An underrated gem in the filmography of Douglas Sirk, Has Anybody Seen My Gal is a 1920s-set comedy that proves the director was adept at more than just tearjerkers. Read on to see what makes this film so special and why it is absolutely worth seeking out. It was Rock Hudson and Douglas Sirk’s first… Read more »
Guest post by Caleb Allison. Spoilers throughout! Douglas Sirk has become synonymous with lushly subversive melodrama wrapped in Technicolor brilliance, but before his nearly unbelievable string of melodramatic masterpieces in the 1950s, including Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), and Imitation of Life (1959), he conjured up a… Read more »
In 1942, about a decade before she would step into the role of Lucy Ricardo, Lucille Ball was ending a run as “the RKO comedy bombshell” and moving up into MGM’s glitz-and-glam musical comedy world. The height of Ball’s Hollywood stardom was in the early- to mid-1940s, and yet her success in Hollywood cinema pales… Read more »
When Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) invites her gardener, Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), to join her in a cup of coffee on a whim, it seems innocuous enough. She politely inquires about his work while he gives her laconic replies until their discussion turns to his new passion of growing trees and his eyes brighten. Despite… Read more »
Everyone knows that Ida Lupino was a great actress — I, for one, have already gushed in the pages of this blog about her performance as an isolated, blind woman in Nicholas Ray’s eternally underrated On Dangerous Ground (1951). Her curious performance style can make one feel, through the slightest look or gesture, that one… Read more »
Much has been made of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s relationship with the great Hollywood auteur Douglas Sirk, and of Fassbinder’s predilection toward working within a mode of overwrought melodrama – the kind of “weepies,” largely intended for female audiences, that Sirk was most comfortable working with in the ‘50s. Those who study Fassbinder have even come… Read more »