Sirk on Sirk (Directors on Directors) Book

In the Faber series of interviews with leading cinema auteurs the name of Douglas Sirk may not leap off the page with the resonance of a Scorsese, but at one time he was to American Melodrama what John Ford was to the Western. A strange eventuality perhaps for a Dane born Detlef Sierck, who worked extensively in German theatre and film in the 1920s and 1930s before leaving in 1937 (to the chagrin of the Nazis, who praised him as a "fine specimen of the Aryan race") to join the distinguished German emigrés in Hollywood such as Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang. After a torturous time bound to Harry Cohn's Columbia ("Between Mr Hitler and Harry Cohn I lost more than 10 years of my life"), Sirk signed to Universal and directed a string of classic movies including Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life and perhaps his best, The Tarnished Angels, until ill health forced him to retire to Switzerland. What draws his conversations with writer and cineaste Jon Halliday beyond "talking shop" are the details of his personal life. Sirk reveals that a son he had by his first wife became the leading child film star in Nazi Germany after a court order denied Sirk access to him because his second wife, Hilde, was Jewish. He was never to have contact with his son again, who went missing, presumed dead, on the Russian front in 1944. This is the second and revised edition; in the first, published in 1972, Halliday deliberately omitted details at Sirk's request to protect those still alive. Sirk died in 1987 and this extended volume includes new material on his work in Weimar Germany, more extensive comment on his own films and greater personal detail. Halliday also provides a detailed biofilmography and his judicious editing of the text allows Sirk's ideas and opinions to breathe freely, alongside a delicious tendency to gossip. A welcome and invigorating resurrection of a neglected talent. -- David VincentRead More