All that Melodrama Allows: Sirk, Fassbinder, Almodóvar, Haynes

Abstract

In the late 1950s, Danish-born, German-trained Douglas Sirk directed a series of lush, Technicolor melodramas for Universal studios, which, while successful, were generally panned or ignored by serious film critics. Such overwrought soap operas as Written on the Wind (1956), Imitation of Life (1959) and All that Heaven Allows (1955) seemed the height of Hollywood artifice, the apotheosis of the ‘weepie’, the four-handkerchief movie aimed at the suburban housewife of Eisenhower’s America. By the 1960s these films had a large following in the gay community for their camp elements, but as Christine Gledhill has pointed out, it was precisely these films’ artificiality in their portrayal of bourgeois American life which led to a neo-Marxist appreciation of the ironic critique they offered of the rigid suburban milieu (Gledhill 1987). Such critics as Paul Willemen and Jon Halliday in 1971, but most importantly Thomas Elsaesser in his seminal essay ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’ in 1972, began a reassessment of the impact of the Hollywood family melodrama, and Sirk’s in particular, which has travelled through poststructuralist, feminist and psychoanalytical criticism to contemporary times.