Of core this film is a masterpiece. Much of what's so great about the
end is the way the DIRECTOR'S style (tweaking David a little bit, no
need to reply, he has the right to think that Lana Turner is really the
auteur if he wants too -- why didn't you even tell how the movie's story
resembles her life, David?) produces a kind of triumph of surfaces.
Sarah Jane tries to peel them back by clutching at the flowers, but
cannot -- she only gets more flowers.

I went to a Sirk conference at Dartmouth in 1997. They hadn't invited
me, but when I heard about it I asked if I could attend, and they
offered to pay my transpiration if I gave a talk, which I think was a
less good deal than the other people got, but I took it. I didn't want
to let those academics do a Sirk conference on their own! There were
many papers. I won't try to judge my own, but of all the papers only two
others seemed to express any enthusiasm for the films at all. There were
scholarly studies of Zarah Leander and so on, not that I don't think
people should do that. One of the two worst was a paper by Eric
Rentschler. (Uh-oh, I may have posted about this before?) It was
potentially of at least some interest to me: his subject was the
reception of Sirk's American films in Germany. As far as I could tell
all he did is organize reviews in order of increasing negativity, and I
think it was clear that his agenda was to express a hatred of Sirk's
American films. He later said that there was no visible difference
between the styles of Sirk, Ray and Minnelli. To me this simply showed
that he had no eye for these directors work at all, or for film style in
general, though maybe his style-meter got fried watching too many Nazi
films for his book. But to me this claim would be a like a musicologist
saying that he couldn't tell the difference between Bach, Handel, and
Couperin. I guess in the Camper Academy of Cinema Art (aka CACA, an
acronym already in use by another group I'm part of, which I'm ready to
form as soon as someone donates, say, $200 million, since we'd need to
start by restoring a lot of films and buying a lot of prints, and no
videos of films either) you wouldn't be allowed to graduate unless you
could tell in some sort of blind test which director made key scenes
from the films of all three -- hard to do in practice unless you could
keep the students in isolation and make sure they never saw the films
you would use in the test.

The other of the two worst was a "paper" by the chairman of Datrmouth's
English Department, who was African American, and whose name escapes me.
He waved a videocassette over his head while announcing that no
African-American could possibly like this film. I told Tag about that
and he told me about how he saw it when it opened in Philadelphia with
theaters full of crying African Americans. Anyway, he then proceeded to
claim it was one of two Stahl remakes by Sirk (wrong, it's one of
three). He claimed the beach was Atlantic City (wrong, Coney Island, as
should be obvious to anyone who knows New York). Worst of all, he
claimed that Laura Meredith (Turner) was "the object of the
photographer's gaze" (gosh, what an original phrase to hear at an
academic film conference) in that the photo that he took of her on the
beach is what launched her acting career. Wrong. As anyone who knows the
film well knows, it was "that certain je ne sais quoi that you got with
the dog" in an advertising photo not taken by the Gavin character
(quoted from memory, perhaps with a wrong word or two). Lucy Fisher
wrote an article on the film in the book she edited on it in which she
stresses Laura Meredith as an example of a strong, independent woman;
I'm not a big fan of stressing issues such as that one in analyzing
films, but Fisher seemed like a genius compared to this guy's willful
misreading. What's the point of having a videotape in your hand if you
can't use it to check the plot?

All this left me more depressed than I'd expected, and at the end of the
conference I had a sudden and massive infection in my leg and the
hospital I went to right from the closing lunch told me it was
life-threatening and they insisted on admitting me. So the conference
cost me about $6,000 more than I'd expected it to, because I was there
for six days on IV antibiotics. I guess it's true about depression
lowering your immune response.

- Fred C. (who is still planning a response to the now-old-autuerism thread)