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.’

Douglas Sirk’s Lured: between a film noir and a whodunnit

 

There is no discernible or worthwhile philosophical, psychological or emotional truth in Douglas Sirk’s Lured (1947), often labelled a film noir but aside from a couple of striking expressionist shots involving suspicious characters lurking in the shadows there is nothing to suggest any of the moodiness, doom, existential crisis normally associated with the genre.

 

Indeed, if the film is characterised by anything then it’s its light-heartedness and breeziness, as if Sirk can’t quite come up with anything dark and meaningful to say in the script he’s been given to work with. Having comedienne Lucille Ball in the female lead doesn’t help with trying to give the film an air of gravitas or darkness. 

 

In fact, the best scenes are those that have some comic appeal, particularly those involving Boris Karloff, who plays a deranged ex-fashion designer who has lured Ball to his flat and dressed her up as if she’s about to appear in a fashion show, only for Karloff to pull back the stage curtain to reveal an audience consisting of a dolorous canine and a mannequin. 

 

How Ball has ended up at Karloff’s tells us something about the plot of the film. She’s got there after a friend of hers at the nightclub they both work at as dancers has gone missing – and is presumed the latest victim of a serial killer stalking London. The ‘poet-killer’, as the murderer is known, taunts police by sending them Baudelaire-inspired poems on death and beauty announcing he’s about to strike again. 

 

Inspector Harley Temple, played by Charles Coburn, enlists Ball as an undercover detective to answer lonely hearts ads in the newspapers in the hope that she will flush out the killer. The killer’s modus operandi is to use newspaper advertisements to lure potential victims. Karloff is one of several eccentrics she encounters via the ads before she gets closer to uncovering the homicidal maniac.

 

The film boasts a stellar cast – as well as Ball, Karloff and Coburn, the film features George Sanders and Cedric Hardwicke – and is set in London, though it’s a London of the Hollywood set and not the real thing, which is a shame, since we get no sense of post-war London and all the social, economic and psychological conditions of the time that would have made for a far more interesting film. Instead, we get the impression that Sirk is going through the motions, delivering less a film noir and more a far-fetched police procedural and whodunnit.

Shockproof: breaking society’s shackles

With Douglas Sirk directing and Sam Fuller writing the screenplay, you’d expect that Shockproof (1949) would be an explosive film noir full of interest – and it is.

Sirk, the German exile, who became best known for a series of 1950s proto-feminist melodramas – such as Imitation of Life, All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession – and Fuller, who went on to direct memorable and idiosyncratic Westerns and film noirs in the 1950s and 1960s – Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, Run of the Arrow, Forty Guns – create a film of bewildering twists and turns, not so much in plotting but in character, as the protagonists are put through the mill as they try to find their best selves and overcome their pasts, their families and society. 

 

Patricia Knight plays Jenny Marsh, a convicted murderer who’s just been released from prison after five years. Her parole officer is the upright Griff Marat, played by the magnificent Cornel Wilde, devoted to his job, to the rules, to helping people get back on the straight and narrow, and to his family: his recently widowed blind mother and his younger brother, both of whom idolise him.

 

Griff is immediately attracted to the beautiful ex-killer and does all he can to make her parole a success: finding her work and somewhere to stay, and when these are insufficient, bringing her to his home, making her a carer and companion for his mother.

 

All this love, attention, compassion, rather than ‘civilising’ Jenny makes her sick, suffocates her, as she longs for Harry Wesson, the slick, flamboyant gambler, the man she loved before prison and whose life of glamour, danger and independence she wishes to rejoin. 

 

It is a stunning repudiation of bourgeois society and domesticity that shocks the viewer to the core. How could Jenny reject the pure love of the hardworking, honest, handsome, dependable Griff for the superficial fop Johnny? But she does, going so far as to run away and risk violating her parole and being sent back to jail.

 

Griff, however, refuses to give up on Jenny and rather than letting her go decides to confess his love to her and ask for her hand in marriage. It is a proposal as Jenny’s parole officer that puts Griff’s career and future prospects at risk. 

 

Jenny is moved. It’s the first time a man has wanted her for a wife. Her mind is in turmoil. What kind of life does she want? Which man truly loves her? The one who is prepared to give up his life for her or the one who allowed her to go to prison for a crime committed on his behalf? 

 

She chooses the former, to Harry’s consternation, who sets out to destroy the man who’s taken his lover from him by revealing to him she’s an unrepentant deceiver who’s taken Griff for a fool. Jenny shoots her ex-lover and so begins the second part of the film as Griff, rather than turn Jenny in, goes on the run with her.

 

The fugitive couple now engage in a gruelling cat and mouse game as they seek to avoid capture by the police and the certainty that Jenny will be sent back to prison for life for shooting Johnny. 

 

Griff and Jenny’s love is put to the test. They are short of money, the people they encounter want to betray them rather than help them, they become paranoid and argue with each other. They live in squalor, they go hungry, move constantly, do backbreaking work just to survive. All the while, the net closes in on them…

Sign of the Pagan: Douglas Sirk, feminism and tyranny

 

 

When one thinks of Douglas Sirk, the German-born film director who fled Nazi Germany for the USA in 1937, it is usually his 1940s film noirs – Lured; Sleep, My Love; Shockproof – and even more so his 1950s melodramas – Magnificent Obsession; All that Heaven Allows; Imitation of Life; The Tarnished Angels, dismissed at the time as ‘women’s films’ but, to  more discerning critics, hailed as masterpieces for their dissection of American bourgeois life and studies of female and racial hypocrisy and repression – we have in mind.

It’s strange, therefore, to see Sirk's name associated with a film like Sign of the Pagan, a sword and sandal epic that purports to tell the story of the threat to the divided Roman empire – with the Western part led by Valentinian III in Rome and the Eastern part by Theodosius II in Constantinople – posed by the barbarian Mongol hordes of Attila the Hun. 

 
The film takes the line that both these competing emperors are too self-absorbed, caught up in petty palace politics and the luxuries and fripperies of being emperor, to recognise the dangers the barbarian warlord poses to the existence of civilisation.

Civilisation in this case is identified in the film as Christianity, which has by now – the mid-5th century – been established as the state religion in both parts of the empire, but is reviled by Attila for its message of peace and love.

The film also posits that if Valentinian and Theodosius are too weak and short-sighted to confront the dangers of Attila, then the more robust Markianos, the stout Roman soldier, has the answers.

Markianos’ commitment to fighting Attila and devotion to a pacifist religion confuses Attila, who begins to doubt his venture to conquer the Roman world and destroy Christianity. Prophecies of his own doom also unbalance his mind.

And it is perhaps Attila’s descent into madness, which is of Shakespearean proportions, that provides us with Sirk’s interest in the story. We also note that Attila’s ultimate betrayal and killing are carried out by two women – it is his brow beaten daughter Kubra that betrays her father to the Roman enemy and it is the Huns’ brutalised concubine, Ildico – and not Markianos, as you’d expect – who delivers the final blow of the knife that ends the life of the savage tyrant. The fact that it is women who are given the role and satisfaction of bringing down tyranny perhaps points us to Sirk’s overtly feminist films to be made in the near future and alerts us to his interest in making this otherwise uninspiring historical drama.