The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions

Introduction

Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

—DOUGLAS SIRK, 1971¹

DOUGLAS SIRK WAS ONE OF THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY CINEMA’S GREAT ironists. And perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the films he made in Europe and America is the rigor with which they create a gulf between how his characters see themselves and our view of them.

They’re forever grappling with the same problems that have always afflicted men and women and parents and children, to do with love, death, and social circumstance. In some cases, they do so in a world of melodrama; in others, they’re immersed in the trappings of genre films, such as crime thrillers, musicals, war dramas, and Westerns. Whatever the contexts, though, Sirk adds another layer to their dramatic shape and to his characters’ struggles within them.

All around, but beyond the reach of their vision, are forces which define the parameters of their lives. These are evident at the most basic level, in the way that the plots almost always hinge on problems for which the only solution becomes a convenient plot-bound miracle, a deus ex machina. As Sirk told journalist Wolfgang Limmer in 1973, "These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition. One could follow these thoughts endlessly through Dante, Moliere, Calderon, and even in the grandiose, celestial, operetta-like ending of the second part of Faust."²

There’s also an air of fatalism in the way that social customs and the material world acquire lives of their own in Sirk’s stories, stifling the characters’ sense of what’s possible and limiting their options. From Das Madchen vom Moorhof/The Girl from the Marsh Croft (1935) and Boefje (1939) through Summer Storm (1944) and Has Anybody Seen My Gal (1951)—which begins with a caption reading This is a story about money. Remember it?—to The Tarnished Angels (1957) and Imitation of Life (1959), characters’ choices seem to be determined by a combination of ideological decree and financial capacity.

It’s remarkable how often carousels, merry-go-rounds, and other rotating objects turn up as background detail in Sirk’s films. Rock Hudson in The Tarnished Angels.

Most compellingly of all, forces of repression are signaled through Sirk’s imagery. In his work, mise-en-scène is as crucial to meaning as narrative form. Outlining the material and psychological parameters of his characters’ lives and delineating the limits of their liberty, Sirk’s often baroque visual style points to the ways in which human aspiration is largely determined by the tenor of its surroundings.

Homes that are supposed to be havens start to look like prisons as the décor comes to dominate the compositions. The characters’ reflections are all around them, and it often seems as if they’re entrapped in what is tantamount to a hall of mirrors, a realm made up of reflections of reflections. They’re also frequently framed through the bars of staircases or in low-angle shots that make it seem as if ceilings are pressing down on them. Objects that are supposed to be items of support actually seem to be taking over their lives. Their traumas become the logical extensions of the workings of the world around them.³

And, at least until the happy endings arrive, there seems to be no way out for them, for they’re also regularly locked inside cyclical narratives which suggest a legacy being passed from one generation to the next. It’s remarkable how often carousels, merry-go-rounds, and other rotating objects turn up as background details in Sirk’s films.

Melodrama was the most potent weapon in Sirk’s arsenal. Critic and playwright Eric Bentley’s simple definition of its modus operandi best defines the source of its emotional power. Melodramatic vision is paranoid: we are being persecuted, and we hold that all things, living and dead, are combining to persecute us … Popular Victorian melodrama made extensive use of bad weather and dangerous landscape.⁴ In the women’s film in general, and Sirk’s work in particular, the natural world of Victorian melodrama is replaced by social circumstance: family breakdowns, the loss of a husband or wife, an individual’s alienation from his or her world, the consequences of the divisions wrought by class.

In All That Heaven Allows (1955), a New England widow (Jane Wyman) falls in love with her gardener (Rock Hudson), a younger man, much to the chagrin of the local community and her grown-up children (William Reynolds and Gloria Talbott). They have other plans for her: a TV set; a safe, respectable suitor of her age and social standing (Conrad Nagel); a comfortable, orderly life. In Sirk’s hands (as in its source), this troubled romance unfolds as an indictment of the social mores that make it troubled, mores that not only exist outside the central figures, embodied in how they’re treated by others, but that also seep through their own behavior and are ever-present in the ways in which they think about themselves.

In such a context, when the curtains finally close on them, characters who’d seemed to have overcome their problems emerge in a very different light. Endings that might otherwise be deemed to be happy become far less reassuring. Unsettling ironies cast a shadow across any sense of achievement, not so much invalidating it as offering other ways of viewing it. The miracle that brings The First Legion (1950) to a close might persuade Father Arnoux (Charles Boyer) and Dr. Morell (Lyle Bettger) of the existence of God and the power of faith, but Sirk ensures that we also understand both the event and their reaction to it as an indication of the final incomprehensibility of the world, what John Belton refers to as the pure ambiguity of experience,⁵ and of their limited understandings of their place in it.

The resolutions to Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Battle Hymn (1957) work in much the same way. While acknowledging the changes that have taken place in the lives of their protagonists (played in both films by Rock Hudson) and their heroic efforts on behalf of others, the films also call into question the nature of their spiritual conversions, suggesting the two men’s limited grasp of the personal needs that have been driving them. Sirk’s observations to Jon Halliday in relation to Imitation of Life are especially pertinent to the view of the world that emerges through his work: There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can’t reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections.⁶

• • •

Sirk is now entrenched as an esteemed Hollywood auteur. But perhaps the most astonishing facet of his career is that it took until he left the US for Switzerland at the end of the 1950s (and at the age of sixty-three) for any serious critical attention to be paid to his work. The April 1959 issue of Cahiers du cinema is probably where it began, with Jean-Luc Godard’s enthusiastic review of A Time To Love and A Time To Die (1958), Sirk’s anguished 1957 adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque novel of the same name.

However, it was Cahiers’ April 1967 issue that really set the ball rolling: it included an extended interview conducted by Serge Daney and Jean-Louis Noames;⁷ a thoughtful (and influential) appreciation written by Jean-Louis Comolli, entitled L’aveugle et le miroir ou l’impossible cinema de Douglas Sirk (The Blind Man and the Mirror or The Impossible Cinema of Douglas Sirk); and a biofilmographie compiled by Patrick Brion and Dominique Rabourdin. And, in 1972, Jean-Loup Bourget’s insightful writings about Sirk for Cahiers’ rival, Positif, indicated that the director was no passing fad.

Published in 1968, The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris’s pioneering book on American directors, placed Sirk on The Far Side of Paradise, drawing attention to his distinctive visual style, somewhat guardedly observing that the essence of Sirkian cinema is the direct confrontation of all material, however fanciful and improbable, and predicting that time, if nothing else, will vindicate Douglas Sirk as it already has Josef von Sternberg.⁸

But it wasn’t until the publication of Jon Halliday’s seminal, book-length interview in 1971 that Sirk became known in the English-speaking world as something more than the director of glossy melodramas and other genre films at Universal. The Sirk that emerges from the interview is a cultured intellectual, a filmmaker who arrived in Hollywood with a very clear vision, leaving behind him an established career in German theatre and film.⁹

At around the same time, largely as a result of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s enthusiasm, which appeared in his tribute to Sirk in Fernsehen und Film in February 1971, German critics began to take notice of Sirk’s work. In 1972, a retrospective in Munich paid tribute to the director, followed by Heinz-Gerd Rasner and Reinard Wulf’s extended interview with him in Filmkritik, in November 1973, and Wolfgang Limmer’s soon afterwards in Munich’s widely read Suddeutsche Zeitung. The country of his birth was now paying attention too.

In England during the 1970s, several probing articles by writers such as Paul Willemen and Fred Camper published in the British theoretical journal, Screen (Summer 1971), further enhanced Sirk’s prestige. They were followed by the programming of a twenty-film retrospective at the 1972 Edinburgh Film Festival, at which Sirk was a guest. The event solidified his reputation and led to the publication of a book of essays, edited by Halliday and Laura Mulvey. It offered new material as well as a selection of articles originally published elsewhere, including Thomas Elsaesser’s translation of Fassbinder’s tribute and an essay by a young American filmmaker-in-waiting named Tim Hunter on Summer Storm.

A downside of much of the writing about Sirk during the 1970s and ’80s was the almost reflexive condescension towards the sources for his films, the insistence that he was somehow borrowing from the trash heap and transforming what he found there into masterworks. For example, James Harvey writes in the late 1970s that an intelligent director confronting the world of Fannie Hurst or of Lloyd C. Douglas confronts not only banality but a more virulent kind of falsity: the self-deceptions and consoling lies about life and human character that the tearjerking mode exists to supply us with.¹⁰ This view is also prevalent throughout Halliday’s book, and Sirk himself, at least as quoted—I never encountered this kind of tone from him during my interviews with him—appears to have concurred.¹¹

One gets the sense from the lack of any detail about these sources that what was being espoused here was a borrowed truth rather than the result of any firsthand encounter with the novels or plays being so summarily dismissed. In the Halliday interview, Sirk frequently observes that he didn’t read the books or stories from which his films were adapted or watch the original versions of the films he was remaking. In several cases, these sources were entirely overlooked. It wasn’t until I began researching this book that I became aware that Slightly French (1949) is a remake of Let’s Fall in Love (1933), which was based on a story by Herbert Fields, and that There’s Always Tomorrow (1956) is a remake of a 1934 film of the same name (sometimes known as Too Late for Love), which was based on a story by Ursula Parrott.

Where possible I have tracked down these sources as part of my efforts to identify the creative strategies Sirk brought to the material, to try to make sense of exactly how he was bending them to his style. And enough have proved to be sufficiently worthy of attention in their own right—rather than simply being seen as starting-points for Sirk’s projects—to make it clear that one should remain skeptical about any glib put-downs.

Published 1952, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.

For example, Edna Lee’s novel, All That Heaven Allows, might have been available during the early 1950s and at the time of the release of Sirk’s film, and viewers might well have been compelled to set the two alongside each other in their assessments. But by the time Sirk had been discovered, Lee’s work no longer had any traction, and no commentaries I’ve come across about the film offer any more than a passing note.

Even more obscure is Gene Markey’s 1951 novel, The Great Companions, which served as the source for Sirk’s 1953 musical, Take Me to Town, and, as far as I can tell, was only ever published in the Ladies’ Home Journal. Nowhere does any commentary reflect on what Markey’s work might have contributed to Sirk’s, or how choices made by the filmmakers might have been inspired by it.

In 1974, the University of Connecticut Film Society programmed an ambitious tribute to Sirk,¹² offering a complete retrospective of the director’s American films and inviting him to attend. However, on the way to the airport for the flight to New York, and the eagerly anticipated return to the US, Sirk suffered a hemorrhage that seriously impaired the vision in his left eye, an ailment that was to trouble him for the remainder of his life. If I couldn’t read, I couldn’t live, he said shortly afterwards.¹³ But it wasn’t long before he lost most of the sight of his other eye.¹⁴

However, by this time, his reputation was firmly established, even if he felt uncomfortable with some of the terms in which his work was being discussed. In particular, he was uneasy about the way he’d been cast as an unequivocal critic of all things American, as in Halliday’s account of his work as a commentary on the barren ideology of ’50s America.¹⁵

Much of the subsequent writing on Sirk’s films took up Halliday’s approach, casting the director as something akin to a latterday Bertolt Brecht, identifying his methods of distanciation as a way of casting a critical eye over the workings of classical storytelling and the failures of the American bourgeoisie. While acknowledging Brecht’s influence and expressing his admiration for him (he’d directed a production of The Threepenny Opera in Germany), Sirk was uncomfortable with the way his work was being regarded in the same light.

For example, the robot figure in There’s Always Tomorrow can be viewed as a metaphor for the way Fred MacMurray’s protagonist is living his life, but it reveals nothing of the torment he suffers during the course of the film. Here and elsewhere, Sirk’s films offer critiques of their characters’ ideologies, but also extend to them an understanding and an empathy that acknowledges their humanity. While the director was delighted to find that the social commentary embedded in his work was being recognized, he was dismayed by the way it was often reduced to its didactic elements.

When I went to the United States, he recalled in 1975, I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley. But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.

It was a view upon which he elaborated in an interview with Peter Lehman in 1980. You have to think with the heart, he said. There’s a thinking of the heart, too. At the same time as you can be an intellectual; you can be very sophisticated. I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.¹⁶

Among those who contributed to the wave of critical interest in Sirk at this time were a number of critics well-equipped to situate his work in the context of so-called women’s pictures and to explore its sexual politics. Foremost among them were Elsaesser, whose seminal essay on the family melodrama laid solid foundations for what was to follow.¹⁷ Two other prominent and influential contributors to this discussion during the 1970s were Molly Haskell¹⁸ and Laura Mulvey.¹⁹

Without wanting to promote a straightforward cause-effect reasoning here, I suspect that it’s not entirely by coincidence that much of the commentary about Sirk and the 1950s melodramas occurred during the ’70s, just as the resurgent feminist movement of the time was becoming a potent social force. As revealed in the interviews he was giving, Sirk was clearly a man with social and sexual politics on his mind, and the films for which he initially became famous were dealing with what history had long defined as the woman’s domain, the home.

Much of the commentary, like that on display in the invaluable 1991 collection edited by Lucy Fischer for Imitation of Life: Douglas Sirk, Director,²⁰ focuses on the ways in which Sirk’s films probe the circumstances of women in American society. Barbara Klinger’s Melodrama & Meaning: History, Culture and the Films of Douglas Sirk,²¹ published in 1994, also provides an insightful context for the exploration of Sirk’s standing as an auteur. Not all of the critical work was waving the Sirk flag; some of the writers disagreed with the prevailing view for a variety of reasons. But the sustained critique and its focal points made significant contributions to Sirk commentary, whatever conclusions the various critics reached.

As a result, however, Sirk’s critical reputation currently rests heavily on four of the melodramas he made during the 1950s: All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels, and Imitation of Life. And some recognition has been given to three other films from this period, including All I Desire (1953),²² There’s Always Tomorrow²³ and A Time To Love and A Time to Die (1958).²⁴ Of the work he did before going to America, only Schlussakkord/Final Chord (1936),²⁵ Zu neuen Ufern/To Distant Shores,²⁶ and La Habanera (both 1937)²⁷ have received substantial critical scrutiny.

These films all deserve the attention paid to them and their configurations play an important part in the commentary that follows. However, the preoccupation with them and the social and political priorities that came to the fore during the 1970s and ’80s meant that other works that were equally deserving of attention were pushed into the background.

In his book, Michael Stern exemplifies the skewed thinking that resulted from this. "Sleep My Love has as poor a reputation as Lured among Sirk’s admirers, he writes, and, in fact, it shares with its predecessor the mystery/jeopardy plot that seems so out of place in the hands of a director whose concerns are social and psychological."²⁸

It’s true that some of Sirk’s early work in Hollywood suffers to a degree from the limited budgets that were available to him and from the other constraints under which he was operating. But much of it also indicates that, even before the 1950s melodramas, he was a filmmaker with a finely developed sensibility who was fully in control of his medium. In fact, his work in Europe makes him a significant figure in world cinema even before he went to the US. He might not have been free to choose projects in line with his personal interests, but he was an artist who brought those interests with him to whatever material he tackled.

That said, not everyone who has written about Sirk has been positive about his work. In 1991, Paul Coates summarily dismissed the director as an opportunist, accusing him of reducing the imperative of art to the small matter of retaining a tasteful tone, while explicating his supposed true intentions in interviews dispensed after the fact to eager auteurists.²⁹ Robert B. Ray’s smug put-down in his book How a Film Theory Got Lost, of Sirk’s opportunistic engagement with commentators about his work, is similarly instructive in its condescension: Aberrant decoding [such as Sirk’s] enables individual readers [or groups, cf. feminist scholars] … to remotivate Hollywood’s product for other purposes.³⁰

Along the same lines, several hostile articles appeared in a 1999 double issue of the American magazine, Film Criticism, that had been devoted to Sirk and that followed a 1997 conference at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Therein, he was accused of inadvertently playing into the hands of the Nazis by making films at UFA after Hitler came to power, and any admirers of his work were charged with being guilty of unreflected fandom [sic]³¹ and accused of missing the point. The renaissance of Sirk, wrote Gertrud Koch in an extremely convoluted article, is informed by a duplicity in the interpretation of his oeuvre. The emphasis on the ‘tender,’ ‘human,’ ‘non-despising’ aspects of his films brushes aside elements which are central to his films—elitism, sadism, and sealed surfaces.³² Then, in 2005, the New German Critique published an essay by Eric Rentschler asserting that Sirk’s undialectical approach to social criticism does not further understanding, but instead compels the viewer to retreat into interiority when the world outside offers no solace.³³

Much of this commentary, which is described by Linda Schulte-Sasse in her 1998 article in the Germanic Review, as the backlash discourse,³⁴ is filled with factual error and snide innuendo, and is certainly not unduly overburdened with critical acumen. Dissenting views about Sirk’s work should open up further discussion about it, but the dismissive tone of this commentary runs entirely counter to that. The accusation that Sirk was using the interviews he did with Halliday and others to guide the way his work would be discussed totally misrepresents the openness Sirk would bring to discussions about his art. And it also displays an appalling arrogance in its charge that a generation of film critics and scholars had allowed the wool to be pulled over their eyes.

When critic Fred Camper observed that no critic has been as perceptive as Sirk himself in articulating some of [his] themes,³⁵ he was showing an appropriate respect for the filmmaker’s intelligence as a commentator on his own work. And the quotations from Sirk sprinkled throughout this book indicate the richness of the insights he had to offer. However, any critic worth his or her salt will always adhere to D. H. Lawrence’s dictum: Never trust the teller, trust the tale. Nobody can control meaning and it is never fixed. Furthermore, the quality of any reading of any text—Sirk’s and anyone else’s—depends on the insights and understandings it has to offer. The director’s reputation mattered to him, of course, but his readiness to discuss and debate the meanings of his films pointed to his appreciation of Lawrence’s position on the subject.

• • •

From the vantage point of 2018, Sirk’s work looks very different from the way it did in the 1970s. My extended introduction to it back then came via one-off screenings, on TV (hosted by knowing Australian cinephiles such as Ivan Hutchinson in Melbourne and Bill Collins in Sydney), as part of National Film Theatre schedules (in Melbourne and London), during the teaching of courses at colleges and universities (in Melbourne and the UK), at the National Film Archive in London, and courtesy of enthusiastic and unfailingly generous film collectors (in Melbourne and New York). However, it’s a logistically very different matter to examine them from the perspective of the early years of the twenty-first century than from anywhere between 1960—by which time their director had departed Hollywood—and the 1990s.

Scribblings made in the dark and post-screening reflections made on the run used to be all that I or anybody else was able to do by way of note-taking. Unless, of course, one was able to view the films on a Steenbeck editing table. That invaluable but now-antiquated contraption provided an early and very crude model for the closer kinds of viewings available today, via DVD, on television, or online (on YouTube and elsewhere). Armchair viewings now allow remote-controlled opportunities to pause and rewind at will.

Furthermore, it’s more than half a century since Cahiers first turned the spotlight on Sirk’s work and most of his films are far more readily available. So, one of the chief goals of this book is to provide a comprehensive overview of all of Sirk’s features. Another is to propose a view of them that looks beyond their political critiques and their concern with the social oppression of women to a wider view of the human condition that incorporates those critical issues but looks beyond them.

Following Schulte-Sasse’s lead, my commentary also draws upon the notion of a reflexive space³⁶ which Sirk’s films (or at least most of them) invite us to occupy as we contemplate their stories and their surfaces. That is, the space in which an audience finds itself when it comes to recognize that form should not be understood as opposed to content, but as a formal system that constructs and complicates meaning. This thesis is akin to the one proposed by Victoria L. Evans in her analysis of Sirk’s use of apertures, grids, drapes, screens and vortices … [to create] a state of sympathetic attention in the observer that combines emotional engagement with more thoughtful deliberations.³⁷ To a degree, that project is also part of a wider one: to lay claim to Sirk’s work as classical in its form, self-aware, and finding room for rupture, but never abandoning the coherence of its characters or the seamlessness of its fictions.

My interviews with Sirk were more like conversations. He asked almost as many questions of me as I did of him. Along with his published responses to others over the years, his comments appear here to indicate his thoughts about his work and life. As my disagreements with him indicate, they are not intended in any sense to provide a final word on the subject.

• • •

Sirk was born Hans Detlef Sierck on April 26, 1897, in Hamburg. His parents were Danish, his father a newspaperman. By the time he was fourteen, he had discovered the theatre, in particular Shakespeare’s history plays. He’d also begun to frequent the cinema, where the Danish-born silent era star, Asta Nielsen (1881–1972), became a favorite and where he had his first encounters with what he was later to describe as dramas of swollen emotions.

In 1919, he enrolled to study law at Munich University, before moving to the newly established Hamburg University, where he turned his attention to philosophy and the history of art. Years later, he still remembered lectures given there by Albert Einstein (presumably as a visitor) and Erwin Panofsky (who was chair of the art history department). To finance his studies, he wrote for newspapers and began to work in the theatre.

In 1922, he directed his first production in Hamburg, Hermann Bossdorf’s Bahnmeister Tod/Stationmaster Death, and began a career which saw him become one of the foremost theatre directors in Weimar Germany. While continuing that side of his career, which he was finding increasingly stressful in the context of the social changes of the time, he also began work at UFA studios in 1934. He directed three shorts there before making his feature debut in 1935 with April! April! (an alternative version was made in Dutch).

Throughout his time in Germany, he maintained an intense interest in painting (which he pursued in his spare time) and in art movements across history. When I first visited him and his wife, former stage actress Hilde Jary, in 1975, it was clear that this interest was eclectic and hadn’t waned over the years. A Korean tapestry denoting the seasons was hanging by the entrance doorway, presented to him during the location filming for Battle Hymn. On opposite walls of their living room were a modern Japanese painting and one striking work entitled Negro Ritual, done by Hilde during her time as a student, before she turned her hand to singing and acting. And on their dining room wall was a Constable original.

Sirk would welcome the chance to talk about art and the ways in which it fueled his theatre and film work. I was bored by expressionism and unhappy about the gradual shift to more realist forms, he said, subsequently identifying two nineteenth-century painters, Honore Daumier (1808–1879) and Eugene Delacroix (1798–1863), as having left their imprint on the visual style of my melodramas.

After April! April!, Sirk made six more films at UFA, before leaving Germany in 1937 to join Hilde, who’d traveled to Rome not long beforehand. Sirk made his escape by pretending to be scouting locations for what he explained to UFA executives was to be his next film, Wilton’s Zoo. That film was never made, but it became his way out. While there were admirers of his work in high places in the Nazi government—Goebbels foremost among them—he had become increasingly dismayed by what was happening in Germany and what he referred to as the abyss of Hitlerism.³⁸ Along with his concern for Hilde, this was a key reason for his hasty departure.

One of the reasons he had remained as long as he did was his hope for a chance to reunite with his son, Claus, from whom he had become estranged after divorcing his first wife, Lydia Brinken. After leaving Germany, he never saw her or Claus again. She died of cancer in 1945; a year earlier, Claus had been killed on the Russian Front, although Sirk didn’t learn of this until much later.

Arriving in the US in 1941, he found it hard to get a foothold in the film business. Eventually he made Hitler’s Madman (1942), which provided him with an opportunity to dramatize some of the horror he’d been able to leave behind. Then came Summer Storm, which was based on Chekhov’s The Shooting Party and led to a collaboration and long friendship with George Sanders (1906–1972), whom he described as really the only actor with whom I had anything in common in Hollywood.

Sirk’s star gradually ascended in America, his partnerships with producers Ross Hunter (nine films) and Albert Zugsmith (two) at Universal-International proving especially fruitful.

When Hunter visited Australia during the early 1970s to promote Lost Horizon (1973), he remembered Sirk as a sweet man, but very out of place in Hollywood. For his part, Sirk found Hunter equally congenial company, even if they were on entirely different wavelengths. Zugsmith gave him his freedom, for which he was grateful, and he would speak of Zug with affection, although he also confessed to finding the cigar-smoking mogul awfully crass.

Largely as a result of the workings of the studio system, Sirk was able to gather around him a group of regular collaborators, including Rock Hudson (a lovely young man who was treated abominably by the studio), screenwriter George Zuckerman (the only writer I ever felt an allegiance to), cinematographer Russell Metty (a man with a great eye for detail and an appreciation of what I wanted), and art director Alexander Golitzen. However, he lamented long after his retirement, I was, and to a large extent still am, too much of a loner.

His affair with Hollywood was very much a love-hate relationship. At that time, we Europeans called Hollywood a prison, and that it was. But although it appears paradoxical, the system had its advantages. An artist needs walls against which to fight, even if they are prison walls. Total freedom is only for the genius, and even that is open to doubt. Attacking these walls makes a man cunning and inventive. It strengthens the muscles of his talent.³⁹ But, while he enjoyed the challenge of bending the material to [his] style in an environment seemingly designed to cramp his creativity, neither Sirk nor Hilde ever felt comfortable with its excesses. He remembered being shocked when he went to a party at Zugsmith’s lavish LA home and found naked women frolicking in the pool.

Partially because of his ill health, but largely because he’d had enough, he and Hilde left the US in 1959. Until his death in January 1987, they lived in Lugano, in an apartment high on the Ruvigliana hillside looking out over the beautiful lake. It provided them with the peace and the solitude they loved, although they regularly greeted friends from afar. Hilde died in 1989.⁴⁰

Encouraged by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with whom he became friendly after the then-enfant terrible of the German cinema visited him in Lugano, Sirk also did some teaching during the late 1970s at the film school in Munich, where he made three short films with his students. When he died, he was still studying the classics, as he put it, and being excited by more recent discoveries, especially the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Patrick White.

CHAPTER ONE

Detlef Sierck in Europe

I didn’t expect the Nazis to last. I was wrong about that. First of all, like a lot of people, I didn’t ever expect them to get power—and then, when they did get in, I didn’t believe they could hold on to it.

—DOUGLAS SIRK, 1970¹

IN 1934, AFTER TWO UFA (UNIVERSUM FILM-AKTIEN GESELLSCHAFT) executives attended a performance of Sirk’s stage production of Twelfth Night in Berlin, the director was invited to work for the Berlin-based film company. It had been established in 1917 as a corporation run by a consortium whose business was making films and money. In 1927, it was bought by Alfred Hugenberg, an extreme right-wing financier with close ties to the Nazi Party. In 1933, Hitler came to power and appointed Joseph Goebbels as minister of propaganda; his goal was to assume control of the media in all forms, and that included UFA. Public book burnings began soon afterwards, although the types of films coming out of UFA remained relatively constant.

There are several reasons for this, including the fact that the company was not only an established part of the business landscape but was also prosperous. As Marc Silberman puts it, except for the exclusion of ‘undesirables’ [notably Jews and Leftists], there was a remarkable continuity in the personnel on the management level of the film industry before and after January 1933 … In other words, the main social function of National Socialism in the film industry was to sustain the capitalist industrial structure to the advantage of big business and at the expense of small and midsized operations.²

While Sirk, whose work in the theatre had made him a well-known figure of the left, became one of numerous undesirables to find or maintain a place at UFA, others departed the scene, many in fear for their lives. Although little detailed biographical information is available about this period of Sirk’s career, it appears that he managed to do things his own way not only because his films were successful but because, despite the oppressive circumstances, he found himself working with like-minded individuals.

In fact, even after UFA had been nationalized in 1937, bringing it formally under the control of the government’s propaganda ministry, Goebbels regarded it as a problem. As historian Klaus Kreimeier points out, despite official policy, not only was it still employing unreliable types capable of equivocation, but "the contingent of National Socialist Party adherents (working there) was small,