Noirfolk

Here’s an experience fellow cinephages may recognize: it’s happened to me often enough that I have finally recognized it as A Thing, and A Recurring Thing at that.

You catch up with a Douglas Sirk film you’d never seen before; fascinated as usual, you pick up Jon Halliday’s Sirk on Sirk to see what the director has to say about it; and you find he has virtually nothing to say about it, and Halliday doesn’t press him.

This starts to become slightly annoying, and yet Sirk on Sirk is a very fine book. It’s just of very limited use in providing direct critical insights into many of the man’s movies. What’s the best critical study? Tom Ryan’s? Michael Stern’s?

The film that inspired these thoughts on this occasion was THUNDER ON THE HILL, available on Blu-ray in a Film Noir box set even though it’s not film noir, but it’s terrifically handsome. Beautiful flat sets representing flat Norfolk. Sirk grumbles that he’d rather have done it on location. And that he didn’t want the film, set in a convent, to have anything to do with religion.

Though I don’t think you can make much of a case for it being noir, it IS a kind of detective story with nun Claudette Colbert as the investigator. Flooding strands various parties at the Gothic hilltop nunnery, including a condemned murderess on her way to the gallows. But is she guilty?

Lots to enjoy here: Sirk’s staging, the moody lighting and the design and the fantasy of Hollywood Norfolk. There’s probably too many unconnected thematic elements — Sirk was right that religion could have been left out — and the mystery is fairly guessable at an early stage — but that’s OK, because the appointment with the hangman creates tension, so that the question isn’t really Whodunnit? but Will they be caught in time?

Ann Blyth as the convict is absolutely dreadful in her first scene, straining to hit a series of discordant emotional marks, but improves somewhat thereafter, and what she has going for her is striking beauty. Still, possibly the worst clunker of a performance Sirk ever had to work around.

The mother superior is, effectively, an antagonist — there’s a theme about the dangers of being sure you’re right, but oddly Colbert embodies that trait too — her certainty has destroyed her sister’s life — but this time, her certainty is a GOOD thing. That’s the funny thing about certainty — you never know where you stand with it.

THUNDER ON THE HILL stars Gerry Jeffers; Veda Pierce; Ellsworth M. Toohey; Morgan Le Fay; Dick Turpin; Mrs Higgins; Sir Locksley; Will Scarlet; Hominy; Phillip Musgrave; Lady Beekman; Algy Longworth; and Auntie Glutz.

Universal Truths

A rare misprint in the Il Cinema Ritrovato program had a Sirk masterpiece listed as ALL HEAVENS ALLOWED, which seems like a nice, tolerant approach. I don’t have any set photos from that, but two other Sirks also screen in Bologna are represented. MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION is above and below.

Shock Jane Wyman appearance. You don’t usually see the stars, or anyone else, in these things. Maybe Sirk sets were so relaxed the actors just naturally didn’t want to get up and move. Jane looks pretty tranquil. Still, you never see Rock Hudson.

Here’s two from Sirk’s lesser-known THUNDER ON THE HILL. Should I see it? I bet I should. I had convinced myself I actually had seen it, but I think between SUMMER STORM and THE FIRST LEGION, which I can barely remember, I neglected it.

Some sets just look bland and generic, some seem intriguing and characterful but you can’t recall the movie using them. But this staircase from WRITTEN ON THE WIND is pretty iconic if you’ve seen the movie. That’s a staircase just made for staggering down. Seeing it like this has an uncanny quality because, unlike in the movie where it’s as much a part of the Technicolor fantasy as Lauren Bacall or Robert Stack, here it’s more like a workplace for technicians and actors. A place you could walk into, wearing your own clothes.

A Bologna moment: they projected an original Technicolor print of WRITTEN, and at one point the projector gave a hiccup and the image jounced UP, to reveal not the heads of the actors poking up from the bottom of the screen, but simply MORE IMAGE. Because Sirk was forced to compose for both widescreen and boxy TV, and shoot “open-matte” so that the top of and bottom of the squareish TV frame exist, but are masked out during cinema projection (normally). If you’ve ever seen the 1:1.33 TV ratio version, you may have found it rather distant, since Sirk was forced to basically compose wider than he preferred. This was kind of a momentary peek behind the curtain — and so are these stills, in a different way.

Holy shit, it’s Dorothy Malone! Unless it’s her stand-in. Plus a corner of what could be Rock Hudson, or Rock Hudson’s stand-in (AKA Fake Rock). Looks like Sirk’s sets really were relaxed, happy places. A film scholar once told me that he couldn’t answer my questions about how funny Sirk intended his films to be but that the important thing was, he was certain Sirk was a GREAT GUY. This struck me as weird and unsatisfactory (but pleasingly idiosyncratic). If we found out something bad about Sirk, would his films cease to be any good? What I would offer as an alternative would be that maybe Sirk channelled his work through the finest, noblest part of his personality.

No more set photos left! But more gratefully received.