12 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE DECOmber 10,

To Sirk with love

Cinematheque to feature four films by Fassbinder's mentor

Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in Magnificent Obsession.

by Michelle Tomko

Cleveland-If you are a fan of melodrama and will not get enough of it visiting your family this holiday season, plan on "camping out" at the Cleveland Cinematheque for "Universal Sirk," December 11-19.

Universal Sirk is a series of four melodramas made by German director Douglas Sirk in the 1950s for Universal Pictures. All of the flicks in the festival will be shown from new 35mm prints. Three of the four films star then-newcomer Rock Hudson.

Born in Hamburg, Germany as Claus Detlev Sirk in 1900, Sirk was a successful theatre director in Hamburg, Leipzig and Berlin. His productions were everything from classical texts by Shakespeare to modern works of Bertholt Brecht.

In 1933 he produced Kaiser's Silver Lake which the Nazis opposed thus moving Sirk into the realm of the cinema, where he enjoyed much success. But in 1938 with a volatile political climate and fear for his Jewish wife, Sirk went into exile, eventually ending up in America at Columbia Pictures where he worked as a writer. Again, as in the theatre, Sirk's productions were eclectic, from his first American film Hitler's Madman telling the tale of Heydrich's assassination, to the Dorothy Lamour musical Slightly French.

During the decade while he was under contract at Universal Studios from 19501959 is where Sirk really made his mark. It was here that Sirk teamed up with Cleveland native and producer Ross Hunter. They produced what became known as a series of "women's movies," or melodramas that appealed to the matinee audiences of forgotten housewives.

These popular melodramas displayed high emotion (especially suffering) and exaggeration, easily accessible language, and a simplification of good and evil.

The combo of Hunter and Sirk compounded this formula by consistently having almost absurd plots, bright colors, stylish clothes, posh sets and an older, sophisticated leading lady ending up with a boy toy.

Showing at the Cinematheque on Saturday, December 11 and Sunday, December 12 is the 1965 film Written on the Wind. The film stars Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone (who picked up an Oscar for her performance). Film reviewer Leonard Maltin describes it as a "florid melodrama of playboy-millionaire Stack, his nymphomaniac sister Malone, and how they destroy themselves and others around them."

Also on Sunday, December 12 is Sirk's 1959 remake of the Fannie Hurst story Imitation of Life, starring John Gavin and Sandra Dee, as well as the sultry Lana Turner. This proved to be Universal's biggest moneymaker until they released Jaws in 1975.

It is the story of an actress, her black servant and the servant's light skinned daughter trying to pass for being white.

According to Sirk, “In Imitation of Life you don't believe the happy end, and you're not supposed to. The mirror is the imitation of life. What is interesting about a mirror is that it does not show yourself as you are, it shows you your own opposite.'

If the drama at the bars didn't fill your cup during the week you can catch a double dose of Rock Hudson on the 19th in The Tarnished Angels and Magnificent Obsession.

In the remake Magnificent Obsession, Hudson becomes a surgeon in order to restore the eyesight of Falcon Crest matriarch Jane Wyman, after he blinded her in a drunken accident. An actor has a better chance of becoming president than this plot coming true.

Based upon William Faulkner's Pylon, The Tarnished Angels has a big drinker newspaperman becoming obsessed with a daredevil pilot. Time Out Film Guide describes it as being "totally at odds with the bland optimism of postwar America."

Sirk's films took place in the heyday of Technicolor, and according to a lecture at Sonoma (Calif.) State University in 1995; they boast strange camera angles, non-natural lighting, and bold object placement.

Because of the eccentricities of his films, very few critics of the time took him seriously.

Then one of his students, an openly gay fellow German named Rainer Werner Fassbinder, entered the picture in the 1970s and forced the film industry to reexamine Sirk's work. Fassbinder regarded his mentor as a master of melodrama as well as a critic of American val-

ues.

Fassbinder formed the Anti-Teater theater troupe in Munich in 1968 and made over 60 films before his drug and alcohol-related overdose death at the age of 36. New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote of Fassbinder's film work that its "only redeeming feature is genius."

Fassbinder was the first German director to make gay and lesbian themes a prominent part of his work, as in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant which explores a lesbian triangle, and In a Year of Thirteen Moons, where a transgender woman is rejected by the man she became a woman for.

Fassbinder is not the only filmmaker to be influenced by Douglas Sirk. More recently, writer and director Tommy O'Haver described his film Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss in an interview with Indie Wire's Tom Cunha. "I like to see it as a melodrama, not the negative connotation of the word, but like a Douglas Sirk film that has emotions that are played to the hilt."

When asked why bring this film series to Cleveland, Cinematheque director John Ewing said, "I want to see them with mature eyes in the light of Fassbinder."

The films "are a subversion of dramatic convention and American materialistic culture," he added.

"This is the first Sirk festival to come to Cleveland" said Ewing as he explained that he was first scheduled to show Written in the Wind back in 1988, but the studio backed out of sending a print. Ewing describes the films in this series as "so elegant" and a must to see on the big

screen.

But they are available as video rentals, if you must.