Sirk in Germany │ Eureka Entertainment
Courtesy of Eureka Entertainment
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
The career and reputation of Douglas Sirk has undergone many mutations. Famous for directing lush melodramas in the 1950s, he was dismissed and belittled by many contemporary critics, until seeing a revival of sorts in the 1970s sparked by European writers and filmmakers, in particular Jean-Luc Godard and then subsequently by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Later on, many notable directors doffed their hat to Sirk and paid homage to his 1950s’ soap operas, including Tarantino, Pedro Almodóvar, Wong Kar-wai, David Lynch, John Waters, Lars von Trier and in particular Todd Haynes, with his sumptuous imitation Far from Heaven, with Julianne Moore. When the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro accepted his Oscar for The Shape of Water, he even name-checked Douglas Sirk as an inspiration.
Sirk, the son of Danish parents, made his breakthrough as a stage director in 1920s’ Germany and then, when filmmakers like Max Ophüls and Fritz Lang fled the Fatherland in the shadow of the Third Reich, Sirk was given a chance to direct the light romantic comedy April April, and then two other German films, The Girl from Marsh Croft and Pillars of Society, before fleeing Germany himself with his Jewish wife to Switzerland. Sadly, his first three films were believed lost but in the tradition of the laudable ‘Masters of Cinema’ brand, not only have they been unearthed but restored to their original pristine condition and are now obtainable for the first time in the UK, having never been available before, either on British television or in any home entertainment format. Now Eureka Entertainment have released a two-disc Blu-ray set – ‘Sirk in Germany 1934-1935’ – as part of their Masters of Cinema series featuring the director’s first three films as well as three of his earliest shorts.
Douglas Sirk’s very first feature – April Fool! to give it its English title – is very much a film of its time, something that could never be made today due to its theme of mistaken identity. It’s a frothy, light-on-its feet romcom – not unlike a Whitehall farce in character – which sends up the false values of the middle classes and the nouveau riche. It starts in the home of the noodle tycoon Julius Lampe (Erhard Siedel), whose daughter Mirna (Charlott Daudert) is giving a private rendition of her vocal talents – in the tradition of Florence Foster Jenkins – to her father’s most important friends and business colleagues. Julius Lampe himself has fallen asleep in a corner, when a maid receives a registered letter from the local palace requesting a large shipment of the tycoon’s noodles. When Julius awakes from his slumbers and makes much of a to-do about this regal endorsement, two of his colleagues decide to play a trick on him, it being April Fool’s Day: they get a friend to ring up and impersonate the prince to announce his very visit to the factory the following morning, an event that the tycoon promptly has printed up in the paper. All that is needed is a suitable candidate to imitate the prince, for a small price. And so a travelling salesman is hired (Hubert von Meyerinck), who gives a very grand impression of how he thinks a member of royalty would behave. Meanwhile, reading of his visit in the newspaper, the real prince (the eminent Albrecht Schoenhals) decides to pop down to the factory himself and, as it’s such a lovely day, he decides to go on foot. The only person in the tycoon’s employ who is not about to fawn to the upper classes is Herr Lampe’s own secretary (a delightful Carola Höhn) who strikes up a rapport with the real prince, oblivious of his social station. Of course, such a plot would not work today as everybody would know what the prince looked like, which adds to the charm of this enchanting frolic.
But that’s not all – in the box-set there is also Douglas Sirk’s rural drama The Girl from the Marsh Croft, made in the same year, and Pillars of Society, another exposé of the upper classes, adapted from the play by Henrik Ibsen, also released in 1935. When in Hollywood, Sirk was signed up by Columbia Pictures and his first English-language film, Hitler’s Madman – in 1943 – was a direct attack on the Führer. But it’s his romantic soap operas that made his name, the gushing classics Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows and Written On the Wind – all starring Rock Hudson – and perhaps his most critically revered, The Imitation of Life with Lana Turner and John Gavin. Interestingly, his career proved to be quite a symmetrical thing, as he started out directing stage productions in Germany, before making three short films, and then ending his career making another three shorts in Germany and returning to the theatre there.
Besides the resurrection of these very rare, seminal works, which have been beautifully restored, there is the superlative audio commentary of each title, while the eloquent, endlessly encyclopaedic Sheldon Hall discusses the life and career of Sirk, his talk richly illustrated with stills, posters and clips.
Eureka Entertainment’s release of ‘Sirk in Germany 1934-1935’ is now available on Blu-ray
EUREKA ENTERTAINMENT is the leading independent distributor of classic silent/early films in the UK. In 2004, Eureka! established the award winning Masters of Cinema Series, a specially curated director-led Blu-ray and DVD collection of classic and world cinema using the finest available materials for home viewing. In 2014, Eureka! established Eureka! Classics intended to highlight a broader selection of classic and cult cinema, and in 2017, Eureka! established Montage Pictures, a label celebrating ground-breaking and thought-provoking world cinema from new and upcoming directors.
