Written on the Wind

Sooner or later, I had to get to Douglas Sirk. This is a director of influence, discussed and referenced decades after his passing. I've been putting him off because he worked in a time (the early Technicolor era) and a genre (melodrama) that doesn't appeal to me. But his work is seen as multilayered, with pulp for the matinee audience and cutting social commentary for the dinner-and-drinks crowd, and any student of the art form has to see him sometime. So what did Douglas Sirk have to say to me?

He had to say that America really, really needed rock 'n roll.

WRITTEN ON THE WIND's surface gloss is one of vapidity. It's shallow, finding joy in glittery handbags and hand blown glassware and gauzes and mind-numbingly plastic choral music - it's trying too hard to buy class, when real class comes from within. But look beneath the polish and you'll find all those old needs and emotions which have colored human drama since we figured out to get a steady supply of food, water, and shelter. You can't live on polish - it's too slippery. You need the grit of humanity, the anger and the love and the biology and all the rest. You need to embrace it, because it's the only way to get any real traction.

That's where rock and roll comes in. America needed it because it needed to put aside the postwar happy face and get back to the hard business of living. It needed Berry to remind it how to dance, Elvis to remind it how to love, The Beatles to rejuvenate it, and The Doors to help it find the dark places of its soul. All these things that Sirk criticizes, all these attitudes he laments, all the silliness he lampoons, they needed rock 'n roll to clean them out and ground America in reality once again.

Sirk had a lot to say. I'm glad I took the time to listen.

To Be or Not to Be

I knew who Ernst Lubitsch, Carole Lombard, and Jack Benny were before I saw TO BE OR NOT TO BE. I knew that Lubitsch was a German Jew who fled to Hollywood during the rise of Hitler. I knew that Carole Lombard was a screen queen of the Golden Age. I knew that Jack Benny had a popular television show and made a running gag of his stinginess. I didn't know that Lubitsch had the talent to actually pull off a screwball comedy about the Warsaw Occupation. I didn't know that Lombard, in addition to being staggeringly beautiful, had perfect comic timing. And I didn't know that Jack Benny mixed detachment and warmth that kept me laughing both at and with him.

As previously mentioned, TO BE OR NOT TO BE labors under the burden of being set in the Nazy occupation of Warsaw. At the time of the film's release (1942), this was serious business, yet the full scope of the horrors of the occupation had yet to come to light. From our current vantage point, it's hard to associate the Warsaw Occupation with anything other than those horrors, but it's worth it to try and adopt the mindset of an America at war. At that time, it was common to paint our enemies as buffoons, and we were more than happy to engage with a troup of plucky resisters. Once we do adopt that mindset, we're in for a great time at the movies. Lubitsch takes jealousy, vanity, bravery, and fear; and he mixes them into high comedy combined with dramatic tension and a bit of cheerleading for the Allies.

He couldn't do it without Lombard, who comes off as smart, funny, and the greatest wearer of white silk dresses in Western history. She's the pivot about which the enterprise turns, and there isn't a moment she's onscreen that we don't invest in her. Benny's a great counterpart, a little older, a little vainer, and very jealous of his wife (as well he should be, with young Polish Air Force officer Robert Stack sniffing about), and the two play off one another with the aplomb of old pros.

So, while I admit that TO BE OR NOT TO BE made me a little uncomfortable at times (Col. Earhardt as a buffoon? That monster?), it stands as an excellent comedy and deserves its status as a classic of the screwball genre.

And now I know who these people really are.