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.

Rock and Doris (and Tony)

Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann, 1961)

Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and Tony Randall in Lover Come Back 

Jerry Webster: Rock Hudson
Carol Templeton: Doris Day
Peter Ramsey: Tony Randall
Rebel Davis: Edie Adams
J. Paxton Miller: Jack Oakie
Linus Tyler: Jack Kruschen
Millie: Ann B. Davis

Director: Delbert Mann
Screenplay: Stanley Shapiro, Paul Henning
Cinematography: Arthur E. Arling
Art direction: Robert Clatworthy, Alexander Golitzen
Film editing: Marjorie Fowler
Music: Frank De Vol

Send Me No Flowers (Norman Jewison, 1964)

Tony Randall, Rock Hudson, Doris Day, and Clint Walker in Send Me No Flowers

George: Rock Hudson
Judy: Doris Day
Arnold: Tony Randall
Mr. Akins: Paul Lynde
Winston Burr: Hal March
Dr. Morrissey: Edward Andrews
Bert: Clint Walker

Director: Norman Jewison
Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein
Based on a play by Norman Barasch, Carroll Moore
Cinematography: Daniel L. Fapp
Art direction: Robert Clatworthy, Alexander Golitzen
Music: Frank De Vol

The gag "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin" has been attributed to various wags, including Groucho Marx and Oscar Levant, but in fact the canard that the Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies were all about Day defending her virginity stems mainly from the second of the three films, Lover Come Back. In the first, Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959), Day's character seems perfectly willing to go off for a weekend with Hudson's, and in the third, Send Me No Flowers, they're already married. Still, these are sex comedies, and Day's characters are, if not virgins, at least naïve. Pillow Talk remains the best of the trio, if only because its initial teaming of the perky Day with the handsome Hudson feels inspired -- as if its makers had been watching the great screwball comedies of the past and had looked around for contemporary equivalents to Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, and Carole Lombard on the one hand, and Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, and Joel McCrea on the other. If Day and Hudson don't seem quite as distinguished as that company, I think that's because the movie industry had changed so much in the interim, with stars no longer seen as members of a studio's repertory troupe. To my mind, Day and Hudson hold their own nicely. What had also changed was a certain coarsening of the treatment of sex as the Production Code began to crumble -- there's a sense that writers and directors in the heyday of screwball comedy were content to finesse the limitations of the Code while those of the early 1960s were thumbing their noses at it. Certainly there's nothing so crass in the great comedies of the 1930s and '40s as the scene in Lover Come Back in which Day's Carol Templeton orders a designer to remodel the container of a potential client's product, saying that whoever gets the contract will have "the most attractive can." Cut to a closeup of the bunny-tail-adorned bottom of Edie Adams as the nightclub dancer Rebel Davis. There's also a lot of humor in these movies that feels sadly dated in ways that the classic '30s and '40s comedies don't, especially the play on symbols of the Confederacy when Hudson's Jerry is trying to woo a Southern client: Rebel exposes an array of Confederate battle flags across her chest as the band plays "Dixie." Send Me No Flowers feels a little less crass than either Pillow Talk or Lover Come Back, partly because we have moved from sex comedy to domestic comedy of the sort more familiar from TV sitcoms: Hudson's George is a hypochondriac who mistakenly thinks he's dying and wants to provide for Day's somewhat ditzy and impractical Judy. If the toned and brawny Hudson seems like a misfit in this part, we have to accept it as a given -- just as we have to accept the goofiness of Cary Grant as a paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938). Perhaps one reason the producers cast the impossibly tall and bulked-up Clint Walker as Judy's old boyfriend was to make Hudson look comparatively normal.

Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959)

Rock Hudson and Thelma Ritter in Pillow Talk

Brad Allen: Rock Hudson
Jan Morrow: Doris Day
Jonathan Forbes: Tony Randall
Alma: Thelma Ritter
Tony Walters: Nick Adams
Marie: Julia Meade
Harry: Allen Jenkins
Pierot: Marcel Dalio
Mrs. Walters: Lee Patrick
Nurse Resnick: Mary McCarty
Dr. A.C. Maxwell: Alex Gerry

Director: Michael Gordon
Screenplay: Stanley Shapiro, Maurice Richlin, Russell Rouse, Clarence Greene
Cinematography: Arthur E. Arling
Art direction: Richard H. Riedel
Film editing: Milton Carruth
Music: Frank De Vol

The Production Code censors wanted to change the name from Pillow Talk to something less redolent of sex, which is one of the more ludicrous of their demands. Because if Pillow Talk is about anything, it's about sex -- more particularly sexual anxiety and, to some extent, sexual identity. The date of the film's release, 1959, is just before the great revolution started by The Pill, and viewing it in that context only highlights how odd some of its dilemmas seem today -- as forgotten, let's say, as the telephone party lines on which much of the movie's plot depends. Doris Day's Jan Morrow, the career woman outwardly convinced that she likes being single but inwardly doubtful, is as problematic a figure as Rock Hudson's Brad Allen, the swinging bachelor who has a pad with switches that turn it into a rape trap. That so much fun can be had from these somewhat reprehensible characters is one of the things we can't quite share in naively today, just as Thelma Ritter's perpetually hungover Alma would be in reality a figure more in need of help than of laughter. Of course, the film knows that these are flawed people, and it sets out to help them in the only way possible in 1959: by marrying them off. (Even Alma finds her mate in Harry, the elevator operator.) Marriage was never really the cure-all for personal dysfunction, but the film was made in an era when we still liked to pretend that it was. The other rich subtext of Pillow Talk is sexual identity, most evident when Hudson, in real life a gay man, plays a straight guy who wants the woman he's trying to bed to think he might be gay, the better to pounce. Here the joke extends beyond the screen into the actor's private life, and it's to Hudson's everlasting credit that, though he's in on the joke, he can play it as if he isn't. The filmmakers take the game one step further by having Hudson's character blunder into an obstetrician's office and wind up  suspected of being a pregnant man -- a twist in the farce that provides the movie's kicker. All of this is meat and potatoes for queer theorists and other miners of cinematic subtext, and one reason why Pillow Talk remains a minor classic when other romantic comedies of the period just seem dated.

The Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk, 1958)

Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone in The Tarnished Angels

Burke Devlin: Rock Hudson
Laverne Shumann: Dorothy Malone
Roger Shumann: Robert Stack
Jiggs: Jack Carson
Jack Shumann: Christopher Olsen
Matt Ord: Robert Middleton
Col. Fineman: Alan Reed
Sam Hagan: Alexander Lockwood

Director: Douglas Sirk
Screenplay: George Zuckerman
Based on a novel by William Faulkner
Cinematography: Irving Glassberg
Art direction: Alexander Golitzen, Alfred Sweeney
Music: Frank Skinner
Costume design: Bill Thomas

CinemaScope and black-and-white are an odd combination. The former was developed and premiered in 1953 as a way for exhibitors to give audiences something they couldn't find at home on their television sets, which were of course black-and-white. It was meant for color and spectacle, and hastened the making of films in color toward its now default status. But although Douglas Sirk was noted for his use of color, and although The Tarnished Angels has scenes that would have benefited from both color and the CinemaScope extra-wide screen, such as the Mardi Gras sequences and the airplane races, he chose to make the film in black-and-white. And it works: It imposes a kind of film noir chiaroscuro on the story, which could easily have devolved into yet another routine action melodrama. The Tarnished Angels was not well received by contemporary critics: Bosley Crowther in the New York Times called it "badly, cheaply written" and "abominably played." (It might be noted that Crowther wasn't paying too close attention to those abominable players: In his review he misidentifies Jack Carson as Jack Oakie.) Today, however, the film has benefited from the wholesale reevaluation of Sirk's oeuvre, and it feels like the work of a master, if one not always fully in control of his art. Sirk creates a shadowy milieu for the story of barnstorming pilots in the Depression, including the shabby interior of the apartment to which Devlin invites them. And there's a wonderfully creepy use of Mardi Gras masks as motifs. But is there any way to excuse the ridiculously fake and exploitative scene in which Dorothy Malone is forced to dangle from a parachute against a process screen while an unseen wind machine blows up her skirts? None, except to blame it on the insistence of producer Albert Zugsmith, who followed up this film with a series of exploitation flicks starring Mamie Van Doren, like High School Confidential (Jack Arnold, 1958) and Sex Kittens Go to College (Zugsmith, 1960). Otherwise, however, Sirk managed to steer clear of Zugsmith's bad taste. It's true that Rock Hudson is miscast as the alcoholic, chain-smoking Times-Picayne reporter Burke Devlin, a part that demands someone who can look less healthy and strapping than Hudson does. But in fact he gives one of his best performances, emphasizing Devlin's vulnerability. Sirk chose to use long takes in the scene in which Devlin delivers an impromptu eulogy to Roger Shumann in the newsroom, beginning drunkenly but gradually sobering as he warms to the topic. Hudson rises to the acting challenge beautifully. Malone doesn't allow the studio's determination to show off her legs to prevent her from also showing the weary, hard-bitten side of Laverne Shumann. Of the leads, I find Stack's performance the least satisfying: There's not enough ambiguity and conflict in Roger's decision to prostitute Laverne to Matt Ord so he can fly Ord's plane; as Stack plays him, Shumann just comes off as an irredeemably obsessive shit. The Tarnished Angels is based on Pylon, one of those William Faulkner novels I've never got around to reading, but Faulkner reportedly said it was his favorite among all the films that have been made from his works. That's not saying a lot, I fear: Faulkner has been sadly mishandled by filmmakers. But judging it purely as a study of characters enduring what life throws at them, a favorite Faulknerian theme, the film stands on its own.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

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

Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954)

Lloyd C. Douglas, Lutheran pastor turned novelist, was in some ways the anti-Ayn Rand. His Magnificent Obsession, published in 1929 and first filmed in 1935 with Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor directed by John M. Stahl, advocates a kind of "pay it forward" altruism, the obverse of Rand's laissez-faire individualism. Douglas preached a gospel of service to others with no expectation of rewards to oneself. Fortunately, director Douglas Sirk and screenwriters Robert Blees and Wells Root keep the preaching in the 1954 remake down to a minimum -- mostly confining it to the preachiest of the film's characters, the artist Edward Randolph (Otto Kruger), but also using it as an essential element in the development of the central character, Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson), in his transition from heel to hero. This was Hudson's first major dramatic role, the one that launched him from Universal contract player into stardom. Not coincidentally, it was the second of nine films he made with Sirk, movies that range from the negligible Taza, Son of Cochise (1954) to the near-great Written on the Wind (1956). More than anyone, perhaps, Sirk was responsible for turning Hudson from just a handsome hunk with a silly publicist-concocted name into a movie actor of distinct skill. In Magnificent Obsession he demonstrates that essential film-acting technique: letting thought and emotion show on the face. It's a more effective performance than that of his co-star, Jane Wyman, though she was the one who got an Oscar nomination for the movie. As Helen Phillips, whose miseries are brought upon her by Merrick (through no actual fault of his own), Wyman has little to do but suffer stoically and unfocus her eyes to play blind. Hudson has an actual character arc to follow, and he does it quite well -- though reportedly not without multiple takes of his scenes, as Sirk coached him into what he wanted. What Sirk wanted, apparently, is a lush, Technicolor melodrama that somehow manages to make sense -- Sirk's great gift as a director being an ability to take melodrama seriously. Magnificent Obsession, like most of Sirk's films during the 1950s, was underestimated at the time by serious critics, but has undergone reevaluation after feminist critics began asking why films that center on women's lives were being treated as somehow inferior to those about men's. It's not, I think, a great film by any real critical standards -- there's still a little too much preaching and too much angelic choiring on the soundtrack, and the premise that a blind woman assisted by a nurse (Agnes Moorehead) with bright orange hair could elude discovery for months despite widespread efforts to find them stretches credulity a little too far. But it's made and acted with such conviction that I found myself yielding to it anyway.