The following notes on Douglas Sirk's Interlude (1957) were written by David Vanden Bossche, PhD Student in UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts and co-organizer of the Antwerp Summer Film School. A 35mm print of Interlude from the collection of the Chicago Film Society will screen in our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen series on November 10 at 2 p.m. in the Chazen Museum of Art. Admission is free!

By David Vanden Bossche

When the young wolves of Cahiers du cinéma created an idiosyncratic canon of American studio era directors deemed worthy of the “auteur” label, Douglas Sirk was not among the names they put forward. It would take well into the 1970s before Sirk’s melodramas—or “weepies,” as they were pejoratively referred to—would gain critical attention.

A 1969 Cahiers du cinéma article by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni dealt with the way ideology functions in (mostly American) cinema. To Comolli and Narboni, a director like Sirk (they also singled out Roberto Rossellini and John Ford) was able to direct films that at first glance adhere to the dominant ideology, but in reality position themselves as critical of the dominant modes of representation. When Laura Mulvey and other feminist writers started to reclaim and recuperate the genre of the melodrama – focusing on representations of domestic spaces and repressed female sexual desire – Sirk’s reputation as one of the great auteurs of melodrama was further cemented.

The sudden critical and scholarly attention for such films as Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and Imitation of Life (1959) obscured the fact that most of Sirk’s triumphs were actually remakes of older melodramas, usually from the 1930s. The late historical focus on Sirk’s films was in this way detrimental to the position of John M. Stahl within film history, as his earlier versions of Sirk movies like Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession, and Interlude (1957) came to be completely overshadowed by the later incarnations. The 2018 book Call of the Heart by Bruce Babbington and Charles Barr and a retrospective at both the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and Il Cinema Ritrovato festivals finally restored the Stahl versions rightfully as great films in their own right.

Among the John M. Stahl titles that gathered more fame in the Sirk versions, Interlude is probably the least renowned and while discussions on the merits of both versions of Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life are still ongoing, most will agree that Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes (1939) is definitely Interlude’s equal, if not a superior take on the same material. When Tomorrow Comes, which screened at the 2019 Wisconsin Film Festival, is the only Stahl movie Sirk remade that has a bigger reputation than its 1950s counterpart. In the 1939 original, Stahl inserted some poignant social commentary and the real-life event of a 1938 storm in the New York area, resulting in one of Stahl’s most moving love stories. When Tomorrow Comes exemplifies both Stahl’s feeling for changing narrative trends (e.g., the bulk of the story is set during the course of a single night) and his remarkably consistent visual style.

Douglas Sirk’s take on the same story by James M. Cain (another adaptation was directed by Kevin Billington in 1968) is, as always, the work of a baroque stylist. The sumptuous Technicolor photography adds Sirk's typically heightened sense of color an extra element to convey meaning and emotion. Which by no means is to suggest that John M. Stahl’s stylistic approach is inferior (in this 2018 article for Photogénie, I dismissed the claim that Stahl had an “invisible style”), but that his approach definitely draws less attention to itself.

Sirk remains faithful to the 1939 screenplay. The story centers around a love triangle between a woman (Irene Dunne in the original, June Allyson here) and the married man she loves (Rossano Brazzi, filling Charles Boyer’s part), who can’t bring himself to leave his wife—an emotionally damaged person who depends on his love and affection. While the 1939 film was rich in its subtle observation of different relations, Sirk opts for broader dramatic touches, but through these he also adds a profound sense of loss to the doomed love triangle, an element that was missing in Stahl’s more subdued approach.

While not generally considered one of Sirk’s masterpieces, Interlude is still a vivid illustration of the German (he changed his name from Hans Detlev Sierk when he moved to the US) master’s virtuosic mastery of melodrama.