Douglas Sirk and the masterclass of melodrama. I've always wanted to get into some of Sirk's work but until now have just been preoccupied with other films. The usual saying for a film fanatic "So many films, so little time". However ever since exploring renowned German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who quickly became one of my favorites) and discovering some of his biggest influences have come from none other than Sirk, well I just had to eventually see for myself. This is basically the original version to Fassbinder's film (a quasi-remake of sorts) 'Ali: Fear Eats the Soul'. Now Fassbinder is still very much an experimental director in style but you can see his substance does reflect melodramatic form that…

Sirk is just outstanding. As someone obsessed with surface style I can only wonder why it took me so long to get into his work.

Although this is only the second of his films I've seen it seems to me that this movie is simultaneously his most satirical and ironic film and also his least. What I mean by that is simple. All the satire and irony is directed at "society" and those people who keep Wyman and Hudson apart. This means we have two main characters we are obviously supposed to feel sympathy for while we feel derision towards the others (seriously, she needed to just accept that she had shitty fucking kids).

In the other film of his…

This film just gets better every time I see it. I saw it now for the third time and what struck me was how masterfully it was made. The camera movements and placements are so perfect, the autumn colors, exactly right for the theme and the mood of the film and the script is so well structured. Not one waisted line or scene.

Let me take an example of the camerawork. When Cary comes to ask Ron to take it slowly, and wait with the marriage, the camera is put on the top, inside the mill. Ron walks to open the door. The camera follows him showing the fence on the 2nd floor where the camera is placed. The fence…

Call me a sentimental sap, but this stuff works on me. The insanely saturated technicolor (the lighting literally makes no realistic sense, creating so many shadows in weird places), the heightened acting, the dialogue where people say exactly how they feel, the too-perfect painted studio backdrops, all of it creates a feeling of artificiality that some have identified as a satirical subtext to Sirk's films. I don't think it's subtext - it's text. This is how we think of the 1950s, through rose-tinted picture postcard lenses. But the subject matter - the petty poisonousness of a bourgeois America that pretends the American Dream exists and that there is no class system; the conveniently fleeting attachment to heritage and past (the…

This was my introduction into Sirk. I have to say that I enjoyed it, but I think you have to be in some kind of a mood to get into this type of film making. It is so lush and thick and cautionary.

The story is about a widow (Cary) who fall for a younger man (Ron) of a lower social class of hers. It is set in the idyllic 1950's America. The movie is focus on societal norms and judgement's, as well as the family structure. Ron, played by the amazing Rock Hudson, is a rugged nature loving man that reads, and lives Thoreau's 'Walden'. Cary, played by the equally astounding Jane Wyman, is the widow seeking happiness, but…