Douglas Sirk Ranked Part One

Recently I reviewed Eureka’s excellent boxset Sirk in Germany, which featured the first three films by director Douglas Sirk. Having thoroughly enjoyed the experience, I thought Hey, why not keep going? So I watched the entire Sirk feature filmography in chronological order, ranking and reviewing them as I went along. Considered The King of Melodrama, Sirk’s career is often condensed to the five year run between 1954 and 1959, during which he made all his most famous films. But there are more gems to explore and more than just Melodrama to discover. There are Noirs, Comedies, a Swashbuckler, a Western, Musicals, Thrillers and War films and, while most of the famous Melodramas predictably come out on top, there are several surprises that I loved far more than I expected to.

In Part One I’m looking at the films from number 37 to 21, most of which are inessential to all but completists but which offer interesting context for those interested in Sirk’s work.

ALL ENTRIES CONTAIN SPOILERS

37. SIGN OF THE PAGAN

During the final five year run of Douglas Sirk’s career, things really began to click into place and this was when he made all of his most famous and acclaimed films. But in 1954, just after the success of Magnificent Obsession played a significant part in mapping out his future, Sirk still had a few oddities to get out of his system. Whether by studio misassignment or through his own desire to explore a wider range of genres, Sirk found himself making the painfully dull swords-and-sandals Epic Sign of the Pagan. Perhaps I’m not the best person to assess the artistic success of this film, given the fact that I’m not the biggest fan of this genre, but I can tell a Ben-Hur from a Ben-Urghh and this tedious and misjudged turkey definitely feels like the latter. Of course, it stars Jack Palance as Attila the Hun, a piece of casting that results in brownface makeup that makes him look like a Klingon, but there are more problems than just ideological ones. Sign of the Pagan is the sort of Epic that gives you a hefty piece of political and historical exposition in an opening voiceover and then immerses itself in complex back-and-forths that disregard the impossibility of tuning in to such cursory narrative foundations. As with his earlier Western experiment Taza, Son of Cochise, Sirk has made a plodding, self-serious film in Sign of the Pagan, one that knows the broad strokes of its genre but not how to exploit them effectively. Consequently, this is a would-be-Epic that fizzles out after just 90 minutes, an indication of failure which nevertheless feels like an act of mercy.

36.TAKE ME TO TOWN

The run of six Comedies made by Douglas Sirk between 1951 and 1953 has some real gems hidden amongst it but the final film of that run, Take Me to Town, is certainly one of the worst films the director ever made. It is often praised for what some perceive as a great leading performance by Ann Sheridan as the fugitive singer, dancer and implied sex worker Vermilion O’Toole. However, despite having a name almost worthy of Groucho’s madcap monikers, Vermilion is stuck in a non-starter of a story which finds her hiding out in a small town where three impossibly annoying young boys size her up as new mother material. The promising opening in which Vermilion evades her police escort quickly collapses into something overly folksy and cloying. Sirk had created greatness in the similarly light and low budget Meet Me at the Fair but Take Me to Town finds none of that same infectious energy and collapses under the weight of its own inconsequentiality. Sheridan, to my mind, looked like she was struggling, gallantly, but struggling nevertheless. It doesn’t help that she was saddled with one of my least favourite actors, Sterling Hayden, as a leading man. I’ve seen Hayden in numerous films, including several of the greatest ever made, and he’s usually the worst thing about them. I remember being utterly bewildered by how abysmal he was in Johnny Guitar when I first saw it. In Take Me to Town he doesn’t stand out so much, but only because so much of the film is school-play level feeble.

The major point of note about Take Me to Town is that it was Sirk’s first collaboration with producer Ross Hunter. Hunter was new to producing but he would go on to work on the majority of Sirk’s most famous films, including three of the “big four” Melodramas, Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. The Hunter/Sirk partnership would start paying dividends just one film later with the exquisite All I Desire. As for Take Me to Town, there’s little here to salvage and unfortunately it’s ended up at the bottom end of my Sirk pile.

35.INTERLUDE

Amongst that Douglas Sirk sweet-spot of late-50s Melodramas there are a few lesser-known efforts. Interlude is perhaps the most forgotten of the late Sirks and it’s easy to see why. Returning to the world of classical music in which his earlier German Melodrama The Final Chord had been set, Interlude also returns to that country, shot on location in Germany and Austria. Sirk incorporates some ornate imagery of the locations but this superficial sight-seeing cannot replace the incisive social commentary of his American pictures that deconstructed the contemporary values of the USA. Interlude’s relocation to Germany results instead in a meandering and dull Romance with a luridly shallow mental illness subplot. It was based on a novel by James M. Cain which had already been filmed previously as When Tomorrow Comes by John M. Stahl, a director whose filmography Sirk plundered no less than three times for remake material. Sirk’s updates of Sahl’s films are generally considered superior but Interlude may be the exception, with many feeling Sahl’s take is richer and less inconsequential. Certainly, amidst the strong work that surrounds it, Interlude seems appropriately titled in the Sirk oeuvre.

34.THE COURT CONCERT

In my eagerness to chronologically consume and evaluate the Douglas Sirk filmography, I somehow managed to jump over a whole film, going straight from The Final Chord to To New Shores. When I returned to watch The Court Concert, I discovered a film so light, airy and inconsequential that I’m not surprised I breezed past it so easily. The Court Concert comes from a period of the 1930s during which Operetta films were popular. I’ve seen quite a few of these and, by and large, they are pretty intolerable for those who don’t revel in the warbling trills of this genre. While The Court Concert wasn’t exactly an exception, it is a hard film to hate. Sirk’s handling of the material is jolly and light, and while its backdrop of a royal concert does inevitably lean into some fetishisation of privilege and opulence, it doesn’t preclude Sirk’s penchant for satirical commentaries on class divisions either. Although its happy ending involves the main characters becoming assimilated into the royal court, Sirk has at least poked a few holes in that same court’s pretensions and prejudices.

There’s not a great deal else to say about The Court Concert. If you like Operettas and are easily charmed by light whimsy, this one is for you. I didn’t exactly enjoy it but it’s pleasant enough company for its short runtime, provided those with an aversion to this shrill music keep a couple of fingers free for ear-plugging purposes.

33.LA HABANERA

When taking on the task of watching a director’s entire filmography, there are usually films that you’re really looking forward to and others to which you’re not so keen on getting round. In the case of Douglas Sirk, I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about the Nazi propaganda and bullfighting film I happened to know was lurking in the shadows. Still, sometimes the pleasure of watching films comes from more than straightforward entertainment. La Habanera, while far from being a good film, was nevertheless an interesting exercise in pinpointing Sirk’s mindset on the eve of his fleeing Germany with his Jewish wife. This film, a nakedly xenophobic and sentimentally nationalistic piece of propaganda which was personally approved by Goebbels, is a troubling indication of how remaining under the Nazi regime would’ve negatively impacted Sirk’s work. In escaping Germany, Sirk’s priority was obviously preserving the lives of himself and his wife. But had he remained, it is clear that the life would have been drained from his art as well.

There’s an argument to be made, and a strong one at that, that being a piece of Nazi propaganda should be enough to condemn a film to a half star rating and consign it to the bottom of any ranking. In most cases I probably would’ve marked this film as watched and refrained from including a star rating at all. Had Sirk had any more of these far-right-sullied travesties in his filmography, I probably would’ve abandoned my project of ranking his works, as I can’t imagine feeling comfortable with weighing the comparative crimes of a long list of hate-filled diatribes. Why, then, am I comfortable (at least relatively speaking) in ranking the Nazi Scheissefilm above the piss-weak Operetta? Do I really hate high notes that much? Of course not. If we’re talking only about the intent of Nazi propagandist Gerhard Menzel’s revolting screenplay then yes, La Habanera should be banished to the bottom of the list. However, we’re also talking about the direction of Detlef Sierck, soon to be Douglas Sirk, and this film was clearly made while the director had that imminent name-change at the forefront of his mind.

La Habanera tells the story of Astrée, a Swedish tourist on holiday in Puerto Rico who is seduced by the local customs to the extent that she has decided never to leave. Abandoning her disapproving elderly Aunt on their ship home, Astrée runs back onto the dock and into the arms of Don Pedro, a powerful landowner who has won her heart with the ultimate romantic gesture of stabbing a bull to death. Ten years down the line however, Astrée has realised that her aunt was right, that her husband is a bullying and corrupt brute and that she loathes the traditions that once charmed her, epitomised by the ubiquitous sound of the habanera music. Longing to return to the homeland she now romanticises, Astrée is imprisoned by her husband’s threats to take away their child if she tries to leave him. Meanwhile, two Swedish doctors, one of whom just happens to be a former lover of Astrée’s, arrive in Puerto Rico to investigate a deadly virus known as the Puerto Rico Fever. A previous failed attempt to create a cure eight years earlier resulted in negative publicity that depressed the economy and Don Pedro and his associates are determined to prevent a repeat of those circumstances, preferring instead to suppress information about the virus and outlaw investigations into it. As the doctors secretly carry out research in their hotel room, things between Astrée and Don Pedro reach a head.

Obviously there’s a lot to unpack here. Maybe we should start with the bullfighting. Although there is a scene depicting real bullfighting, La Habanera is at pains to make the point that the supposed “sport” is barbaric. This is one occasion in which my opinion aligns with that of the Nazi propaganda film, which would be disturbing to me were it not for the clearly divergent reasons behind our opinions. In my case, it is concern for an animal’s welfare whereas in the case of La Habanera the motivation is to target a cultural symbol in order to decry an entire nation. I don’t believe for a second that the Nazi screenwriter gave a shit about the bull (this is the cue for all those Elon Musk devotees to point out that Hitler was vegetarian). Bullfighting rears its head again in an ongoing argument between Astrée and Don Pedro over how to raise their son. He wants to raise him to appreciate the glories of bullfighting, while she wants to instil in him an enthusiasm for the pure white snow of her Swedish homeland. Bullfighting vs. snow: it’s an argument every parent has had at some stage of their child’s upbringing. Although, let’s not be silly, this is blatantly an exaggerated version for the purposes of melodrama. In the real world, it’s usually cowtipping vs. sleet.

It’s easy to slip into facetiousness when attempting to review La Habanera (at least that’s what I’ve heard) but the political climate at the time of writing is ample demonstration of how patently ridiculous propaganda so easily takes root in minds susceptible to bigotry. La Habanera was a big hit, meaning thousands of 1930s audience members ate up its depiction of Puerto Rico as a mash-up of inaccurate notions of Spain, Mexico and Cuba, a place whose main exports were atmosphere-permeating diseases, abusive lotharios and inexplicably Aryan, half-Puerto-Rican offspring. One can only imagine that Sirk’s involvement was due to state pressure and self-preservation, although it is also tempting to believe that he noticed the spectacular own goal the Nazi-sympathising screenplay made in depicting its villain as a dangerous, corrupt megalomaniac. Bigots don’t tend to perceive their own bigotry but I can’t imagine there weren’t at least a handful amongst the thousands of people who saw La Habanera in 1937 who went “Hang on a minute, this prick seems familiar.” Unfortunately, given that Don Pedro is depicted as an influential millionaire who attempts to deny the existence of a lethal virus because of the effect on the economy, I’m sure the majority of those watching La Habanera in 2025 will also find this prick familiar. What’s Don short for again?

Aside from his potentially subversive intentions, Sirk was a smart choice to direct La Habanera because his way with a Melodrama makes it surprisingly watchable, even if splayed fingers inevitably obscure the view. The film has become something different with the benefit of hindsight. It’s now a fascinating document of a straitjacketed artist yearning to break free. Little of that attempted escapology was poured into the end product. Sirk clearly delivered a watered-down version of his services, albeit with a hint of his own dissenting voice tentatively mixed in. It’s to his credit as an artist that he managed to make such a repugnant film somewhat watchable. It’s to his even greater credit as a human being that he then cashed the cheque and got the fuck out of there.

32.SHOCKPROOF

Sometimes putting two things you love together does not have the effect of enhancing their finer qualities. I love a Sunday roast followed by apple crumble but switch the gravy and custard jugs round and you’ve ruined everything. On paper, then, perhaps a collaboration between Samuel Fuller and Douglas Sirk sounds promising but in practice both men are stifled by the incompatibility of their artistry. 

Shockproof was the final entry in a three film run of Noirs made by Sirk between 1947 and 1949. Sirk’s experiments with Noir had yielded mixed results and there is a sense of diminishing returns as we move from the fun, interesting Lured through the goofy, overblown Sleep, My Love and finally arrive at the bland, tedious Shockproof. The story of Jenny Marsh, a paroled woman who has been serving time for a crime inspired by her love for a violent gambler, Shockproof attempts to combine its criminal underbelly with a passionate love story as Jenny’s parole officer Griff falls in love with her. The conflict between Griff’s moral obligations and instant attraction to his client could potentially set up a very interesting scenario but Shockproof fails to stoke those flames effectively. It meanders over small details of the parole process for far too long, while also underselling the chemistry between its leads. Cornel Wilde and Patricia Knight were married at the time they made the film but there are few evident sparks and it is perhaps unsurprising on this evidence that the couple were divorced two years later.

It’s unclear exactly what Columbia Pictures wanted out of Shockproof. In an act of woeful self-sabotage, they nixed Fuller’s original, grittier climax in favour of a completely unconvincing moment of sentimentality that wraps things up too neatly at the expense of credibility. In a situation where the broth had already been thoroughly spoiled by two stylistically incompatible cooks, Columbia hired another one with a completely different palate: Helen Deutsch, writer of National Velvet. Deutsch’s daffy denouement is merely the last nail in the coffin of a deathly dull film, but it ensures that Shockproof enters the annals of bad cinema rather than just drifting by on a wave of indifference.

31.TAZA, SON OF COCHISE

Although he had made his first great American Melodrama the year before, Douglas Sirk was still experimenting in a range of different genres in 1954. Taza, Son of Cochise was his first and only shot at a Western, a 3D one at that, and although Sirk claimed to have always wanted to make a film in the genre, he really shows little aptitude for it. The first thing most people will notice these days is that Taza, Son of Cochise is a film that focuses on Native American protagonists but primarily stars white actors with artificially darkened skin. That’s a regrettable product of the time the film was made, as indicated by the fact that Jeff Chandler makes his third appearance in the role of Cochise, a part for which he was Oscar nominated in Broken Arrow. Rock Hudson, Barbara Rush and Rex Reason (here credited under his briefly-adopted moniker Bart Roberts) all appear daubed in bronzer, somewhat undermining the attempted sympathetic depiction of Native Americans by constantly making clear that no studio would even consider casting a real one in a leading role.

The question of whether directors were correct to push ahead with stories that spotlighted Native Americans but could not actually feature them in significant roles is one I previously discussed in my review of Anthony Mann’s Devil’s Doorway, where I concluded that given the choice of presenting a compromised vision or none at all, I think they made the correct choice for that time and place, a choice that ultimately helped to usher in changing attitudes at the expense of the film’s own eventual unviability. In the end, as a white man myself it’s not my place to determine this but I can at least tell you that from a purely narrative and filmmaking point of view (not that these can be so easily separated from ideological questions), Devil’s Doorway is a fairly good film and Taza, Son of Cochise isn’t. While I appreciate the unusual viewpoint, the film itself is stiff and self-serious, applying something of the measured pacing that works so well in Sirk’s Melodramas to a Western template that cannot contain it. The result is laboured and a chore to sit through, despite a couple of decent bursts of action. Sirk made his Western and thankfully one was enough to satiate that desire.

30.BATTLE HYMN

Following the success of Written on the Wind, Douglas Sirk’s most deliciously lurid Melodrama yet, the director set to work on a War film based on the autobiography of US fighter pilot Lieutenant Colonel Dean E. Hess. Although Sirk and his regular cinematographer Russell Metty were able to bring their celebrated use of colour to the project (from which it benefits enormously), in practically every other way Sirk feels like the wrong choice for this material. Rock Hudson gives another solid performance in the lead role and perhaps it was his involvement that put Sirk in the running for director, but this is not amongst the two men’s better collaborations. Sirk’s Melodramas had established him as a master at combining Soapy excess with scathing social satire, a technique he executed so deftly that the subtleties were lost on the majority of critics for decades. But Battle Hymn’s true story of the mental anguish of a pilot who accidentally bombed an orphanage and killed 37 children leaves no room for playful irony and Sirk finds himself cornered into making something (*shudder*) tasteful. While a certain level of Melodrama is present, from the dreadfully earnest (and dreadfully delivered) opening monologue by General Earl E. Partridge it is evident that this is not Sirk’s comfort zone, even if the General’s name does sound like an absurdist Sirkian incongruity, or at least a Groucho Marx pseudonym.

Generally speaking, I’m not the biggest fan of War films and I’m not a remotely religious man either, so the title Battle Hymn didn’t exactly fill me with excitement. Given Sirk’s own proclaimed atheism and left wing politics, he hardly seems like an ideal fit for this material. In fairness, he did turn in a competent, conventional film along the lines of others that seek to idealise the services and reverently proffer Christianity as the answer. But for a director like Sirk, “conventional” is perhaps the harshest criticism that could possibly be levelled.

29.WEEK-END WITH FATHER

Week-End with Father is the second in a run of six lighthearted comedic confections that Douglas Sirk made while searching for his niche in the early 50s. For me, Comedy is the greatest genre but also the most difficult to get right. Sirk is a competent comedy director, with previous films like April, April! showing he can even excel when he feels connected with the material. In the case of Week-End with Father, no such connection is apparent, although the script is such a generic piece of 50s sub-sitcom hokum that it’s hard to imagine anyone having injected much more life into it. The story of two widowed parents who fall in love while their children are at summer camp, Week-End with Father mines its comedy from the parents joining their skeptical offspring for some camp activities, during which the children do their best to derail the love match. There are several ideas repeated from Sirk’s previous film The Lady Pays Off, including a glamorous rival who arrives midway through the action and a love affair at the mercy of the manipulations of children. One of the children is even the same child from The Lady Pays Off, the likeable Gigi Perreau. Watching the two films back to back as I did, there’s an unavoidable sense of “not this again”, but this sort of film was designed to be comfortably repetitive so Sirk at least delivered on that count.

Much as I love a light Comedy, Week-End with Father doesn’t really work. Van Heflin and Patricia Neal feel miscast as the parents and have little chemistry, and the screenplay predictably favours Heflin as the put-upon Dad, leaving Neal with little to do and none of the laughs. The “wah wah wah wah” trombone sound of comedic defeat is used several times in an effort to hammer home the punchlines but there’s no saving Week-End with Father from its predictability and dullness. The one thing that did make me laugh was a subplot with Richard Denning as an ultra-healthy, shirtless camp counsellor who is revealed to be less perfect than he seems when he encourages the children to eat soy loaf instead of hamburgers. As a vegan myself, it made me laugh out loud to see that the world has hated us for well over seven decades now!

28.BOEFJE

It’s probably fair to imagine that Douglas Sirk felt somewhat displaced when he directed Boefje. Having fled Germany in the face of the rising Nazi regime, Sirk had gone to Italy then France, worked uncredited on Final Accord, a Musical Comedy shot in Paris and Switzerland, before heading for the Netherlands where he directed Boefje, a children’s Comedy/Drama of which he didn’t even stick around long enough to see a finished cut. Sirk’s next stop was America, where he found fame and success, though the majority of his critical acclaim would come later after he had moved countries once again. Boefje appears to have been the product of one of the shortest stops on this unfortunately necessary tour, and as such it is apparent why the film is so scrappy. It feels like it was helmed by a director who was just passing through, as if Sirk’s fleeting presence in the Netherlands manifested itself literally in the director dashing past the set and shouting instructions to the actors as he quickly disappeared again. This unpolished urgency is not necessarily to Boefje’s detriment. The rough edges imbue the film with the same shabby energy as its pre-teen protagonist, resulting in the sort of unpretentious vitality that would eventually be highly prized in independent cinema.

In case you’re wondering what a Boefje is, it means rascal, and that one word essentially serves as a plot synopsis for the film. This is 90 minutes of a rascally rascal perpetrating rascalments upon his unfortunate racscalees. Based on a 1903 children’s book by Marie Joseph Brusse which was then adapted into a 1922 play, Boefje became the first Dutch film to be adapted from a work aimed at children. It also preserved the same actor from the play in the central role, Annie van Ees, a 46 year old woman playing the part of a 12 year old boy. Much has been made of how convincing van Ees is in the role, although this is mostly to do with costume and the slight frame that nature gave her. In terms of performance, van Ees is Boefje’s main problem in that her interpretation of a young boy involves little more than YELLING EVERY LINE OF DIALOGUE! It becomes intolerable very quickly and a potentially charming film starts feeling difficult to sit through. 

In truth, Boefje doesn’t feel like a potential hidden classic anyway. Its simple tale of an unloved urchin saved by the charitable attentions of a man of the cloth has hints of the previous year’s Boys Town and there is one moment involving a stolen harmonica that touches on the class divisions so often examined in Sirk’s work. There is little else here to suggest Boefje was a project particularly close to Sirk’s heart though, and it stands as an odd anomaly in his filmography. I can’t say I enjoyed it much but I was impressed that a man on the run from the Nazis could create a film while still looking for a suitable sanctuary. In an interesting footnote, some sources credit Boefje as having the alternative title of Wilton’s Zoo. This was, in fact, the completely spurious name for a fictional project Sirk claimed to be travelling to research when he escaped from Germany.

27.THE FIRST LEGION

After a stretch of Douglas Sirk films that had felt a bit impersonal, The First Legion at least feels like a film in which its director has some interest. Though the small budget he has to work with constricts him a little, there are moments here that feel distinctly Sirkian, including an ending that pushes the sentimentality to breaking point in a way that could be perceived as both sincere and ironic. In his later Melodramas, the parameters were often clearer as regarded Sirk’s personal viewpoint and the lavishly manipulative endings usually worked because of their smartly pitched duality that allowed romantics and cynics alike to shed tears of varying pH levels. Where The First Legion fails for me is in appending such a climax to a wordy, philosophical piece which is constantly floating fascinating points for discussion but which never quite seems to coalesce into a coherent thesis. In this light, the denouement seems desperate.

The plot of The First Legion feels like something of a missed opportunity to me. It involves a seminary of Jesuit priests who are reckoning with the decision of one of their members to leave the priesthood and return home. When the other priests fail to convince him to stay, a long bedridden priest who is seemingly at death’s door suddenly rises from his bed and comes to the doubting Thomas among their number. The priests readily accept this as a miracle, as does the local and national press, resulting in a groundswell of interest in their order. Unfortunately, the miraculous recovery is the work of a cynical atheist doctor who deliberately neglected to mention the medicine he administered right before the priest did his Lazarus act. The doctor’s motives are nothing more than his own smug amusement, but when a young wheelchair-bound girl of whom the doc is fond suddenly finds renewed hope of walking again in this manufactured miracle, the doctor feels the need to confess to one of the priests. When the priest insists on outing the truth, the doctor evokes the rights of the confessional, binding his hands as an unwilling accomplice to blasphemy. The lie continues to have widespread consequences, including the fatal stress-induced heart attack of one of the priests. But amidst the commotion, the ever hopeful young girl enters the seminary chapel and, while praying for the soul of the doctor, suddenly finds herself able to rise up and walk.

Based on the play by Emmet Lavery and adapted by Lavery himself, The First Legion is a little bit silly even before that final go-for-broke flourish. The notion of the doctor orchestrating such damaging mayhem because it’s a bit of a laugh feels too underwritten. Some more serious opposition between his atheism and the faith of the priests needs to be in there in order to drive such a wilfully wicked choice. But for me the major mistake is making this a simple atheism vs. faith story when there’s far more complexity to be explored if the deception is kept within the seminary. If the doctor’s cure were kept a secret by one of the priests with the motive of inspiring the lapsed member of their order to stay on, then there’s a really fascinating set of moral and theological questions to unravel. It is improbable that Hollywood would’ve told such a story in 1950, under a production code that expressly forbade ridicule of the clergy, but it would’ve been far more interesting to me than what Lavery ultimately went for. Exactly what that is I’m still not entirely sure. Wrapped in lots of pontification, by the end The First Legion feels like little more than a takedown of an atheist through a cheaply inserted miraculous event that eliminates the need for actual intellectual engagement.

26.MYSTERY SUBMARINE

Despite its promisingly goofy title, Mystery Submarine is not a film that’s really worth digging too hard to uncover. One of Douglas Sirk’s most atypical films, there’s little to tip anyone off to the fact that this is the work of a great director. This is Sirk in the B-movie doldrums. I love a good B-movie but there’s an awful lot of bad ones to pick your way through to uncover the gold. In defence of Mystery Submarine, it’s not actually one of the bad ones. What we have here is a perfectly serviceable wartime Drama, albeit with uneven performances and terribly on-the-nose writing. Sirk seems a little bored with the material but he turns in a decently professional job of work, with the first act in particular promising more than the film can ultimately deliver. There are some hilarious pieces of clumsy foreshadowing, such as an opening scene in which a woman accused of treason is about to be brought in for questioning and the officers in charge discuss what a pity it is when such pretty young things betray their country. Not long after, a heroic and handsome doctor is brought in as a witness and is asked if he is a family man, to which he replies that, unfortunately, he is a bachelor. Where do you think this is going?

The highlight of Mystery Submarine is undoubtedly the performance of Robert Douglas as the German Commander von Molter. He drips villainy with every leering look and smug declaration, his energy propping up the rest of the cast and the film itself. At a mere 78 minutes, Mystery Submarine is an easy watch that never really gets boring but Sirk feels wasted on it. Fortunately, as part of his new contract with Universal-International, Sirk was able to negotiate a guaranteed A-picture within his first year, which turned out to be Thunder on the Hill, a Claudette Colbert vehicle which may have helped him pull himself out of the slump into schedule fillers like Mystery Submarine which he appeared to be undergoing. Still, with a hugely enjoyable Musical and an entertaining enough War film under his belt, Sirk was keeping his head above water admirably in this unprestigious interim.

25.PILLARS OF SOCIETY

An adaptation of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s play of the same name, Pillars of Society finds Sirk working with more famous source material which ultimately proves to be slightly to his detriment. Though not one of Ibsen’s better-known works, Pillars of Society is famous for having a cynical conclusion in which wrongdoing goes largely unpunished. Given its damning satirical view of political corruption, that seems fitting but this adaptation substitutes a climactic moment of meekly redemptive sacrifice which places Ibsen’s story squarely in the melodramatic wheelhouse that would eventually become Sirk’s bread and butter. That said, it also rather cuts the legs off the satire in favour of a predictable and slightly wearying sentimentality.

Aside from its climactic transgressions, Pillars of Society feels sloppier in execution than its predecessors. There are several instances of obviously intercut footage, some of which comes at crucial moments in the narrative and undermines the gravitas. A finale involving a violent storm and a wind-tossed sea falls apart under the weight of obvious artifice. Perhaps it would have been easier to suspend disbelief had the build-up been more engaging. Pillars of Society is a tale of secrets and lies, of the past coming back to haunt a sinner, but the tension on which its success hinges is rarely felt. The film’s major asset is lead actor Heinrich George, a future star of Nazi cinema, who manages to create a villain of some emotional complexity. With his girth and commanding presence, this performance feels like a more subtle and successful take on what Charles Laughton was aiming for in Hitchcock’s adaptation of Jamaica Inn. The rest of the cast are permanently in George’s shadow, which unfortunately means that the film sags when he is off screen.

Pillars of Society isn’t a terrible film but there’s an overwhelming impression that Sirk is struggling to marry his sensibilities with unsuitable material. The result is a slow-moving experience that rarely engages or defines the majority of its characters beyond their designated function in the narrative. As such, it comes across as Sirk’s first feature length misfire.

24.TO NEW SHORES

To New Shores is often identified as Douglas Sirk’s finest German film so I was very intrigued to see it. In the event, I found it surprisingly underwhelming. Coming off the back of The Final Chord may have affected this, since that film was such a box of tricks that the simpler approach to storytelling that Sirk takes here felt comparatively flat. But a mental recalibration on my part is surely required here. Given To New Shores grittier story, Sirk’s more straightforward style is entirely appropriate but it also unfortunately places a lot of pressure on the story itself to deliver. With The Final Chord, Sirk’s artistry managed to make a preposterous plot feel like a secondary concern. By contrast, To New Shores often feels like a dour trudge, while its melodramatic peaks feel like narrative impostors.

The story of a London cabaret singer who takes responsibility for the crimes of her self-absorbed aristocratic lover and ends up being transported to a tough Australian prison as a result, To New Shores starts out very well with its London scenes. Of course, everyone in both London and Australia is speaking German, a discrepancy that seems to bother many viewers despite their likely lack of comment at the dominance of English dialogue in internationally-set films, but the atmosphere of late 1800s music halls is captured with energy and humour. Zarah Leander, a very popular Swedish singer and actress, is brilliantly cast as Gloria Vane, the unfortunate showgirl bound for those titular new shores. She gets to perform some flirty musical numbers and wear some scandalous costumes, providing an effective juxtaposition with her later slide into unglamorous poverty. Willy Birgel, fresh from his sympathetic leading role in The Final Chord, gets to play a more interesting character here, in Gloria’s caddish lover Albert whose impulsive act of fraud will have far reaching consequences. Sirk presents the frivolous upper class lifestyle with satirical disgust, giving Birgel the chance to play a deeply unlikeable lead. As is usually the case with Sirk’s “villains”, there are layers to Albert, although the screenplay by Sirk and his Final Chord collaborator Kurt Heuser fails to really peel them away convincingly. The final beat in Albert’s story feels like a false injection of cheap melodrama into a previously sober narrative. Though Gloria’s character is more consistent, her ending too feels forced. Sirk was often troubled by the endings he was required to shoot, to the extent that some suspect he actively took the piss occasionally. The deer in the snow from All That Heaven Allows is the most famous example. Like that shot, Sirk makes sure his ending here can be taken sincerely but there is the undeniable hint of a raised eyebrow in its excessive nature in the face of its pat convenience.

To New Shores is not awful by any means. Leander and Birgel’s fine work props up the film, although the middle portion in which Gloria is imprisoned feels lacking in authenticity or entertainment value. Her struggle feels undersold, which is detrimental to the emotional impact of her downfall and Albert’s subsequent horror at what he has wrought. The film has been seen as a satirical attack on patriarchy, with a woman torn apart by the insecurities of the men around her, but the character of Gloria feels insufficiently impactful to really sell this idea, as she sacrifices her freedom for a manipulative cad and then glumly waits for him to come to her rescue. There’s certainly a good film that could be made from this material but To New Shores barely qualifies. This was one of the last screenplays Sirk worked on himself and it certainly seems that his strengths lay in directing above writing.

23. SUMMER STORM

When he made Summer Storm, Douglas Sirk must’ve just been starting to feel like his career was finally settling down. After making the film To New Shores in Germany, Sirk was forced to set sail for them himself after making the compromised, Goebbels-approved La Habanera. After making a couple of films at different stops on his search for permanent sanctuary, Sirk made his first American film, the justifiably angry Hitler’s Madman. By contrast, Summer Storm feels like the film of a director who has recently exorcised some demons and now wants to tell a more straightforward, if hardly upbeat, story. Sirk had reportedly been working on developing Summer Storm while still in Germany, and it must have been satisfying to find the means and stability to finally bring that project to fruition in America. Still, Sirk wanted to keep a firm grip on the material, rejecting an adaptation he’d been working on with legendary crime writer James M. Cain because it was “too American.” Despite changing his name and home country, Sirk was clearly vehement about maintaining his identity.

Summer Storm is an adaptation of the Chekhov novel The Shooting Party. Sirk had adapted big literary names like Molière and Ibsen before and, while he was able to deliver fair adaptations, he always seemed slightly more constrained by the weight of expectations on this material. Summer Storm is no exception, feeling somehow small and nervously reverent of its source. Sirk’s cast features recognisable faces playing against type. Linda Darnell shed her goody-goody image in the role of the sensual manipulator Olga, George Sanders swapped urbane confidence for tragic weakness as the obsessive Fedor, and Edward Everett Horton traded his double-taking comedic persona for a rare straight role. The actors, though often entertaining, feel like they are delivering stage performances rather than screen ones. Horton in particular feels like he’s playing to an offscreen audience, while Sanders performance feels oddly flat. Darnell is the standout, her smouldering seductiveness wisely made the focal point of the film’s marketing.

Summer Storm lacks the visual flair that makes Sirk’s best work so readily identifiable. The story is classically melodramatic but Sirk fails to engage with its emotional possibilities in the way he did so effectively in his later cornerstones of the genre. One thing I did enjoy is how the characters are all so deeply flawed. Their desires and weaknesses lead them to make bad choices at crucial moments. The final stretch involving an incriminating manuscript is almost farcical in its grimly amusing back and forth, while the final image is so deliciously cynical that it momentarily leaves the impression of having watched a better film. Ultimately, Summer Storm is fine but it feels like the work of a director settling in and rediscovering his groove, which makes for a slightly unsatisfying watch.

22.CAPTAIN LIGHTFOOT

In 1955, Douglas Sirk was just entering his golden age, a half decade of enormously influential Melodramas that became so retrospectively beloved that he is rarely talked about in relation to anything else. Though this was the genre in which Sirk undoubtedly thrived most, it’s a shame that so few dip into his other films as across the preceding twenty years he’d proved himself a more than able director in other genres, with a handful of effective Comedies, some interesting Noirs, a striking propaganda film and a couple of fun Musicals that are well worth unearthing, not to mention some melodramatic forerunners from his time in Germany. Captain Lightfoot essentially ended Sirk’s experiments in other genres and it came amidst a clutch of lesser efforts at creating a Western and a swords-and-sandals Epic. Captain Lightfoot is a swashbuckling Adventure film and, although it shares several of the problems that haunted Sirk’s other rather stiff genre films, it gets a pass from me partly because it has the good fortune to be working with the parameters of a genre I adore. I’m always up for a Swashbuckler and while Captain Lightfoot is hardly a quintessential example, it benefits from the lighthearted approach that so characterises this genre. Sirk’s previous two non-Melodramas had been weighed down by self-seriousness and moralistic convolution. Captain Lightfoot is all thigh-slapping adventure, its political backdrop of Irish rebellion largely swept aside in favour of ruddy-cheeked merriment.

Captain Lightfoot has all the makings of a film I should love but it just falls short. As with his attempt at a Western, Sirk’s direction feels too mannered and deliberately paced to capitalise on the zippy action for which the story is crying out. With cinematographer Irving Glassberg providing the glorious Technicolor and the widescreen CinemaScope allowing for rolling landscapes to be experienced in jaw-droppingly beautiful fashion, there’s plenty to keep your eyes on the screen but there are also missed opportunities galore, with potentially spectacular action scenes brushed over with after-the-fact descriptions. Despite being saddled with wavering Irish accents, Jeff Morrow and Rock Hudson are enjoyably stagey as Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (yes, this is where Michael Cimino took those names from for his debut feature) and Barbara Rush is agreeably fiery as Hudson’s leading lady, although she is subjected to one of those unfortunate spanking scenes that were surprisingly prevalent during the era, often with John Wayne doling out the spanks. Surprisingly, Hudson seems much more brutal than Wayne ever was, any dubious playful intentions lost in the harshness of the blows he rains down. 

Amidst the Sirk filmography, Captain Lightfoot sits mid-pack alongside a plethora of other three star time-passers that littered the years in which the director searched for his groove. Fortunately, his next film, All That Heaven Allows, would confirm that he had emphatically found it.

21.SLEEP, MY LOVE

Some films live and die by the comparisons placed upon them and, in the case of Sleep, My Love, it can hardly be suggested that those comparisons were uninvited. The then-recent success of George Cukor’s Gaslight (in fairness, itself a remake) hangs over Sleep, My Love like a Damoclesean sword commandeered by Freud. I recently watched Douglas Sirk’s first Noir, Lured, and praised it for its astute take on the numerous horrors of being a woman in a male-dominated world. By contrast, Sleep, My Love homes in on one specific abusive relationship and stretches it to such ludicrous extremes that it can feel like a disservice to the seriousness of the subject matter. Perhaps Sleep, My Love would’ve played better for me a decade ago, before the much needed re-examination of behaviours that constitute abuse highlighted gaslighting as a prevalent and poisonous continuum. While this threw the spotlight once more on Cukor’s Gaslight, it was probably for the best that Sirk’s film remained unilluminated in the public consciousness. Although it undoubtedly depicts gaslighting as a monstrous thing, Sleep, My Love plays it so broadly and with such a lascivious smirk that it makes this form of abuse feel like it could only be a concoction of the silver screen.

In order to enjoy Sleep, My Love, which is perfectly possible, you have to take it for the pulpy schlock it is. The film shares a screenwriter with Lured in Leo Rosten, who also wrote the source novel. Rosten populates his story with vivid characters and chilling twists, and Sirk shoots it beautifully, turning a New York townhouse into a ghoulish haunted-castle-like backdrop that is deliberately emphasised during moments when the plot particularly stretches credibility. This atmosphere also allows Hazel Brooks to just about get away with playing her cynical other-woman role like a forerunner of Vampira. Sleep, My Love moves at a fair lick, opening in media res as Claudette Colbert’s Alison awakens aboard a train with no idea how she got there. The manipulations of her husband, a delightfully oily Don Ameche, are already underway and there’s a creeping terror in watching them intensify as the full elaborate scheme is gradually revealed. Unlike Lucille Ball’s gutsy heroine in Lured, Colbert is lumbered with a woman-in-distress character who must rely on the square-jawed Robert Cummings to rescue her. Colbert is always good value but this role doesn’t put her talents to the best use. Sleep, My Love is much more interesting when it focuses on the oddball troupe of manipulators, including a sinister George Coulouris and a hilarious Queenie Smith.

Sleep, My Love seems to be aware of the weight of expectations that comes with emulating a hit predecessor, so it pushes for a bigger impact by bringing in a goofy hypnotism element that undermines whatever psychological credibility the film might otherwise have had, while also overstretching the pulpiness to patience-trying levels. The finale overplays its hand in this respect too, aiming for a boost of quickly mounting tension but achieving only the application of the camel-breaking straw. Although its lurid excesses do give Sleep, My Love a certain cockeyed charm and stave off any potential boredom, the experience ultimately feels empty once the credits roll.