Douglas Sirk: American Vs. Japanese Audiences
At Moving Image Source, Chris Fujiwara’s article "Tears Without Laughter" deciphers "audience responses to Douglas Sirk, in the U.S. and Japan," where he attended a 10-film Sirk retrospective in Tokyo. Here are a couple of snippets:
"In the U.S., screenings of Sirk masterpieces such as Written on the Wind (1956), Imitation of Life (1959), and even the mournful The Tarnished Angels (1958) are turned into endurance tests by audience participation rituals that, whether fueled by the urge to show off one’s camp sensibility or driven by a misguided sympathy with the irony evident in the films, ends up all but hooting the films off the screen. …"
"How different things are in Japan was proved at the Sirk retrospective of the Pia Film Festival in July."
Here’s one brief example about the "difference" found in Fujiwara’s piece:
"Dorothy Malone’s performance as the rich nymphomaniac Marylee in Written on the Wind generally comes in for gusts of derision from American audiences, who bray at her as if Sirk were a cross between Tex Avery and Russ Meyer. The Japanese silence before Marylee’s larger-than-life compulsions lent Sirk’s film, for all its garishness, a Racinian dignity that an American audience wouldn’t let stand for a second."
***
Most (voting) Academy members perhaps found some "Racinian dignity" in Malone’s performance as well, for the actress won the 1956 best supporting actress Academy Award. Following her win, Malone moved up to starring roles, but she was never again nominated for an Oscar.
My favorite Douglas Sirk effort, by the way, is All That Heaven Allows, in which suburban, middle-class widow Jane Wyman falls for hunky gardener Rock Hudson, much to her friends’ and family’s horror. Todd Haynes would more or less remake it in 2003 as Far from Heaven, in which white middle-class wife Julianne Moore falls for black gardener Dennis Haysbert while husband Dennis Quaid keeps going in and out of the closet.
Jane Wyman should have told her family that even in 1950s American suburbia, things could have gotten considerably more complicated.
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Douglas Sirk deserves to win a posthumous Oscar. His films are much more fun than the Oscar winners of the 1950s.