The undisputed king of the Hollywood technicolour melodrama, Sirk got a lot of bad press from the intelligentsia of the day for the determined overacting, lurid colour palette and jumping between frivolity and seriousness in his films.
But seen from a later perspective, this quite badly misses the point. All of the above is a Trojan horse to smuggle satire and deep-felt social critique past audiences who would have been scared away by an overt message otherwise. So in Written on the Wind, the target of the attack is the American dream and in Imitation of Life it's class, racism and sexism. Here there's no overt target, but what is unusual for mainstream American cinema of the time is that it's a love story set in collapsing wartime Germany, with the supporting characters a mix of disgruntled regular soldiers, passive resisters and amoral opportunists, as well as the more usual murderous Hitlerites. Even the author of the story, Erich Maria Remarque, best known for writing the semi-autobiographical All Quiet on the Western Front, puts in an acting appearance as a principled professor.
Yes, it's painted in broad strokes and contains a few cheap twists, but it's still far more intelligent than what could be expected from the genre norm.
6/10
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