Interesting comment about “gearshift movies” though I am not sure I like them myself. An obvious example is Barton Fink and I would have much preferred that it had continued as a satire. Being John Malkovich is perhaps another example though I don’t remember if there was a single scene where the change occur. It starts off as a comedy and by the end it has become a weird melodrama.
BTW Passion of Joan of Arc is available on DVD and you can rent it on www.greencine.com . Greencine has a pretty good collection of classic films in general; maybe better than Netflix. It has a nice selection of anime as well.
Interrobang, thanks for jogging my memory: Written on the Wind belongs somewhere in my list too, although sometimes I waffle between that and All that Heaven Allows.
And Eve, thank you SO much for that link! I had no idea George had done nude work! I hereby change my position on the possibility of time travel. Somebody, PLEASE! Make me a time machine! (I had a roommate in highschool who was the blond spit of young George. Oh, the memories.)
I’ve seen WotW three or four times, and wasn’t as impressed with AtHA. (I was still plenty impressed, mind you.) The Sirk that challenges WotW for me is Imitation of Life, which I’ve only seen once but left me thunderstruck in my seat when it was over.
Additional Sirk hijack: James Harvey, in Movie Love in the 50s, has some great chapters on Sirk, and one on IoL in particular.
IoL was my first Sirk, but it thins, for me, on repeated viewings. AtHA deepens. WotW is, I think, his most satirical and funniest, and subversively complex, but AtHA is ultimately very serious. For some reason it holds more weight for me.
But faced with a desert island, I’d probly go with WotW, by a hair. It forms part of a kind of triptych for me, with The Birds and Showgirls; a trilogy of dark hysteria; extremes all around. Those three films meet somewhere in a kind of surreal exaggeration of the terrible and mysterious powers of female sexuality.
Add to that the fact that Diamanda Galas is one of my favorite artists and I’d say I have some issues, n’est-ce pas?
Hmm. Free associating here, I Walked with a Zombie, Sunrise, Johnny Guitar, Scarlet Empress, Oleanna, Europa 51, Sylvia Scarlet, all kind of touch on those themes, don’t they?
Maybe I should look into funding for longterm therapy . . .
Wind (new shorthand for Eve) is satirical and funny, true – gotta love the mechanical horse – but it also reaches real emotional depths by the time it’s through.
But the reason I love it is the almost casual way it completely reverses your sympathies over the course of the movie. You start out wanting Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall to get together, but you end up filled with pity for poor Dorothy Malone and Robert Stack – the ones you start out disliking.
As for Heaven, I can’t remember where I read it, but I love Sirk’s comment about the title: studio heads loved it, thinking that “all that heaven allows” is grand and sweeping, but Sirk’s take is that heaven doesn’t allow too damn much at all.
I started another thread for overstuffed 1950s/60s melodramas, as this one was getting a bit lopsided . . .
No, never knew Janet Gaynor . . . My silent-star friendships and acquaintances have been Lillian Gish, Blanche Sweet, Anita Page, Esther Ralston and Lina Basquette.
!?, that’s hilarious: the mechanical horse is my single favorite moment in Wind. That was my first glimpse into the sublayers: it was hollow shallow camp for me the first time I saw it, but the second time, that horse just totally threw me for a loop-de-loop, and I had to watch it all over again from an entirely different perspective.
The same thing happened to me with Showgirls: shallow hollow camp, then WHAM! the knife blades suddenly showed through the flesh and sparkle, and it was an utterly new experience the second time through.
And yes, the third or fourth time through Wind I realized that Sirk’s sympathies lay with the “bad guys” rather than the “good guys,” and again, wham, new movie experience.
I’m sorry - I just can’t take F.W. Murnau films seriously since I saw Shadow Of The Vampire. I keep trying to guess which actor is secretly a vampire. SOTV is a great film, by the way.
Sherlock Jr.—Buster Keaton (1924) The Wind—Victor Seastrom (1928) I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang—Mervyn LeRoy (1932) Nothing Sacred—William Wellman (1937) The Lady Eve—Preston Sturges (1941) Detour—Edgar G. Ulmer (1945) The Best Years Of Our Lives—William Wyler (1946) Sunset Boulevard—Billy Wilder (1950) Johnny Guitar—Nicholas Ray (1954) Diabolique—Henri-Georges Clouzot (1955) Baby Doll—Elia Kazan (1956) Lolita—Stanley Kubrick (1962) In Cold Blood—Richard Brooks (1967) Point Blank—John Boorman (1967) The King of Marvin Gardens—Bob Rafelson (1972) The Conversation—Francis Ford Coppola (1974) Chinatown—Roman Polanski (1974) The Year of Living Dangerously—Peter Weir (1983) Prizzi’s Honor—John Huston (1985)
