Imitation of Life
1959
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Douglas Sirk (born Hans Detlef Sierck; 26 April 1897 – 14 January 1987) was a German film director best known for his work in Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s. However, he also directed comedies, westerns, and war films.
Douglas Sirk. Director: The Final Chord. Film director Douglas Sirk, whose reputation blossomed in the generation after his 1959 retirement from Hollywood filmmaking, was born Hans Detlef Sierck on April 26, 1897, in Hamburg, Germany, to a journalist.
- January 1, 1
- Hamburg, Germany
- January 1, 1
- Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland
- Zu neuen Ufern (1937) Sirk’s most interesting film for UFA (the leading German studio of its day used by the Nazis for its propaganda films) is a tale of a woman brought down by the inadequacy of men around her.
- La Habanera (1937) Zarah Leander suffers again in her second film with Sirk, but here her character is much stronger – she plays a Swedish woman who, on holiday in Puerto Rico, runs off the ship to stay in the exotic locale to become the wife of a wealthy landowner.
- Summer Storm (1944) Before this adaptation of Chekhov’s 1884 novel The Shooting Party, Linda Darnell was valued for her beauty rather than her acting ability, but her role here as Olga, a peasant girl who ruins the lives of three men in her quest for wealth and social standing, relaunched her career.
- Shockproof (1949) While a film directed by Sirk and scripted by Sam Fuller (just before he kickstarted his own directing career with the same year’s I Shot Jesse James) should have critics cheering, Shockproof, though a superior noir with excellent performances, isn’t the masterpiece it should be.
Apr 22, 2024 · Douglas Sirk, German-born American film director whose extremely popular melodramas offered cynical visions of American values. His best-known films included Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), and Imitation of Life (1959).
- Michael Barson
Mar 16, 2024 · Douglas Sirk was a German-born director active in the 1930s and '50s. Although he dabbled in Westerns, war movies, and comedies, he is most famous for his melodramas, including All That Heaven...
- Author
Dec 21, 2015 · Douglas Sirk, whose Hollywood career ran from 1943 to 1959, may be the most intellectual filmmaker ever to work in Hollywood (at least, he’d run Terrence Malick, who translated Heidegger, a close...
Apr 26, 2021 · One of many filmmaking émigrés who fled from Europe to California at the beginning of the Second World War, the German-born Sirk parted ways with his homeland after a brief and begrudging stint in Nazi-controlled UFA. Appropriately enough, his American debut was entitled Hitler’s Madman (1943).
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