The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948)

Cast: Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Don Taylor, Dorothy Hart, Frank Conroy, Ted de Corsia, House Jameson, Anne Sargent, Adelaide Klein, Grover Burgess, Tom Pedi, Enid Markey, voice of Mark Hellinger. Screenplay: Albert Maltz, Malvin Wald. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: John DeCuir. Film editing: Paul Weatherwax. Music: Miklós Rózsa, Frank Skinner.

This hugely influential police procedural won two Oscars, for William H. Daniels's cinematography and Paul Weatherwax's film editing. Which is as it should be: What excitement and interest the film has today, after years of derivative movies and TV shows, is in the documentation of New York City streets and landmarks in the years just after World War II and in the brilliantly paced chase scene that comes at the climax, when the murderer scales the Williamsburg Bridge to evade the cops pursuing him. The script now feels clichéd, even if some of the clichés were new, and the dialogue sometimes banal and over-expository. Nor does producer Mark Hellinger's occasionally pretentious voice-over narration sound right to the ear. Barry Fitzgerald overindulges his leprechaun schtick as Lt. Muldoon and Don Taylor is a bit too determinedly callow as Halloran. On the other hand, the supporting cast is convincingly real. It's fun to watch today for some faces that became familiar later, many of them performing on Broadway at the time the film was made and rounded up for bit parts. Look for Paul Ford, Kathleen Freeman, James Gregory, John Marley, Arthur O'Connell, David Opatoshu, Nehemiah Persoff, Molly Picon, and John Randolph among them. The director, Jules Dassin, and the screenwriters, Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald, were among those who fell afoul of the witch hunters of the blacklist in the 1950s.

Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956)

Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson, and Robert Stack in Written on the Wind

Mitch Wayne: Rock Hudson
Lucy Moore Hadley: Lauren Bacall
Kyle Hadley: Robert Stack
Marylee Hadley: Dorothy Malone
Jasper Hadley: Robert Keith
Dan Willis: Robert J. Wilke
Biff Miley: Grant Williams
Dr. Cochrane: Edward Platt

Director: Douglas Sirk
Screenplay: George Zuckerman
Based on a novel by Robert Wilder
Cinematography: Russell Metty
Art direction: Robert Clatworthy, Alexander Golitzen
Set decoration: Russell A. Gausman, Julia Heron
Film editing: Russell F. Schoengarth
Costumes: Bill Thomas
Music: Frank Skinner

In All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959), Douglas Sirk demonstrated his unsurpassed skill with the "woman's picture," centered on the problems women face in trying to conform to society's demands. But in Written on the Wind, Sirk delivered an essential twist on the genre: a woman's picture about men. There may be no keener exploration of impotence than this portrait of the inability of Rock Hudson's Mitch Wayne and Robert Stack's Kyle Hadley to live up to the concept of masculinity. Kyle is the more obvious example of the problem: He is so terrified that he's sterile that when his wife, Lucy, becomes pregnant, he turns on Mitch, his best friend, accusing him of impregnating her. Granted, he's tricked into this by his malicious sister, Marylee (Dorothy Malone), who is taking her revenge on Mitch for spurning her advances. But this also brings into focus Mitch's problem: Everyone -- Marylee, Lucy, and, yes, Kyle -- is in love with him, and he can't satisfy all of them and remain true to himself. He has been set up by Kyle's father (Robert Keith) as a kind of model of masculinity -- a rags-to-riches success story -- so Kyle, who has never known anything but riches, both admires and resents him. No wonder Mitch wants to escape from the turmoil of the Hadley household and go to work in Iran. Seething under all of this psychodrama is a subtext we now know in greater detail: Hudson's secret life as a gay man. It's reasonably sure that Sirk, who boosted Hudson's career, elevating him into a major star, knew about the actor's off-screen life, so Written on the Wind has grown in stature over the years as one of those films in which a star's personal life deepens a character's backstory. As usual, Sirk and cinematographer Russell Metty provide a rich Technicolor environment for the story, with a masterly use of visually metaphoric shadows and (as in the still above) reflections. Sirk also made the most of the Universal art department, crafting a milieu of excess and sometimes dubious taste for the Hadleys: Notice the array of bottles and geegaws on the dresser in that image. And Bill Thomas's costuming, including some retina-burning reds and oranges for bad girl Marylee, contrasting with muted tones for good girl Lucy, is almost eloquent in what it says about the characters. Written on the Wind is usually cited as a precursor of those 1980s prime-time soaps about the superrich, Dallas and Dynasty, but Sirk gives it more edge and wit than they ever showed.

Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)

Lana Turner and Juanita Moore in Imitation of Life

Lora Meredith: Lana Turner
Annie Johnson: Juanita Moore
Steve Archer: John Gavin
Sarah Jane Johnson: Susan Kohner
Susie Meredith: Sandra Dee
Allen Loomis: Robert Alda
David Edwards: Dan O'Herlihy
Sarah Jane, age 8: Karin Dicker
Susie, age 6: Terry Burnham
Frankie: Troy Donahue
Choir Soloist: Mahalia Jackson

Director: Douglas Sirk
Screenplay: Eleanore Griffin, Allan Scott
Based on a novel by Fannie Hurst
Cinematography: Russell Metty
Art direction: Alexander Golitzen, Richard H. Riedel
Film editing: Milton Carruth
Music: Frank Skinner

John Gavin was Hollywood's ultimate decorative male, there to look good in bed with Janet Leigh in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) but otherwise to play no significant role in the film. (When he shows up later with Vera Miles, playing Leigh's sister, to find out what happened to Marion Crane, she's the one who does all the work, including the discovery of the mummified Mrs. Bates in the cellar.) It's no surprise that when Gavin died recently, several of the obituaries mentioned the scene in Thoroughly Modern Millie (George Roy Hill, 1967) in which his character is paralyzed by a poison dart: He's been presented as so handsomely wooden that it takes a long time before anyone notices he's just sitting there. He's not quite so inert in Imitation of Life, but that's because Douglas Sirk, like Hitchcock, knew how to make use of him: He's there to hang as nicely on Lana Turner's arm as the Jean Louis gowns do on her body. Unfortunately, this makes for some of the film's weaker scenes, the ones in which Sandra Dee's Susie develops a crush on him, but even there the fault is more Dee's limitations as an actress than Gavin's as an actor. He comes off much better in one of the key scenes, in which his Steve Archer proposes to Turner's Lora Meredith. It works because Turner is skillful enough to make Lora into a woman who knows how not to get trapped by male expectations of what women should be. It's not quite so well-played as the scene in Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) I wrote about a couple of days ago, in which Charlotte Vale rebuffs Jerry Durrance's suggestion that she should be looking for a man instead of taking care of his daughter, but that's because Lana Turner wasn't Bette Davis. Still, the scene comes off, and it's reinforced later when Lora is the one who proposes to Steve, after she's gotten what she wanted. The film belongs, of course, to the women, not only Turner but also and especially to Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner, who got the Oscar nominations they deserved. It's possible to fault the film for "whitewashing" by casting Kohner as the black girl who tries to pass for white, especially since in the earlier version of Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl, 1934), the corresponding character was played by Fredi Washington, who was indeed black. But even to raise the issue of "passing" in 1959, especially in a film that some considered little more than soap opera, was audacious: The Production Code had long forbidden any treatment of miscegenation. And Sirk artfully turns the issue into a generational one: Sarah Jane's desire to be white as a reaction against the subservience of her mother, foreshadowing a generation gap that would be operative in the coming decade's civil rights struggle. Sirk's films have a way of working themselves into your head unexpectedly, putting the lie to my observation that drama makes you think and melodrama makes you feel. Sirk's melodrama -- Imitation of Life is unashamed of the clichés it exploits and usually transcends -- undoubtedly makes you feel. Is there ever a dry eye at showings of the film's funeral finale? But by confronting the problems that underlie the melodrama it also has a sneaky way of making you think.

All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)

Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows

Cary Scott: Jane Wyman
Ron Kirby: Rock Hudson
Sara Warren: Agnes Moorehead
Kay Scott: Gloria Talbott
Ned Scott: William Reynolds
Harvey: Conrad Nagel
Mick Anderson: Charles Drake
Alida Anderson: Virginia Grey
Mona Plash: Jacqueline deWit
Howard Hoffer: Donald Curtis
Mary Ann: Merry Anders

Director: Douglas Sirk
Screenplay: Peg Fenwick
Based on a story by Edna L. Lee and Harry Lee
Cinematography: Russell Metty
Art direction: Alexander Golitzen, Eric Orbom
Music: Frank Skinner
Costume design: Bill Thomas

Pauline Kael called All That Heaven Allows "trashy," and others have called it "campy," but the ongoing reevaluation of the work of its director, Douglas Sirk, has delivered a new respect for the film, leading to, among other things, its selection in 1995 for inclusion in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Some would still call it a triumph of form over content, because no one today seriously questions Sirk's brilliant exploitation of the technical resources available to him, specifically his unusually expressive work, in collaboration with cinematographer Russell Metty, in Technicolor, a proprietary medium whose proprietors had rigidly fixed ideas about what could be done with it. Sirk called on Metty for, among other things, more shadows and more use of reflections than were conventional in Technicolor. See, for example, the near-silhouetted figures of Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in the still above, with its subtle backlighting. And notice how the television set that's an unwelcome gift to Wyman's Cary Scott from her children is used in the scenes in which it appears: It's never turned on, but instead its blank screen reflects Cary's face, almost as if the set is a cage in which she's trapped. In another scene, it reflects the flames in the fireplace, becoming a little bit of hell. But that symbolic use of the TV set also suggests why we ought to take All That Heaven Allows more seriously for its content, as filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes have done by echoing it in their films. Because ATHA is the epitome of the "woman's picture" as ironic commentary on what women experienced in the 1950s. For all her masculine name, Cary undergoes a constant reminder of her vulnerability as a woman: She is nearly raped by the drunken Howard Hoffer. At or near 40 (Wyman was 38), she is thought by her children to be beyond remarrying for love or even sex: Hence their tolerance of a proposal from the asexual or possibly closeted Harvey, who admits he can't offer her much beyond "companionship." The television set is pushed on her by everyone who thinks it will provide relief from loneliness. The children only come round to something like acceptance of their mother's independence after she has broken off the engagement to the handsome, virile (and younger) Ron Kirby, and they have started new lives of their own: The daughter is getting married and the son is going off to work overseas. (In Iran! A reflection of different times.) No wonder Cary suffers psychosomatic headaches. I admit to having problems with the film's ending, in which she seemingly finds fulfillment only by devoting herself to nursing the now-vulnerable Ron back to health, as if a woman can only be useful by serving a man. But Sirk himself had problems with that ending, which was imposed on him by the producer, Ross Hunter. Sirk wanted more ambiguity about whether Ron would live or die. All That Heaven Allows was ignored by the Academy, though Metty's cinematography certainly deserved notice -- it was probably judged a little too unconventional by his peers -- as did Frank Skinner's score, with its effective use of quotations from Liszt and Brahms and its resistance to melodramatic overstatement.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies