “bloody as hell”. Aki Kaurismäki alluded to Sirk as well; in his silent film, Juha, the villain’s sports car is named “Sierck”. Sirk was also one of the directors mentioned by Guillermo del Toro in his Oscar acceptance speech for Best Picture for The Shape of Water: “Growing up in Mexico as a kid, I was a big admirer of foreign films. Foreign film, like E.T., William Wyler, or Douglas Sirk, or Frank Capra.” Polyester (1981) directed by Waters was, according to Waters, informed by Sirk’s Universal melodramas.
SCREEN TIME WITH SAM 