Douglas Sirk vs Jess Franco

"Melodrama means music plus drama..." Douglas Sirk

Way back in the days before cable TV, videotape, DVD, I once travelled 500 miles to see a Douglas Sirk film. There are not many films I would do that for. It was THE FIRST LEGION, his film about Jesuits. Not exactly a key film in his oeuvre or something I could discuss here at length. But, like all of Sirk's films, I was hypnotized by the emotional honesty of it amidst its unique plastic aesthetic. It was worth the trip.

I finally caught up with the CRITERION COLLECTION DVD of Sirk's WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956), a late masterwork and one of the 20 plus films he made for Universal International after signing with them in 1950. It's Sirk's most beautiful film in terms of pure form and that has a lot to due with DP Russell Metty, who would shoot Orson Welles' Hollywood swansong TOUCH OF EVIL (see Jess Franco's 1963 RIFIFI EN LA CIUDAD for a virtual remake, which may have prompted Orson to hire him to direct second unit for CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT) the next year. Universal was persuaded by producer Albert Zugsmith to let Sirk, and later Welles, work as they pleased. A DP able to give a film an auteur's style and a studio look Metty is one of my favorite Hollywood cinematographers and he enabled Sirk to do breathtaking things with color, framing and camera movement. The gorgeous hues pulsate in depth of field and seem to have a life of their own. It's beyond the kind of Expression which Sirk practiced in his early UFA films before he fled the Nazis. It's a kind of eye drugging American Surrealism, bold, delicious and somehow morbid. How can one describe in words a canary yellow sportscar speeding past a pumping oil derrick and tanks emblazoned with a red family business seal? You have to see it. It's like Metty is painting with Technicolor heated up to the max. The plot is lurid and ulitmately unimportant. It's a film about sex and class and its images are its true story and themes. By classification it's a melodrama, a "woman's picture" which Douglas Sirk mastered in his final decade of filmmaking. But Jess Franco, througout his career, has also made the woman's picture HIS genre.

Franco's most interesting and personal films are women's pictures: women and their emotional turmoils are at the center of THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z, NECRONOMICON, 99 WOMEN, NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT, EUGENIE DE SADE, VAMPYROS LESBOS, SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY, LA FILLE DE DRACULA, LA COMTESSE NOIRE, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR (a perfect Douglas Sirk title), LORNA-THE EXORCIST, A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD, MACUMBA SEXUAL, right up to the recent SNAKEWOMAN. Women have absolute power over men (and not just sexual) in these films and even in his male centered neo-noirs like BOTAS NEGRAS, LATIGO DE CUERO. The women at the center of these titles search for meaning and identity, usually finding neither.

In WRITTEN ON THE WIND the pathetic nymphomaniac played by Dorothy Malone holds the life and death of her dysfunctional family in her quivering hands througout. On impulse I immediately put on Franco's 1973 MAIS QUI DONC A VIOLE LINDA? (BUT WHO RAPED LINDA?)and completed a fascinating double bill. Franco also made early films in the style of German Expressionism (1961's GRITOS EN LA NOCHE/THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF), moved to a kind of Surrealism in films like NECRONOMICON, VAMPYROS LESBOS, THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, but settled into the impoverished minimalism or subrealism of his these mid 1970s French backed features. He didn't have Russell Metty, or even his favorite DP, Manuel Merino. He had little money, so it's an imposed style, and he seems to have preferred working in relative freedom, although he had to eventually turn even the best of these films into hardcore versions at their producer's insistence. LINDA presents the precognitive dream of Marie-France (Alice Arno) who is about to go to an island where she will interact with the bizarre Radeck/Steiner family. The fact that the "story" of the film is presented as she dozes off reading a book (by "David Khunne*) recalls the formal structure of EUGENIE...THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION (1970), but that was a big budget film compared to this.

Like Sirk's film LINDA is also about sex and class, the pressures they place on the family unit, which ultimate fragments under the strain. The Orloff's family secrets as the ones of the title character in SNAKEWOMAN are kept hidden from the outside world and are investigated at the risks of those who do the probing. Paul Muller's neurotic father is wealthy and remote, he warns Marie-France about the nymphomania of daughter Olivia (Lina Romay). As in most of Franco's key films, this is about watching various performances and he uses mirrors to open the action into symbolic dimensions of time and space. The mirror is the central object in Franco's mise en scene and his filmography as it is with Sirk. The progression into madness and murder is thus a reflection on what life should be, something to be experienced within a happy family. But there are no really happy families in the films of Douglas Sirk or Jess Franco, only the Self to be contemplated by the camera and in the mirror.

"The mirror is the imitation of life. What is interesting about a mirror is that it does not show yourself as you are, it shows you your own opposite." Douglas Sirk


*MAIS QUI DONC A VIOLE LINDA? is also known as LES NUITS BRULANTES DE LINDA [Hardcore version], EROTIC DREAMS [the rare non hardcore English language version], among other titles. The film must be seen in it's origina 2.35:1 OAR to appreciate Franco's complex use of framing, space and objects. Thanks to Francesco Cesari for helping me to see three significantly different edits of this underappreciated JF title.

**The title of the book is MAIS QUI DONC A VIOLE LINDA? Now that we know that there were no actual "David Khunne" novels, this is a double in-joke on JF's part.

"Sirk on Sirk".

(c) Robert Monell, 2007