CLASSIC MOVIE REVIEWS: The Melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Todd Haynes
"Melodramas" are oftentimes more engaging than their genre name - associated overacting and soap operas - would suggest.
By Alan Herrmann
COLUMNIST
Movies that fall under the general classification of melodrama are often seen as overwrought, over-acted, and exaggerated. They are considered big screen soap operas, where the characters’ scandalous behavior provides viewers with an escape from their ordinary lives.
Melodramas have been with us since the dawn of motion pictures over 120 years ago and hit their stride in the 1950s. But as social institutions were rocked in the sities and seventies, their popularity declined, and critics dismissed them as too simplistic or “melodramatic.”
Over time, some of these films were viewed with more insightful consideration and began to be appreciated in a new, positive, and serious light. Critics and film historians looked beyond what many had previously deemed superficial and found stunning set designs, glamorous costumes, lush music scores, and masterful cinematography. Importantly, there were also substantive social issues beneath the sordid and malicious behavior of certain characters.
Among the directors whose work was revisited with a more discerning eye, one stands above the rest: Douglas Sirk.
Like many other Hollywood directors, Sirk was a German immigrant who fled his homeland as Nazism threatened so many lives. Also, like other directors, he worked within a studio system where he made movies across several different genres including westerns, war stories, comedies, and suspense dramas. His work was subjected to the whims of the studio bosses who were constantly looking for material to draw in larger audiences.
Beauty, sex, and violence – within the proper limits of the times – sold tickets, and directors found that these sanitized pot-boilers kept them working.
In the 1950’s Sirk would make several pictures classified as melodramas with stars like Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman, Dorothy Malone, and Lana Turner. With large-budget films often shot in technicolor, Sirk kept Universal Studios happy. But what was happening beneath the veneer of these large melodramas was a passionate, if somewhat subdued, criticism of the mid-century world.
Sirk took on conformity, racism, classism, and sexism in his movies within the constraints of the studio system. Films like Written on the Wind, Tarnished Angels, Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, and Imitation of Life are classics that have a serious following. The last two films are particular favorites of Sirk fans who discovered these works after viewing a 2002 film called Far from Heaven directed by Todd Haynes.
Haynes’ film is a homage to Sirk in content, themes, and style with a strong focus on All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life, while ramping up the themes of conformity, racism, domestic violence, and homosexuality, a theme hinted at in 1950’s cinema but not directly discussed. From the opening shot, the look of Far from Heaven – a bird’s eye view of orange-leafed trees in a quaint New England suburb with its capacious homes – has more in common with All That Heaven Allows than other Sirk films.
In All That Heaven Allows, Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a widow around 40 with young adult children. She falls for Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), a younger working man who loves the outdoors and believes in a more natural and simplistic life than Cary has experienced. This is very scandalous in her world. In Far from Heaven, Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) is married to a successful television executive, Frank (Dennis Quaid), and has two young children. Her situation is more complicated and scandalous because it involves both her attraction to Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert), a Black man, and her discovering that her husband is gay.
While there are differences in specific circumstances, there are similarities in plot. For instance, both leading women characters are attracted to their gardeners who had inherited their jobs from their deceased fathers. Both women are well off and have similar country club friends, including their red-haired best friends played by Agnes Moorhead (Sara) in the 1955 film, and Patricia Clarkson (Eleanor) in the Haynes film.
The music is also similar. Elmer Bernstein, who wrote several scores in the fifties and sixties including The Man with the Golden Arm and To Kill a Mockingbird, wrote the score for Far from Heaven which uses lush, bittersweet melodies. There are even some familiar notes from the To Kill a Mockingbird soundtrack.
Haynes’ use of color symbolizes the mood of his characters. Blue is associated with coldness and bitterness, the failure of a marriage. Green is used to represent the mysterious and forbidden, like Cathy visiting an African American restaurant in Raymond’s neighborhood or Frank’s entering a gay bar in a seedy section of town.
Haynes’ departure from the confines of Sirk’s studio and societal repression by pulling back the curtain on the issue of homosexuality and inter-racial love is brilliantly executed. Instead of taking a more modern approach to how these situations could be handled, he uses the restrained, sanitized dialogue Sirk would have used. Conversations for the most part are polite and coded. When Frank’s homosexuality is discovered, terms like misunderstanding, loitering, not normal, and sickness are used by not only townspeople but also the police and the doctor who “treats” Frank for his “affliction.”
When he is rapidly unraveling, Frank utters the F-bomb. It is the only time a serious swear word is uttered in the film. Even when Frank hits Cathy in a drunken rage, her response is coded as she blames herself and struggles to explain her bruise to Eleanor. There is further violence in Far from Heaven when Raymond’s daughter, Sarah, is attacked by a group of white boys when it’s rumored her dad is running around with a white woman. Her attack is viewed with a “tsk, tsk” response rather than the outrage it deserved.
In All That Heaven Allows, Cary never experiences physical abuse but is emotionally abused by her snobbish and spoiled children who, along with her friends, are humiliated by Cary’s love for the younger, free-spirited Ron. Their answer to Cary’s loneliness is to encourage her to find an older, wealthy widower, and they buy her a television set to keep her company. The true tragedy for Cary is that her friends and family are more concerned with their own worlds being threatened by her happiness.
All That Heaven Allows has a happy ending – Hollywood producers loved a happy ending – despite all the turmoil to get there, whereas Far from Heaven is bittersweet.
Todd Haynes was heralded for Far from Heaven by Hollywood and especially praised by the LGBTQ+ community. The film was nominated for four Oscars. In 2015, his film Carol, about a forbidden lesbian romance in the 1950’s with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, was nominated for six Academy Awards.
Both of these films deal with fatalism, a boxed-in feeling of oppression which was true of several Sirk films despite Hollywood happy endings. In his last major melodrama, Imitation of Life (1959) Sirk tackled racism, particularly the issue of African Americans passing for white. Sirk, tired of dealing with Hollywood rules, eventually left to direct in Germany and other countries. He died in 1989 on February 14th, Valentine’s Day. Perhaps there is a bit of irony here considering that so many of his film characters struggled with love.
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