Sleep, My Love: race and resentment in Hollywood

Douglas Sirk’s Sleep, My Love threatens to become a mundane gothic ‘gaslighting’ melodrama – in the mould of Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Suspicion and, indeed, George Cukor’s Gaslight – with dreary references, as was common at the time, to Freudian psychology, but is, after 30 minutes, rescued by a couple of unexpected innovations and turned into something hugely interesting and entertaining.

The first twist is Sirk’s decision to highlight the differences between the egotistical, repressed and calculating Richard Courtland – played flawlessly by Don Ameche – and Bruce Elcott, the epitome of effortless American masculine charm, common sense and determination – played with great appeal by Robert Cummings – by having Bruce, who has fallen in love with Courtland’s wife, Alison (Claudette Colbert), take the object of his forbidden desire to his ‘brother’s’ wedding, his brother turns out to be Jimmie Lin, who is not his real brother but his ’honorary’ brother since Jimmy is Chinese.

The Chinese wedding, happy, graceful, full of culture and style, is a surprising early attempt by Hollywood to deal with questions of race, racial discrimination and stereotyping – which, of course, Hollywood did so much to perpetuate – that Sirk was to return to more famously in Imitation of Life.

The Chinese couple’s wholesome and joyous relationship contrasts with the destructive and harrowing American relationships in the film – between Richard and Alison, between Bruce and Alison and, especially, between Richard and Daphne, the ravishing glamour model played by Hazel Brooks, who he is madly in love and lust with – the poor man cannot keep his hands off her – to the extent that he devises an elaborate plot to do away with his wife, colluding with a seedy photographer Charles Vernay superbly portrayed by George Colouris, which involves convincing her that she is mad and adding hallucinatory drugs to her drinks in order to make her more suggestive to his malign suggestions.

The second surprise in the film is the intensity of the hatred Richard feels for his wife. Not only does he find her physically repulsive – he recoils from her touch – but he is also bursting with resentment that she is above him in station.

If he were to simply leave Alison for Daphne, Richard would lose his right to his wife’s wealth, which, indeed, is why Daphne, one of the most cynical, acerbic, ruthless – and attractive – characters in film noir, urges her lover to get on with it and kill his unsuspecting spouse so that they can be together and enjoy the spoils of their crime.

In one of the most startling scenes in the film, Daphne explains what she wants and what she expects from her besotted lover.

‘I want what she’s got,’ Daphne says. ‘I want all of it. I want her house, her name, her man, and I want them now, tonight.’