Is this movie fabulous or is this movie fabulous?
That's all. A new thread for everyone to pour in their love for this fantastic movie.
A wed wose; how womantic! http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=8093247
Yes, and anyone who thinks it's fabulous is also fabulous!
I love Dorothy Malone (though she's even better in Sirk's next film The Tarnished Angels), and for the second time she steals the spotlight away from the indominable Lauren Bacall; the first time, Malone was a bespectacled brunette trading words and wit over a bottle of rye with Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. Robert Stack is also commanding, and Rock Hudson, for all his reputation as a wooden leading man in those Doris Day comedies, is actually quite a capable actor as the only human to not lose his soul into the Hadley's obsession with wealth. Even Lauren Bacall, despite later being embarrassed at this film, has a certain charm to her, because she really does seem like a fish out of water, just like Lucy Moore.
Today we laugh at the melodrama, but make no mistake: this film is a cookie full of arsenic, and it's as sharp as ever in its depiction of America's love for money, power and above all, oil. We like to think that we're too sophisticated for melodrama and the closest most modern-day audiences have gotten to Sirk is via Todd Hayne's stunning homage Far From Heaven, but as Ebert said, it takes a much more sophisticated audience to watch a Sirk than an Ingmar Bergman because Sirk's message is more cryptic--my favorite definition of Sirk is that he is the "Trojan Horse of film directors." He appears to be celebrating the very material things that he's really criticizing. The sets are half-deliberately false (in an interview, he said that he noticed the falsity of his sets and blew it up to show his character's obsession with fantasy and illusions*), and we, as filmgoers of the HD, blue-screen and blu-ray generation, scoff at the falsity. But people need to accept Sirk's completely absurd and beautiful mise-en-scene. To call him the first camp director would be so close and so far from the truth--he believes in his characters too much, about as much as he doesn't believe in the 1950s America.
*
"Many pictures I have shot against the wishes of the studio totally on location. But the moment you go inside the studio, it is dangerous to go out again. The moment you hop from that studio to the wilds of Utah, you must artificialize nature. You must somehow integrate nature into your story. So you use back projection. For instance, there in Written on the Wind, the whole story is artificial. The back projection has to be this way. "Artificial" used to be a negative word. But every artist today must proceed with a certain artificiality. "
There's a great interview with Mr. Sirk here, where he talks about his kind of melodrama: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/48/sirkinterview.htm
"GOD--WAS--WRONG!"--James Mason, Bigger Than Life share
Thanks a lot for the link Ruby. It's always great to see that people don't think of Douglas Sirk as a dated relic from the 1950's, and that his cinema is still taken into great consideration. "Written on the Wind" is my personal favorite from his days at Universal, and the picture remains as scathing and eloquent as it did in 1956. The four principle actors are all terrific and perfectly embody their characters. Whether it's the crass smiles and extravagant living which Robert Stack's Kyle uses to bury his torment of impotence, his wife Lauren Bacall and her sullen and pensive reactions to her failing marriage (Fassbinder once said that Sirk made the only films in which women actually think rather than merely react), Rock Hudson as the reliable and love-lorn Mitch who isn't as good a friend to Kyle as he thinks, or Dorothy Malone, in a great performance, as the nympho schemer who acts out due to being perhaps the most emotionally battered of them all. These types in the film could have been down-right wretched if Sirk, as you mentioned, didn't genuinely empathize and love them.
The stylized artifice in his films comes across as a hoot to most contemporary audiences, but this candied atmosphere, at times complimented with gorgeous dark shadows, only reaffirms the intense subjectivity of the characters and how this Eden studio existence is always surrounding them but remains completely out of their reach. This contrast of style and substance just exemplifies the great strife of each protagonist and the intensity that results in these melodramatic situations is as real and gritty as anything from Scorsese. Every cinema is type of construct, and what really matters is how emotions and ideas come across through the film's personifications. Few directors expressed this fact about cinema as boldly and gloriously as Douglas Sirk and his exquisite imitations of life.
Yeah, I'd say the film is pretty damn fabulous indeed.