18 thoughts on “Douglas Sirk Movies”

1. Certainly one takeaway from the rave reviews is that we Sirk fans are not alone in this world in our admiration of The Great Man’s Work. Indeed I bet you Johnnie Ray liked them! *** So go on! – watch Magnificent obsession again with a more open mind and secure your copies of Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. Meanwhile –

   I know all there is to know about the crying game
   I’ve had my share of the crying game
   First there are kisses (kisses), then there are sighs
   And then before you know where you are
   You’re saying goodbye

   One day soon I’m gonna tell the moon
   About the crying game
   And if he knows, maybe he’ll explain
   Why there are heartaches why there are tears
   And what to do to stop feeling blue when love disappears

   Don’t want no more of the crying game
   Don’t want no more of the crying game

   ***Johnnie Ray was a partially-deaf American singer who was Big in the 1950s but who surprisingly was far more popular in the United Kingdom than in the States despite Tony Bennett paying homage to him as “The father of rock and roll”. Although Johnnie sang some of the catchy upbeat classics like “Walking my Myrna Back Home” he was regarded as a specialist of sad songs and in fact had mastered a vocal technique which made it sound as if he was crying the songs instead of singing them so that critics named him “The Nabob of Sob”.

   Hence among working men of the Belfast Shipyard those who burst into tears out of self-pity or sentimentality (from for example watching Magnificent Obsession) were referred to as “a Johnnie Ray”. He was one of the 6 stars of 1954’s smash-hit musical There’s No Business like Joe[L] Business

   Yours
   (B) Sob Story

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   1. Hey Bob…interesting that you brought up Johnny Ray…..my mom got a chance to meet him years ago….for my recent birthday…my turned over her Johnny Ray autograph for our autograph wall. Good lyrics. Thanks for all the feedback on this Douglas Sirk page.

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      1. HI BRUCE: Thanks for the very comprehensive and informative response to my Douglas Sirk page. It’s heartening to know that one of this site’s great ADULTS – ie Bern- liked Magnificent Obsession. Maybe that’ll help convince STEVE that many people with good taste admired that movie!

         However it’s possible that even previously I was never actually as alone as I thought because the proverbial fly on the Lensman wall may well have seen Steve weeping bucketloads as he watched Magnificent Obsession recently.

         Perhaps he won’t admit it because either (1) he doesn’t want to be seen to agree with me or (2) he subscribes to The Duke’s moral code: “Look at that sniveller Cooper in High Noon – REAL men don’t cry!” So it could be that [if I may paraphrase Queen Gertrude in Shakespeare’s Hamlet] “Steve doth protest too much methinks!”

         Amazing to me are your revelations about Johnnie Ray. I would have bet your house [new fence and all] that I was maybe the only one frequenting this site who remembered Johnnie as he is now very much a “light of former days”. Possibly I’m not getting as old as I had thought! So thanks for bringing me feelgood stuff.

         Anyway certainly the Family Cogerson don’t believe in slumming it: keeping the company of both Johnnie Ray and Andy Griffith – wow! Please keep safe.

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2. Dear Hard Case: I apologise for forgetting to give you a cover post with my 3 earlier ones which I hope will illustrate to you how much Douglas Sirk is appreciated by film historians and many others.

   It would please me if upon reading the detailed appreciations of Sirk’s works which the 3 posts convey you were to study more-closely Douglas’ widely-recognized 3 masterpieces though I would concede that Battle Hymn was nowhere near being in their league despite it including Rory’s girl from 1956’s Red Sundown – Martha Hyer who also had the distinction of being in Laddie’s final movie 1964’s The Carpetbaggers.

   As one of the reviews makes clear Doug was particularly famous for the magnificent color and innovative lighting techniques that he used in his movies – qualities which are among those that I have always thought YOU admired in a film. Heck one doesn’t have to care about the subject matter of a great Van Gogh painting to appreciate its beauty.

   Personally If I were told that I could only ever watch 2 movies over the rest of my life those would be ‘Obsession’ and ‘Heaven’ and sadly even Shane and Godpop would not make the cut despite the lines in a catchy 1950s song: “My baby’s a Brando fan. Rock Hudson’s an also-ran.”

   My feeling is therefore that if you familiarized yourself with Sirk’s Big 3 you would understand better why everyone raves about them in particular. To admire those 3 classics you don’t have to become a “Mush” fan in general and you could even dub yourself “The Grim Weeper”!

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   1. Hey Bob. As for your two movies to watch….BERN1960 agrees with you 100% about Magnificent Obessesion…..not sure what she thinks about All That Heaven Allows….though I know she has watched it. As for Mush fans…..this is the era to appreciate them….lol.

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3. IMITATION OF LIFE 1959
   Cogerson Adjusted domestic Box Office Gross: $280 million
   Cogerson Rating: 80%
   IMDB Rating: 79%

   DESCRIPTION. An aspiring white actress takes in an African-American widow whose mixed-race daughter is desperate to be seen as white.

   IMDB Selected User Reviews –

   Superb movie!

   What can you say about this wonderful classic?!

   The acting is extraordinary — especially Ms. Moore and Ms. Kohner.

   The music, the gowns, and Lana Turner.

   I have always been a Sandra Dee fan. I read somewhere that she was most proud of her work in this film. I don’t think she had anything to be ashamed of.

   The underlying theme of this movie was so heart-wrenching. You can never forget the ending, especially Ms. Kohner’s line “That’s my momma!”

   A wonderful, wonderful movie. Very moving!

   WIKIPEDIA TAKE ON THE MOVIE
   Since the late 20th century Imitation of Life has been re-evaluated by critics. It has been considered a masterpiece of Sirk’s American career. Emanuel Levy has written “One of the four masterpieces directed in the 1950s, the visually lush, meticulously designed and powerfully acted Imitation of Life was the jewel in Sirk’s crown ending his Hollywood’s career before he returned to his native Germany.”

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   1. Hey Bob….Sirk movies have brought out an awesome of sharing from you. Unlike the first two movies you wrote about I have actually seen Imitation Of Life. It is considered a cult classic and is listed in the Danny Peary books that I like so much. As for the last part of your comment…I agree 100%….Sirk’s reputation has indeed gotten so much better as time has passed. I agree with review you included…..this was career highlights for many of the performers in this one. Good stuff.

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4. ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS 1955
   Cogerson Adjusted domestic Box Office Gross: $155 million
   Cogerson Rating: 84%
   IMDB Rating: 76%

   Description: An upper-class widow falls in love with a much younger down-to-earth nurseryman much to the disapproval of her children and criticism of her country club peers.

   IMDB Selected User Review –

   Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows could stand as a lesson about how, in gifted hands, movies can surmount and surpass their source material, elevating the routine into the rhapsodic. And that’s more than a matter of just fleshing out the roles with appealing talent or supplying de-luxe production values. It takes a sensibility that can suggest the complexity under the commonplace and spot the verities hidden beneath the clichés.

   On its surface, All That Heaven Allows is little more than polite fiction from women’s magazines circa mid-20th-century (and would today be a romance paperback with a beefcake cover of the kind that one understands is very popular in Manchester England at the moment).

   But from his opening shot Sirk creates a dreamy, storybook world, so Disney-pretty that he might as well have started with `Once upon a time….’ Swirling downward from a church steeple in a New England autumn, he shows us an affluent enclave just a commuter-train trip away from New York.

   Abetted by director of photography Russell Metty, Sirk paints this soapish weeper with a gorgeous palette of hues and tints Now and again, he washes half the screen in an autumnal green-gold, the other in an enchanted-night mauve, situating characters at cross purposes in their respective halves. Wonderfully nostalgic!

   Sirk takes this unlikely June-September romance and buffs it to the highest possible gloss, using his exquisite eye to enrich and deepen every frame. It’s lush and sensuous – almost candified (at times gluttingly so) – and all but impossible to resist. When, at the close, a deer gambols up to nuzzle some snow off the windowpane in the mill Hudson has turned into his home, it’s an embarrassment of perfection. Never was Disney so magical. 9/10 stars.

   ADDITIONAL REVIEW BY Lary Wallace July 2019
   All That Heaven Allows has layers beneath layers, each layer confirming once again just how mysterious a movie’s meaning can be. That’s why All That Heaven Allows has endured as a film masterpiece.

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   1. Hey Bob. Another good breakdown on All That Heaven Allows. Good reviews. Like Magnificent Obsession I have not seen this one at all. Not sure I have seen any of the 8 Rock Hudson/Sirk movies. Most as you have shown were pretty big hits. Good stuff.

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5. MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION 1954
   Cogerson Adjusted domestic box office gross: $300 million
   Cogerson Rating: 78%
   IMDB Rating: 71%

   Description: A rich playboy whose recklessness inadvertently causes the death of a prominent doctor tries to make amends to his widow, and falls for her in the process.

   IMDB Selected User Review –

   “I watched MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION yesterday, for the first time in a few years, as I worked my way through the Douglas Sirk Box Set.

   Like all of Sirk’s Hollywood movies, there’s a lot more going on in the movie than there appears to be. That said, MO is probably the director’s most eventful film. Where his other pictures concentrate on the dramatic psychological conflict between characters, this one has loads of life-altering events.

   Within the first reel, the male lead Bob Merrick is in an accident that takes him to death’s door. And the female lead’s husband dies of heart attack. A short while later the female lead, Helen Phillips (Jane Wyman) is involved in an accident that robs her of her sight. Ladle on top of this Sirk’s sumptuous technicolour design schemes and all this melodrama might have seemed a bit contrived if it hadn’t been for the highly intellectual philosophical glue that Sirk binds it all together with.

   Sirk himself claimed in an interview on BBC TV that he was more interested in the “circle of life” angle … Dr Phillips dies so that Bob Merrick can live and carry on his good works for him. But whatever the director’s intentions, what we ended up with was a SUPERIOR romantic melodrama with a strong underlying sub-text that says, “Give with no thought of receiving and the world will be a better place.” No argument from me!” 8/10 stars.

   NOTE/1: Magnificent Obsession is based on a classy 1929 novel by Lloyd C Douglas whose works like The Robe, The Big Fisherman and Magnificent Obsession itself tend to have a feel-good religious theme of one dimension or another running through them. In relation to the male lead Hollywood star and his part of a doctor in 1954’s Magnificent Obsession it is a bit ironic that in 1939 Lloyd C Douglas wrote a novel entitled “Dr Hudson’s Secret Journal”

   NOTE/2: In March 1957 Douglas Sirk won the Box Office Magazine Blue Ribbon award for providing the “Best Picture of the Month for the WHOLE FAMILY” and it also starred Rock Hudson. Its title – Battle Hymn.

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   1. Hey Bob….interesting breakdown on Magnificent Obsession. That is one of my mom’s all-time favorite movies. I have yet to see it. Sirk retired at the peak of his box office power. Good stuff.

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