Douglas Sirk: King of Hollywood Melodrama

Over his 17-year career in Hollywood, Douglas Sirk carved out a name as one of Hollywood’s most bankable directors. Awash with glamour and names such as Barbara Stanwyck, Rock Hudson, Lana Turner and Fred MacMurray, his star-studded matinées constantly appeared at the top of box office charts. But armed with the visual vocabulary of German Expressionism... More »

Over his 17-year career in Hollywood, Douglas Sirk carved out a name as one of Hollywood’s most bankable directors. Awash with glamour and names such as Barbara Stanwyck, Rock Hudson, Lana Turner and Fred MacMurray, his star-studded matinées constantly appeared at the top of box office charts. But armed with the visual vocabulary of German Expressionism and a healthy dose of sardonic irony, Sirk was able to turn otherwise pedestrian romances into incisive indictments of the great post-war American dream.

Collected here are nine of Sirk’s most impressive efforts at Universal, including exclusively the screwball comedy NO ROOM FOR THE GROOM and his only western, TAZA, SON OF COCHISE.

NO ROOM FOR THE GROOM
Alvah (Tony Curtis) and Lee (Piper Laurie) elope to Las Vegas, but a series of disastrous and hilarious hijinks orchestrated by Lee’s uncompromising mother delay the wedding night…

ALL I DESIRE
Barbara Stanwyck stars as a woman who returns to the family she abandoned years earlier, and must cope with the problems she left behind.

MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION
Sirk’s first screen pairing of Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson is a romantic tearjerker filmed in glorious Technicolor®.

TAZA, SON OF COCHISE
Rock Hudson stars as a pacifist Apache chief in Sirk’s first and only western, his favourite of his own films.

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS
Wyman and Hudson are reunited in this May-December romance, compromising the social conventions of her New England country club set.

THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW
Double Indemnity’s Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck are reunited as former lovers who share an unshakable yet forbidden bond.

A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE
Based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, John Gavin and Lilo Pulver star as childhood friends who must learn to rely on each other for love and survival amid the devastation of post-World War II Germany.

THE TARNISHED ANGELS
Rock Hudson and Robert Stack compete for the love of Dorothy Malone’s LaVerne in this barnstorming melodrama based on William Faulkner’s Pylon.

IMITATION OF LIFE
Lana Turner and Juanita Moore star as single mothers whose destinies are intertwined in Sirk’s famed Hollywood swansong, which remained Universal’s biggest box office success until 1970. Less «