I love Halliday's book. But it should be noted that:

a) Sirk wouldn't allow him to tape, so every word attributed to Sirk is
from notes Halliday wrote down afterward.

b) Halliday, at the time, was vociferously anti-American (in ways I
essentially agree with: his book on the Korean War is utterly damning),
maybe the most anti-American anybody has ever been ever, and it's pretty
obvious he is doing everything possible to make Sirk appear to subscribe
to Halliday's unmodulated hate for America. I don't fault Halliday for
his hate. But the book is simply not a reliable reflection of Sirk's
views on America, which I think in reality were, not surprisingly, a
mixture of likes and dislikes.
What neither Halliday or Halliday's Sirk succeeds in doing (and what
films today avoid) is to make connections between American foreign
policy and domestic "bourgeois" culture.

c) A good page and a half of Sirk's words are taken verbatim from a
Cahiers interview -- without attribution.

d) Sirk himself was born in Germany of German parents. He was so
alienated by the course of Germany that he stopped speaking German and
let people (like Halliday) think he was Danish. He had left his German
wife and married a Jewish woman; the first wife kept the son, raised him
as a Hitler Youth and got the courts to bar Sirk from seeing him (even
when the son, a child moviestar, was working on neighboring sets). Sirk
stayed in Germany until 1937 in an effort to rescue his son (for which
reason he was for decades condemned as a Nazi sympathizer). There's no
doubt he found considerable comfort in America and was grateful for
this. After the war, he went back to Germany, hated the place, and
tried to find out what had happened to his son -- who had been sent to
the Russian front. His movie, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, is an
autobiographical projection of this lost son.



jpcoursodon wrote:

> .
>
> True. But let's not forget that Sirk himself has encouraged
> misreadings of his films, notably in the famous (or infamous)
> Halliday book-length interview "Sirk on Sirk". If what Sirk says in
> that book about the "message" and social criticism of Imitation of
> Life is true then I don't think his commentary on "bourgeois American
> life" is worth all that much. He sounds so superior to and
> contemptuous of his characters. "Her life is a very cheap imitation"
> etc... Of course I've been taken to task in the past for
> misunderstanding Sirk when I was just pointing out the fallacy of
> some of his unconditional admirers...
> JPC