Melodrama & Meaning – History, Culture & the Films of Douglas Sirk

220 Pages·1994·26.662 MB·English

by  Barbara Klinger

MELODRAMA
AND
MEANING
History, Culture, and
the Films of Douglas Sirk
Barbara Klinger
~
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
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0 1994 by Barbara Klinger
All rigl-ts reser,ed
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any bm or by
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remrding, or by any lnbmalion s10rage and retrieval system, without
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Uni11ersity Presses' Resolution on Fl!rmissions constitutes the only
e>eeption to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sdences-~rmanence of Paper for Printed
library Materials, ANSI 239.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Conpe• Cataloli111•in-l'ublicmon Dab
Klinger, Barbara, date
11,ielodrama and meaning : history, culture, and the films of Douglas
Sirk I Barbara Klinser.
p. cm.
Filmography: p.
Includes bibliographical references and Index.
158N 0-253-33199-4 (alk. paper).-1S8N
0-253-20875-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Sirk, Dousjas, 1900-1987-Criticism and interpretation.
2. Melodrama in mo6on pictures. I. Title.
PN 1998.3.S57K55 1994
791-43'0233'092-d<:20 93-27574
I 2 3 4 5 99 98 97 96 95 94
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction The Many Faces of Melodrama x,
1
The •Progressive* Auteur, Melodrama, and Canonicity ,
2
Selling Melodrama: Sex, Affluence, and Written on the Wind 36
3
Tastemaking: Reviews, Popular Canons, and Soap Operas 69
4
Star ~ip: Rock Hudson and the Burdens of Masculinity 97
5
Mass Camp and the Old Hollywood Melodrama Today 132
Conclusion Cinema, Ideology, History 157
Notes 163
Filmography 181
Bibliography 182
Index 194
VII
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Acknowledgments
I AM INDEBTED TO a great many people who contributed to the progress and
completion of this book. For their powers of criticism and encouragement at
the very earliest st;ises of my research, I wholeheartedly thank 0 . N. Rodowick
and ). Dudley Andrew. More recently, James Naremore, Claudia Gorbman, Dana
Polan, and Mike Budd read 11ersions of the manuscript, providing insights and
revision sugsestions that I k,und instrumental in sharpening arguments and clar
ifying the organization of various chapters. For their exten.si11e time and energy,
I am deeply grateful. Christine Gledlill generously provided me with some ad
ditional bibliography from the BFI card catalogues that helped me realize the
depth and breadth of academic writing on Sirk. Laura Mull/ey offered a fascinat
ing account of British intellectual life in the 1960s and 1970s, only a small part
of which I was able to include, but which nonetheless provided a significant
framework for thinking about early writings on Sirk.
Without the support of Indiana Uni11ersity, I would ha11e been without the
time and often the inspiration for writing. The comparati11e literature program
granted me a lea11e to set started on the manuscript. The Office of Research and
the Uni11ersity Graduate School awarded me a summer faculty fellowship in 1990
so that I could devote that time to writing. In addition, the Dean of the Faculties
Office funded a year-long Multidisciplinary Faculty Seminar on Cultural Studies
that R. Christopher Anderson and I coorganized in 1990--91. Through my expo
sure to different fields interested in cultural history in the course of this seminar,
I substantially rethought my manuscript to make its arguments more historically
responsi11e. For their part in this aspect of revision, I thank Chris Anderson,
James Naremore, Casey Blake, Patrick Brantlinser, Kathryn Flannery, Richard
Bauman, and Bellerly Stoeltje.
I ha11e also benefited greatly from the students at Indiana. John Berks and
Millie Manglis helped with various editorial aspects of the manuscript. The stu
dents in my seminar on the 1950s and in my American film class provided such
stimulating discussions of the postwar era that my own IM:)l"k on the period was
significantly energized. Torn Amettis patiently photographed many of the illus
trations in the book.
Valuable contextual information came from film archi11es in Los Anseles and
New York. Ned Comstock at the Doheny library's special collections at the Uni-
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Acknowledgments
X
Yel'Sity of Southern California led me IO an impressive collection of materials
from Universal-International regarding the studio's advertising policies during the
195os and its specific campaign for Written on the Wind. The Margaret Herrick
library at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles held
the trailer transcripts for all of Sirk's melodramas, as well as bountiful dippings
from fan magazines on Rock Hudson. Al. the University of California Los Ange
les, I viewed several of Hudson's films from the 196os, as well as episodes of
the 1950s television game show, "Strike It Rich." In New York, the Museum of
Modem Art and the New York Public Library had press books and dippings on
the fihns' stars that proved very useful for conceptualizing how studio and media
practices contribute to film meaning.
Finally, Richard Miller gave me the kind of boundless support, sharp edito
rial insight, and repartee I needed to set through the Sturm und Orang of writing.
For his ability IO transforn1 the most serious of moods into the silliest, Matthew
Miller deserves an equally special place in these acknowledgments.
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Introduction
The Many Faces of Melodrama
If you wish to observe the process of combustion, you h...e
to put the object into an atmospheric medium.
~inoJ
V. N.
D LAST forty Douglas Sirk and his family melodramas have
URINC TH£ yeaB
achieved an almost lesencJary status in film studies. While French critics
had written enthusiastically about Sirk as early as the 195os, he gained what
would beoome his lasting critical reputation in the field in subsequent decades.
From the 1970s forwaro, British and U.S. Marxists and feminists defined Sirk as
a si~ificant political auteor and sub-.ersive master of melodrama.
Much of the academic left's attraction to Sirk stemmed from his situation as
a European intellectual WOO(ing within the formulaic system of Hollywood film
making. Born in Germany of Danish parents in 1900, Sirk (an Americanization
of "Sierck") was educated at German universities in law, philosophy, painting,
and art history. He had extensive training in theater, overseeing productions of
the WOO(S of such renowned dramatists as Sophocles, William Shalcespeare, Au
gust Strindberg, and Be1101t Brecht. He also served an apprenticeship in cinema
at the prestigious German film studio UFA. Due to the increasingly inhospitable
climate of Germany, Sirk left the country in 1937, eventually immigrating to Hol
lywood to WOO( at Warner Bros., Columbia, and finally UniveBal-lnternational.
It was at this last studio that he made his most highly regarded melodramas:
Magnificent Obsession ( 1954), All That Heaven Allows ( 1955), Written on the
Wind ( 1957), Tarnished Angels ( 1958), and Imitation of Ufe ( 1959).2 Sirk's bio
graphical credentials and interviews established him as an artist familiar with
sophisticated theories of representation and capable of articulating the social sig
nificance of his films. In Sirk, critics found a filmmaker who, in addition to em
bodying one of the major axioms of the auteur theory ~ing the ability of
gifted directors to create films of substance within ronventional Hollywood
sen,-es, seemed dedicated to critiquing the l>oureeoisie.
Sirl('s political auteorism in the early 1970s had almost immediate conse-
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)(/1 Introduction
quences for the study of melodrama. Inspired by Sirk's reflective observations on
his filmmaking, Thomas Elsaesser wrote an influential essay that invented a cat
epy of films called the •sophisticated family melodramas• of the 1940s and
1950s, lari,ely comprised of the works of Sirk, Nicholas Ray, and Vincente Min
nelli. This label defined the potential of some melodramas to surpass the senre's
cathartic aims and reactionary tendencies to achieve aesthetic complexity and
social commentary. Thus, the sophisticated family mekxlrama realized the
✓ senre's historical capability to act as a revolutionary form during times of cultural
struggle.3 From this critical perspective, the vivid critiques of the family as a
social institution, the anguished sexual malaise, and the e=ively symptomatic
style in Ray's Bigger Than Life ( 1956), Minnelli's Home from the Hill ( 1960), and
Sirk's Written on the Wind appeared inseniously transgressive of the repressive
Eisenhower era with its vision of the complacent nuclear family. Sirk, the most
self-mnsciously Brechtian of these directors, emersed from Elsaesser's essay as a
filmmaker whose oeuvre demonstrated how melodrama, often considered a triv
ial senre, could achieve the status of a serious artistic and cultural form.
Numerous critics have since noted Sirk's responsibility for the attention that
melodrama subsequently received in film, television, and popular cultural stud
ies. Pointing out that Marxist appreciation of this director as a political auteur
led scholars to seriously consider melodrama as a senre IM>rthy of analysis for
the first time, Christine Gledhill writes, •Through discovery of Sirk, a senre came
into view.•• Such accounts portray Sirk criticism as instrumental in creating ac
ademic respect for the senre, as well as in founding perspectives on melo
drama's subve~ve relationship to the dominant ideology. As the •father: in this
sense, of melodrama theory and criticism, it is not surprising that Sirk continues
to hold a prominent place in contemporary work on the senre.5
While still clearly invested in Sirk's importance to auteur and genre criticism,
fesend
this book attempts to reconsider substantially the of Sirk and his sophis
ticated family melodramas as it has been passed down through several genera
tions of academic theorists and critics. Specifically, I want to el(plore how his
torical analysis challenges our ideas about this director and his film.s. My reasons
for wanting to subject these films to historical revision are twofold. First, political
analysis of Sirk's melodramas has tended to be regulated mainly by biography
and form; that is, by Sirk's avowed intentions to critique America as realized in
the internal structures of his films. This study seeks to provide a stronger histori
cal dimension to questions of the relationship of auteur, genre, and ideology,
arguing that such a dimension is crucial to recognizing the role external social
and historical factors play in nesotiating the cultural politics of a body of films.
Second, the process of placing Sirk's films in social and historical context raises
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