Thunder on the Hill (1951)

Thunder on the Hill (AKA Bonaventure) is a 1951 Universal International movie directed by Douglas Sirk and included in Kino Lorber’s Film Noir: Dark Side of Cinema 2 Blu-Ray boxed set. The awesome thing about this set is that not a single one of the three movies in it is even remotely film noir. They’re all pure melodramas. That’s not to say that it’s a bad set. It’s actually an interesting set and well worth buying. But noir it ain’t.

It’s not Kino Lorber’s fault. These days almost every movie made in Hollywood prior to 1960 gets labelled as film noir because the marketing people believe that it’s only viable to release old movies on Blu-Ray if they’re labelled film noir. They certainly don’t believe that it’s viable to release melodramas or women’s pictures as melodramas or women’s pictures, which I think is terribly sad. Some of the very best Hollywood movies of the 40s and 50s were seen at the time as women’s pictures but the prejudice against that genre seems to be as strong as ever.

The story takes place in a convent hospital in Norfolk. There have been severe storms and floods and the locals have all taken shelter at the convent. The nuns are barely coping with the problem of housing and feeding so many people. Things start to get interesting when three more people arrive. Valerie Carns (Ann Blyth) is a convicted murderess on her way to Norwich to be hanged the following day. She is accompanied by two guards, one male and one female. Valerie was convicted of giving her seriously ill brother a fatal overdose of his medication.

Sister Mary Bonaventure (Claudette Colbert) is troubled by guilts of her own. She feels responsible for her sister’s death eight years earlier. Sister Mary becomes convinced that Valerie Carns is innocent and she decides to play amateur detective.

The convent is now cut off from the outside world by floodwaters and the phone lines are down. There is one thing that could aid Sister Mary’s detective efforts - most of the people involved in Valerie’s trial are now in the convent.

Sister Mary manages to turn up a clue. It doesn’t prove Valerie’s innocence but it does shed a new light on the case. The really vital clue is quite clever and the way it’s discovered is quite clever.

Sister Mary manages to reach Norwich by boat, thanks to the efforts of the simple-minded, quick-tempered but good-hearted Willie (Michael Pate). She brings Valerie’s fiancé back with her. Now everyone with any connection to the case has been assembled.

Unfortunately the solution is blindingly obvious right from the start so as a whodunit this movie is a total washout. There is some decent suspense. It’s a race against time to save Valerie and the vital clues always seem to be just out of Sister Mary’s reach.

The acting is melodramatic but this is a melodrama so that can be forgiven. Claudette Colbert is good as Sister Mary, a woman with some complexity. She is convinced that she is right but she fears that that is her problem - she always thinks she’s right. Ann Blyth is quite good as Valerie. Gladys Cooper is overly obvious as the evil bitch Reverend Mother. The supporting cast no is no more than adequate although Connie Gilchrist is fun as the dotty Sister Josephine. Gavin Muir manages to be both dull and nasty as the vindictive police sergeant in charge of Valerie.

It’s interesting that all the authority figures in this movie are both vicious and two-dimensional.

Sister Mary is the only character who is even the slightest bit interesting.

The convent setting works very well.

As I hinted earlier there’s not the slightest trace of film noir in this movie. It can’t even be described as noirish or noir-tinged.

Thunder on the Hill tries to be both a mystery and a suspense movie. It’s a failure as a mystery and a reasonable success as a suspense movie. The obviousness of the plot makes it less interesting than it should be. I wouldn’t recommend buying this one had it been a standalone release but if you’re going to buy the set it’s worth a look but don’t expect it to turn out to be a neglected gem.

Has Anybody Seen My Gal (1952)

Has Anybody Seen My Gal is a frothy musical set in the 20s that is not quite what one expects from director Douglas Sirk. It is however utterly delightful.

Samuel Fulton (Charles Coburn) is fabulously rich but he’s by no means a young man. In fact he’s reached the age where he’s starting to think about where his money is going to go when he shuffles off this mortal coil. He has no family whatsoever. So he decides to leave all his money to the Blaisdell family in the sleepy little town of Hilverton. And what is his connection to the Blaisdell family? Many years earlier he had proposed marriage to a charming young lady named Millicent and she’d turned him down. As a result of her refusal he’d left Hilverton and set out to make his fortune in the world. With spectacular success. If Millicent had accepted him he’d have spent his whole life in Hilverton and he’d still be making $35 a week. So he has Millicent to thank for his success.

Millicent is no longer alive so he decides to leave his fortune to her descendants. Millicent’s daughter Harriet (Lynn Bari) is married to Charles Blaisdell (Larry Gates) who runs the drug store in Hilverton. They have a son, Howard (William Reynolds), and two daughters, Millicent (Piper Laurie) and eleven-year-old Roberta (Gigi Perreau). Fulton’s lawyer doesn’t care who the old man leaves his fortune to but he does make a suggestion - why doesn’t Fulton go to Hilverton to find out what the family is really like? Fulton is a chronic hypochondriac who is constantly convinced he’s at death’s door but surprisingly he jumps at the idea.

Fulton pretends to be an eccentric painter named John Smith and by means of various subterfuges manages to persuade the Blaisdells to take him in as a lodger. They of course have no idea that he’s a rich man. Fulton/Smith now sets out to find out if the Blaisdells deserve his money. 

Harriet Blaisdell always wanted to be rich. She secretly (or actually not so secretly) despises her husband as a failure. Harriet dreams of marrying off Millicent to Carl Pennock (Skip Homeier), simply because the Pennocks are the richest family in town. Millicent really wants to marry Dan Stebbins but since Dan is a mere assistant in the Blaisdell drug store Harriet is determined to sabotage their plans and persuade Millicent to marry the rich but obnoxious Carl.

Sam Fulton/John Smith gets himself a job as a soda jerk in the drug store. Then he puts his plan into operation. He sends the Blaisdells a cheque, anonymously, for $100,000. Suddenly the Blaisdells are even richer than the Pennocks. For Harriet it is a dream come true. She forces her husband to give up the drug store, she insists they move to the biggest house in town and she sets out to live the lifestyle of the fabulously rich. This makes Harriet happy and everyone else miserable. And Millicent still wants to marry the poor but honest and hard-working Dan. 

The Blaisdells soon discover that being rich isn’t as easy as they’d thought. This might superficially be a movie with the message that money doesn’t buy happiness but it’s a bit more subtle than that. Samuel Fulton is rich and he thoroughly enjoys it. Being rich is fine but you have to decide what you really want. If you know what you want then being rich isn’t absolutely necessary. The movie is certainly not arguing that it’s wonderful to be poor - it’s important to remember that the Blaisdells never were poor. Charles Blaisdell had a modest but fairly successful business, they had a comfortable house. They already had enough money, they just didn’t realise that it was enough. Dan isn’t a pauper - he’s a young man with reasonable prospects. He’ll never be a millionaire but he’ll do OK. If you’re a modest success don’t make yourself miserable wishing you were fabulously successful. The Blaisdell family can have happiness if only they can learn that money is only part of the answer. 

Charles Coburn was one of those wonderful character actors who helped to make the golden age of Hollywood golden. This movie gives him a rare chance to play a starring role. And make no mistake, Coburn is the star here. He makes the most of his opportunity. Samuel Fulton is a terrific character - he’s eccentric but warm-hearted, in fact he’s the millionaire with the heart of gold. Coburn makes him endearing but without getting overly sentimental about it. Lynn Bari is marvelous as Harriet, a woman blinded by her obsession with wealth and status. She’s not evil, just deluded, but she sure does a lot of harm. 

Piper Laurie has great fun playing the good-natured flapper Millicent. Gigi Perreau manages the difficult feat of being a non-irritating and genuinely likeable child star. Rock Hudson is the surprise here - it’s not quite the sort of role you expect for him. Dan is a generally sympathetic character but he’s inclined to be irritable and prickly and he’s certainly bitter about the prospect of losing his girl to the rich but feckless Carl. Hudson doesn’t do too badly. We might occasionally be annoyed by Dan but we can see he’s basically pretty decent.

If you really want to you can try to find typical Sirk themes in this movie but you’d be missing the point. This is a light-hearted bubbly romantic musical with the emphasis very much on comedy. Luckily, it really is funny. In fact it works perfectly. There are fewer musical numbers than you expect in a musical and there are no big production numbers. The music is however light and frothy and pretty enjoyable.

This movie’s biggest strength though is that it looks fabulous. This was a Universal picture and Universal in the 50s seemed to have the knack of making Technicolor pictures look even more sumptuous than usual. The 1920s fashions, and the cars and the sets, all are superb. This movie is quite simply gorgeous.

Has Anybody Seen My Gal has been released as part of the five-movie Region 1 Rock Hudson Screen Legend Collection DVD set. It’s also been released individually and as part of a Douglas Sirk boxed set. My copy is the Region 4 standalone DVD, which looks pretty good. This is a movie that really needs to be released on Blu-Ray.

This is a bright and breezy and generally optimistic movie, and it’s funny. It’s quite content to offer stylish old-fashioned feel-good entertainment. Not a typical Sirk movie but if you accept it on its own terms it’s a delightful concoction. Highly recommended.

Shockproof (1949)

Shockproof was directed by Douglas Sirk from a screenplay by Samuel Fuller. The studio didn’t like the ending and got producer Helen Deutsch to rewrite. In Sirk’s opinion the changes ruined the film and it’s impossible not to agree with him. Nonetheless the movie is still not without interest.

Made by Columbia in 1949, it’s a movie that would certainly have qualified as a film noir had the ending not been changed.

Cornel Wilde is Griff Marat, a parole officer who’s about to get assigned to a case that will drag him down into the noir nightmare world. The case involves paroled murderess Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight). Jenny killed a man for the sake of her lover, the incredibly slimy Harry Wesson (John Baragrey). Jenny spins Griff the usual sob story about her terrible childhood  and tells him that Harry is the only man who’s ever cared for her. To Griff it’s obvious that Harry is responsible for all Jenny’s problems and he warns her that if she ever sees him again she will be breaking the terms of her parle and will go straight back to prison.



But of course Jenny will see Harry again. Jenny is stubborn, has a bad case of self-pity and very poor judgment where men are concerned. Griff’s judgment is also pretty questionable, especially where attractive blonde parolees are concerned. He convinces himself that Jenny is basically good and that if he can only keep her away from Harry she’ll go straight. Griff lives with his blind mother and his kid brother and now decides to employ Jenny as a live-in housekeeper/nurse for his mother. This is obviously a spectacularly bad idea, not to mention that it’s almost certainly against the rules for a parole officer to be living under the same roof as one of his parolees, especially when the parolee is an attractive member of the opposite sex.

The inevitable happens and Griff falls in love with Jenny. But is Jenny in love with him? Or is she still in love with the worthless Harry Wesson? And even if she is in love with Griff is she strong enough to keep Harry our of her life?



Predictably Griff soon finds himself in an unholy mess as the second half of Shockproof becomes a couple-on-the-run movie after Harry appears on the scene again.

Despite being somewhat implausible it’s basically a good story, at least until we reach the hopelessly contrived ending.

Sirk does his usual stylish job. The movie looks more like a Sirk melodrama than a film noir and there are some good visual set-pieces, especially in the mining village in the latter part of the movie. Sirk and his director of photography Charles Lawton Jr also make Patricia Knight look very glamorous, which works well for the story.



Cornel Wilde plays Griff as a nice guy who wants to do the right thing but who can’t help himself where women are concerned. Griff admits he’d never been in love before, a fact which is painfully apparent. It’s a good performance although Griff is perhaps not quite tough enough to be a convincing parole officer.

Patricia Knight is very good indeed. She makes Jenny a very ambiguous character. We’re never sure to what extent Griff can trust her or what her exact motivations are. She makes Jenny sympathetic, but not too sympathetic. The audience has to doubt her. She’s a mixture of innocence and calculation.

John Baragrey is extraordinarily creepy as Harry Wesson, a classic crime movie bad guy. He’s not a heavy. He relies on his oily charm rather than on his fists.



This movie is part of the Samuel Fuller Collection DVD boxed set, an interesting set since it includes not just movies that Fuller directed but also quite a few for which he wrote the screenplay before turning to directing, and even includes a movie with which he had no direct involvement but which was based on one of his novels. All the movies in the set were Columbia productions. The transfer of Shockproof is exceptionally good.

Despite the contrived ending this movie is worth seeing. It features an interesting and complex femme fatale and was made with the style we expect from Douglas Sirk. Recommended.

Interlude (1957)

Interlude (later re-released as Forbidden Interlude), released in 1957, is one of the lesser known Douglas Sirk movies of the 1950s. Like most of his great films of that era it was produced by Ross Hunter for Universal.

Helen Banning (June Allyson) is an American who has just arrived in Munich to work in the US consulate there. She meets the great conductor Tonio Fischer (Rossano Brazzi), and they fall in love.

Tonio however has a tragic secret, a secret that has the potential to doom their love affair.

Tonio has a rival for Helen’s affections, a rather dull American doctor named Morley Dwyer (Keith Andes).




Helen has never experienced a great love before and she is quite swept off her feet by the sophisticated European conductor.

A romantic idyll follows but Tonio is clearly troubled by something and the revelation when it does come leaves Helen shell-shocked to say the least, and facing a situation for which she is quite unprepared. What seemed like a simple holiday romance is anything but simple.



I’ve never liked June Allyson but I must admit she’s quite good in this film. Rossano Brazzi doesn’t overdo the Latin over thing. Both leads give surprisingly effective and sensitive performances. Keith Andes as Dr Dwyer is dull, but his character is supposed to be dull in contrast to Tonio’s European sophistication and charm.

With Ross Hunter producing, Douglas Sirk directing and William H. Daniels doing the cinematography, and given that the movie was shot in Cinemascope and Technicolor you’d expect Interlude to have a lush romantic look, and that’s exactly what it has.



For hardcore Sirk fans this movie may seem to lack the irony that they love so much in movies like Written on the Wind. It’s true that Interlude is a different sort of film, a more or less straightforward romantic melodrama, but Sirk took melodrama more seriously than is often assumed. Like all his melodramas Interlude has a powerful intensity. No matter what you think about his characters their pain is real and he wants you to feel that pain.

Finding that the movie was based on a James M. Cain story may come as a surprise but Cain was obsessed by music and the musical background to the story reflects that love.



The Region 4 DVD from Madman’s Director’s Suite series includes an interview with Kathryn Bigelow in which she talks way too much about her own films and spouts some silly film school psychoanalytical nonsense. It had the effect of telling me very little about Sirk and making me want to avoid Bigelow’s movies.

Interlude might not be a major Sirk movie but it’s a supremely romantic and tragic love story. Most Sirk fans seem to regard this as not merely a minor effort but even as a failure but as long as you’re not expecting something of the quality of Sirk’s great films then it’s worth a look.

There’s Always Tomorrow (1956)

There’s Always Tomorrow is one of Douglas Sirk’s lesser-known melodramas but it’s still typical of the 1950s Sirk style.

It was made at Universal in 1956, with Ross Hunter as producer. As such you’d expect it to be in Technicolor but on occasions Sirk reverted to black-and-white and did so very effectively.

Clifford Groves (Fred MacMurray) has everything he ever wanted. He wanted to marry Marion (Joan Bennett) and he married her. He lover her and she loves him. He has a comfortable home and three healthy kids. He runs a successful toy-making business which is clearly something of a labour of love. That’s what he wanted - stability, prosperity, a job he loves, marriage and children.

So why isn’t he happier? It’s not that he’s aware of being overtly unhappy. There just seems to be something missing. He has a feeling of disappointment, of emptiness.

The fact is that Clifford Groves feels under-appreciated. He has devoted his life to being a good husband and a good father but sometimes it’s nice to be told you’re appreciated. It’s not that Clifford’s wife and children don’t love him but he’s become just part of the furniture. He doesn’t feel that he’s central in their lives. He fees that he is being taken for granted.



He plans a special night out for his wife’s birthday but she cancels out on him. So then he plans a romantic weekend getaway for just the two of them and she cancels out again. He’s trying his best and he feels hurt. He’s a nice guy and he’s a very decent man but this is all too typical of his life. No matter how hard he tries he seems to just fade into the background. Which is one reason the decision to shoot the movie in black-and-white was the correct one. Clifford Groves’ life isn’t black; it’s a sort of dull grey.

And then he meets Norma again. Norma (Barbara Stanwyck) helped him to set up his toy business twenty years earlier and they dated for a while. Nothing serious ever came of it but they were fond of each other. Norma has been in New York for the last twenty years and now has a successful fashion designing business. She just happens to be in LA and she looks him up. And suddenly Clifford’s world isn’t so grey any more.



Norma is vibrant and fun. They enjoy being together. They meet up again at a desert resort and they have a wonderful time, doing all the things that Clifford used to enjoy doing but has given up because he has no-one to do these things with. It’s all quite innocent - just two lonely middle-aged people enjoying one another’s company. It’s so innocent that Clifford makes no secret of it. He tell his wife all about Norma. Marion isn’t jealous at all. She even invites Norma over for dinner. And that perhaps is a symptom of where their marriage has gone wrong - Norma is glamorous and exciting and Marion should be jealous but she takes Clifford so much for granted that the idea that he might have an affair doesn’t even occur to her.

Not that he and Norma have any intention of having an affair. He’s not the sort of man who chases other women. But Norma makes him feel alive again and it’s a dangerous situation. If Marion had actually become jealous everything would probably have worked out harmlessly - at least if she’d become jealous Clifford would have known that she was still interested in him and that would probably have been enough to make him realise he wasn’t interested in an affair. Now things are really starting to get dangerous.



Norma’s motivations are a little obscure, which is not a fault with the movie but rather it’s one of its strengths. Norma herself possibly was not aware of the reasons she suddenly decided to look Clifford up after all these years. Or was she? Did she have some vague notion about starting up their relationship again? It’s obvious that twenty years earlier she was a lot more serious about it than Clifford was, and although she was later briefly married it appears that she never quite got Clifford out of her system. It’s not that she had any conscious intention of having an affair with him but again it contributes to the dangerousness of the situation. Her old love for Clifford could very easily be rekindled into a blazing fire. And given the way Clifford feels about being under-appreciated he could easily find himself falling for Norma in a big way.

To complicate matters his son Vinnie spotted them at the resort and has convinced himself that they’re already having a tempestuous love affair. Now Vinnie is making life very difficult.



This is the sort of material that Sirk always handled well. While critics like to talk about Sirk’s irony his sensitivity towards characters who are vulnerable or lonely is sometimes not noticed as much as it should be. Sirk’s 1950s movies were often dismissed at the time as soap operas and while they are unashamed melodramas they’re melodrama approached seriously. His characters might seem like soap opera characters but they feel real pain. Their dramas are real to them.

Sirk is helped considerably in this one by the faultless casting and the extremely fine performances. Fred MacMurray, a very underrated actor, makes Clifford into a very sympathetic character. He’s a character who could easily be made to look merely pathetic but MacMurray gives him dignity which helps to soften the edges of Sirk’s irony (which is certainly present in this movie). Stanwyck plays Norma with intelligent ambiguity. Marion could easily have become a mere unsympathetic uncaring wife stereotype as well but Joan Bennett doesn’t allow that to happen. Just as Stanwyck resists the temptation to make Norma conniving Bennett resists the temptation to make Marion shrewish. Marion has hurt Clifford but she has done so without realising it and without malice. So we’re never quite sure which way Clifford will jump, and we’re never quite sure which way we want him to jump.



This is another Sirk tale of the perfect American life gone wrong, the American dream that has not turned out to be the fairy tale it appears to be on the surface, but the irony is less savage than usual this time around.

This is melodrama but it’s very superior melodrama and the performances anchor it in reality so that we never forget that these are real people who can experience real suffering, even in a perfect suburban home. Highly recommended.

Eureka’s Region 2 DVD is a superb widescreen presentation and the movie looks as stunning as a Sirk movie should look.

Summer Storm (1944)

Summer Storm is one of Douglas Sirk’s earliest Hollywood films although he was already an experienced director in his native Germany when he arrived in the US. It’s a rather odd and uneasy adaptation of an 1884 Anton Chekhov 1884 novella, The Shooting Party . Sirk and Rowland Leigh shared the writing credit.

The setting is switched to 1912, allowing the movie to start in the post-Revolutionary Soviet Union and for the main story to be told in flashback. The only possible reason I can think of for this is that Hollywood in 1944 was besotted by America’s wartime ally and that it was a contemptible effort to show the brutal and vicious Soviet dictatorship in a favourable light.



George Sanders is Judge Fedor Mikhailovich Petroff, a man who has lived the decadent lifestyle of the Tsarist aristocracy and is suddenly seized by the desire for marriage and respectability. Nadena Kalenin (Anna Lee) is a suitable match and Petroff believes he is in love with her. He believes it until he meets a beautiful peasant girl, Olga Kuzminichna (Linda Darnell). It is lust at first sight. Nadena Kalenin breaks off their engagement when she discovers his dalliance with this peasant bombshell.

Petroff’s friend Count Volsky (affectionately known as “Piggy” and played by Edward Everett Horton) has no intention of reforming. He also falls under Olga Kuzminichna’s spell but her father has married her off to his steward Urbenin. Urbenin is a peasant, and Olga Kuzminichna has much higher ambitions, but at least Urbenin is a relatively prosperous peasant and life with him promises to be an improvement on life with her drunken father. She has not however given up her ambitions. She continues her affair with Petroff whilst also (unbeknownst to Petroff) encouraging the attentions of Count Volsky.



Of course this ménage à quatre will inevitably end in disaster, culminating in the tragic shooting party from which Chekhov’s novella took its title.

The screenplay provides the material for the sort of melodrama at which Sirk excelled but unfortunately the movie veers uneasily between melodrama and comedy. Sirk demonstrated two years later with the excellent A Scandal in Paris that he could (rather surprisingly) handle a light-hearted romp very adeptly. The problem is that combining melodrama and comedy in the same movie is a difficult if not impossible trick to pull off. In this movie the two genres clash disastrously. Melodrama has to take itself fairly seriously. You can do melodrama with irony, but not as comedy.



Most of the blame for this can be assigned to Edward Everett Horton. He was a fine comic actor but his performance here is hopelessly out of place. Unfortunately the movie is saddled with further unnecessary comic relief in the form of Olga Kuzminichna’s drunkard father.

George Sanders would have seemed a good choice for the role of Petroff but the normally sure-footed actor never seems to get a handle on the role. Partly this is because the part is underwritten and the character is colourless and dull (which is almost unheard of for a George Sanders performance). Petroff seems unsure if he wants to be a decadent aristocrat or a respectable and dedicated civil servant and family man. This potentially interest conflict is never developed and the characterisation comes across as confused rather than complex.



The one bright spot is Linda Darnell, an underrated actress who gave a superb performance the following year in Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel. She’s totally unconvincing as a Russian peasant but she’s totally convincing as a scheming femme fatale who oozes sex from every pore.

While Darnell and Sanders seem to understand that the movie needs to be played as melodrama Edward Everett Horton is convinced he’s doing a screwball comedy. The combination of this acting dissonance with Sirk’s uncertain direction and Sanders’ hesitant performance fatally undermines the movie. This is Sirk’s worst American movie, worth seeing only for Darnell’s energy, enthusiastic wickedness and hyper-sexuality.

The Odeon all-region PAL DVD gives us a handsome print but without any extras.

A Scandal in Paris (1946)

Douglas Sirk’s 1946 film A Scandal in Paris (Thieves' Holiday) is a fictionalised account of the extraordinary career of François Eugène Vidocq, a famous criminal who became an even more famous policeman.

Vidocq’s misspent youth was very misspent indeed. He allegedly killed a fencing instructor at the age of 14, joined the army several times and was cashiered just as many times, fought many duels, was a professional gambler, a thief, a forger and a pirate. After which he became a police spy and went on to found the French criminal investigation department of the Paris police, the Sûreté. He was one of the pioneers of modern police methods, especially the use of undercover operations and was renowned as a master of disguise



When I say the film fictionalises his life it should be noted that most of what is known about Vidocq comes from his own accounts of his life and is most likely highly unreliable. Either way he was obviously perfect material for a movie, and who better to play a charming rogue than George Sanders?

In the movie version Vidocq is as notorious for his pursuit of the ladies as for his pursuit of dishonest money, and ideally prefers to combine both. Stealing the ruby-studded garter of the girlfriend of the chief of the Paris police is one of his more colourful exploits, although it’s one that will come back to haunt him.



Vidocq actually starts the movie in prison. He escapes along with his cell-mate, Emile Vernet (Akim Tamiroff). He gets a job, posing as a model for an equestrian painting of St George and the dragon, and promptly steals both horse and costume. A chance encounter in a graveyard brings him into contact with the family of the Minister of Police. He naturally takes the opportunity to rob their house. And then an idea occurs to him. The Minister has fired his Chief of Police for being unable to solve the crime - if Vidocq could present him with the solution, and the stolen jewels, the Minister might be persuaded to appoint him as Chief of Police. Just imagine the possibilities that might open up for criminal activities on a scale he has not previously even been able to contemplate.

There is a complication however. The beautiful daughter of the Minister, Therese (Signe Hasso), has fallen in love with the man in the painting of St George, who is of course Vidocq. When she meets the actual Vidocq she discovers he really is the man she wants, but she’s a virtuous young woman and could never marry a thief. In fact she wants to save him from his life of wickedness. Will he choose love or crime?



This movie is a delight from start to finish. It’s a complete romp, and makes no concessions to anything as boring as realism. Vidocq’s biography is outrageous and fanciful and the movie takes its cue from that. The dialogue sparkles. The sets and costumes are extravagant. The tone is light-hearted, sophisticated and good-natured. The scene on the Chinese carousel is a nice touch.

George Sanders is of course superb in a role that allows him full scope for his talents. He gets fine support from Gene Lockhart as Richet, the former Chief of Police, and Carole Landis as Richet’s wife.



This movie is total entertainment and I can’t recommend it too highly. Absolute joy.

Odeon’s all-region UK DVD release boasts no extras but sound and picture quality are generally good.

Lured (1947)

Lured was directed by Douglas Sirk in 1947 but if you’re expecting to see signs of the Sirk style of the 50s then I’m afraid you won’t find much of it in this movie. And if you’re expecting a film noir (and it’s labelled as such on both wikipedia and IMDb) then you’re going to be similarly disappointed.

It’s a straight mystery/suspense thriller. The good news is that while it’s no masterpiece it’s still worth seeing.

Sandra Carpenter (Lucille Ball) is an American working as a taxi dancer in London. A serial killer has been at work in London, finding his victims by placing ads in the personal columns. When he kills he sends Scotland Yard a poem describing his latest murder. His latest victim happens to be Sandra’s best friend.



Inspector Harley Temple (Charles Coburn) is increasingly desperate to find some lead. When he brings Sandra in for questioning he realises immediately he’s dealing with a smart level-headed woman. Just the kind of woman Scotland Yard needs. Sandra Carpenter finds herself on the payroll of the Metropolitan Police, working a very dangerous assignment indeed - she is going to be used as bait to catch the poet killer.

Inspector Temple picks likely looking personal ads for her to answer, bringing her into contact with an assortment of men all of whom are sufficiently suspicious that any one of them could conceivably be the killer.



Sandra hasn’t yet found the murderer, but she has found love, with one of the suspects. Robert Fleming (George Sanders) runs a very up-market night-club. It’s a profitable business but one suspects that his motivation for running a night-club has as much to do with meeting attractive young women as it has to do with making money. He’s a self-confessed cad, but does that make him a killer?

Another suspect is his business partner Julian Wilde (Cedric Hardwicke). There’s also a sleazy butler who recruits parlour maids for a white slavery ring. And an equally sleazy South American businessman who runs the white slavery ring. And there’s a slightly deranged dress designer (Boris Karloff) who uses the personal column to find young ladies to model his dresses for him, in private. They all seem like plausible suspects.



Of course it’s inevitable that the killer will choose Sandra as his next victim, and he taunts Inspector temple by sending him the death poem before he does the killing. Now Scotland Yard must find the killer before he gets to Sandra.

For 1947 the movie does have a rather decadent, even slightly perverse, feel. Apart from the white slavery angle there’s also the fact that the killer bases his death poems on the poems of Baudelaire.



Lucille Ball is surprisingly good. She plays it straight. There is mercifully no trace of the Lucy of her later comedy TV series. She’s feisty and likeable. George Sanders is of course delightful. Charles Coburn seems to be in every old movie I see these days, playing either loveable rogues or, as in this case, loveable police detectives. Boris Karloff is creepy and sympathetic, as only Karloff could be. As an added bonus you get George Zucco - as a heroic Scotland Yard cop.

This was apparently a remake of a 1939 Robert Siodmak movie, Pièges. The Blackhorse Entertainment Region 2 DVD doesn’t have any extras but picture quality is very acceptable. If you can find this one for a reasonable price it’s worth grabbing. As I said at the beginning it’s no masterpiece but it’s solid entertainment.

Imitation of Life (1959)

Douglas Sirk’s 1959 remake of Imitation of Life makes quite a contrast with the 1934 version. There’s obviously a huge contrast in the visual style – the 1959 version is not just in widescreen and in colour, it’s in amazingly sumptuous colour. It has a completely non-realistic look to it, a look I rather enjoy.

The other major contrast is in the relationship between the two women. In the 1934 version they’re business partners; in the 1959 version the African-American woman is the white woman’s maid. And whereas in 1934 the Claudette Colbert character was a successful businesswoman, the 1959 equivalent (played by Lana Turner) is an actress. So really it could be seen as a major step backward in terms of both race and gender.

Also, Colbert’s boyfriend in the 1934 movie respects her and seems to be attracted to her because she’s intelligent and independent. The same character (played by John Gavin) in the 1959 film treats Lana Turner as a empty-headed bimbo who needs a man to tell her what to do.

That’s not to say that the 1959 film doesn’t have its virtues. I also think you could argue that it’s reflecting a more racist and sexist society rather than promoting such values. I think we’re meant to be appalled by the behaviour of the men in Turner’s life. Lana Turner does a reasonable job in this film.

Susan Kohner as the daughter trying to pass as white is very impressive. Sandra Dee as Lana Turner’s daughter is terrifyingly perky. Perkiness on that scale should come with a government health warning.

The two movies (available together on a double-sided DVD) are fascinating to watch back-to-back. Both are important historically in the way they illustrate Hollywood’s attitudes towards important social issues. Both are very entertaining movies. And the opening credits sequence in the 1959 film is simply wonderful, and sets the tone of lushness very nicely.

Written on the Wind (1956)

I’ve now seen two Douglas Sirk movies in two days, firstly Imitation of Life and now Written on the Wind. I had mixed feelings about the former but I absolutely adored Written on the Wind. It’s just so outrageous. It’s like a cross between Dallas and Valley of the Dolls.
And it looks so gorgeous. How did he get such amazingly vivid colours? Even by the standards of Technicolor the colours are dazzling. Everything has an air of unreality, of staginess. The sets are expensive, but they don’t look real. They look like incredibly expensive film sets.

The dialogue is so overheated. The acting is exaggerated almost, but not quite, to the point of parody. But somehow it works. It’s pure melodrama, but it does deal with real issues and real emotions. It deals with them in an exaggerated and heightened way, with more symbolism than you can poke a stick at. The scene with Dorothy Malone stroking the model oil derrick has to be seen to be believed.

All four main actors give the same types of performance, so one has to assume that these were exactly the performances that Sirk wanted. Robert Stack plays Kyle Hadley, a sexually insecure alcoholic oil tycoon. Rock Hudson is his best friend, Mitch Wayne (wonderful character names in this film), who happens to be in love with his wife. Lauren Bacall is Stack’s wife Lucy , while Dorothy Malone is Kyle’s sex-crazed younger sister Marylee.

The actors focus obsessively on one aspect of each character – Kyle’s fears of sexual inadequacy an failure in general, Mitch’s divided loyalties, Lucy’s determination to somehow make her husband happy, Marylee’s sexual frustration. The performances make fascinating contrast to the Method acting that was becoming so fashionable at the time. Although the performances are artificial they do achieve a kind of intensity that is actually more effective than the mumbling incoherence of the Method.

There are also some sharp observations on the emptiness of life in 1950s America. These people have everything, but they’re absolutely miserable. Written on the Wind is insanely entertaining, it looks magnificent, it’s like eating too many overly rich chocolates, but it’s addictive. I loved it. It’s soap opera, but it’s the Citizen Kane of soap opera.

The Tarnished Angels (1958)

Douglas Sirk’s 1958 movie The Tarnished Angels was based on a minor novel by William Faulkner.

Alcoholic newspaper reporter Burke Devlin (Rock Hudson) thinks he’s found the ultimate human interest story when a group of barnstorming pilots arrive in New Orleans in the early 1930s for an air show. Devlin sees former First World War air ace Roger Shumann (Robert Stack), his stunt parachutist wife LaVerne (Dorothy Malone), their young son Jack and their faithful mechanic Jiggs (Jack Carson) as modern gypsies.

This could be the story that makes him the great journalist he always believed he could be, but never quite became. He discovers that underneath the glamour of air races and stunt flying there’s absolutely nothing. These people are dead inside. If they ever knew how to be happy it’s something they’ve long since forgotten. There’s a particularly unhealthy romantic triangle going on between Roger, LaVerne and Jiggs, and it’s festering because their way of dealing with emotions is to pretend they’re not there. There are things that all three desperately need to say, but none of them are saying anything at all.

Sirk uses the background of mardi gras in New Orleans subtly but effectively, with masks being used to suggest the alienation and the falseness of the lives of the protagonists. Devlin finds himself drawn to these people even as he’s appalled by them (and presumably appalled also by the parallels to his own life and his own broken dreams).

Rock Hudson is amazingly good as Devlin. He was simply the perfect actor for Sirk’s purposes. Dorothy Malone gives another powerful performance, similar to the one she gave in Sirk’s Written on the Wind – she’s all suppressed hysteria and emotional and sexual frustration. Robert Stack was a terrible actor, but he also found his niche in Sirk’s films and his performance works. Jack Carson is terrifyingly hopeless and helpless as Jiggs, a man whose entire life has amounted to nothing at all.

The black-and-white cinematography is absolutely stunning. Sirk’s movies always looked fabulous but the use of black-and-white instead of the incredibly lush Technicolor palette usually associated with his 1950s output is a surprising but very effective choice here.

Of the various Sirk movies I’ve seen (including Written on the Wind which is generally regarded as his masterpiece and is certainly a magnificent film) this may well be the greatest of all. It’s melodrama, you can see the plot unfolding with a certain degree of inevitability, and the dialogue is gloriously overwrought and overheated. In the hands of a lesser film-maker it could have been a disaster; in Sirk’s hands it’s a masterpiece. A must-see movie.