Douglas Sirk, Linda Darnell or: What They Don’t Teach You in Film School
by Robert J. AvrechI’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the best directors in Hollywood. On location and in the studio it’s always fascinating to collaborate with gifted directors and then sit back and watch as the actors breathe life into my pages.
Linda Darnell, studio portrait
I’ve worked with directors who act as Freudian psychologists to elicit the proper emotions from actors. I’ve also seen directors who are more results oriented. They tend to block the actors—deeply choreographing their movements—thus treating actors like expensive props. I’ve witnessed directors bully actors into submission in order to get what they want. And I’ve seen directors who will sit down with their actors and spend endless hours discussing, analyzing, and torturing character and back story in order to excavate the core of the character’s soul.
Getting a great performance is a mysterious process. There is a synergy at work among film craftspeople that is impossible to define or capture in a bottle.
George Stevens, an often great director, was known for shooting endless takes of a single scene, but never explaining to his actors what was wrong with the previous takes or what he was looking to get from his performers. Joan Fontaine, in her autobiography, No Bed of Roses reports Stevens saying:
“I don’t know what’s wrong. Let’s shoot it again.”
Sometimes, Stevens would stop filming and go off all by himself, walk around in circles, or just stare into space.
Fontaine informs us that it was the great Carole Lombard who solved the mystery of what the legendary director was thinking during these breaks:
“You know what that s.o.b. is thinking about when he’s in one of his trances? Not a f****ng thing!”
Which brings us to director Douglas Sirk and actress Linda Darnell .
Director Douglas Sirk.
Sirk’s cycle of lush melodramas were reviled by reviewers during his lifetime but declared masterpieces by a new generation of hip post-modern scribes. Lesson: Film reviewers are, with rare exceptions, slaves to political and cultural fashions—usually left wing. They scrawl film reviews that are, at the core, glorified fashion blurbs. Don’t trust them. Trust your eyes and your heart.
In truth, Sirk’s melodramas are not masterpieces, but they are solid movies, great entertainment, and Sirk was a talented director who was able to draw consistently powerful performances from his actors. Rock Hudson turns in the best performances of his career in three of Sirk’s films. I recommend: Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, and watch Sandra Dee earn her acting chops opposite a finely tuned Lana Turner in Imitation of Life.
Sirk, a stridently anti-Nazi German emigre—his wife was Jewish— settled in Hollywood like so many other European actors, musicians, and directors.
Linda Darnell, (1923-1965) real name Monetta Darnell, a stunning small town Texas beauty, was hounded into Hollywood by a crazed, alcoholic mother who was determined that her daughter achieve what she never could.
Interpolation
There is a special place in hell for stage mothers. There is no forgiveness for these selfish and greedy parents.
End Interpolation
Darnell came to Hollywood—with a beloved pet chicken hidden in a suitcase—when she was just fifteen years old, after being spotted by a Fox talent scout. She clawed her way to the top, and when she starred opposite Tyrone Power in Blood and Sand, Darnell became a genuine Hollywood star.
But personal problems—a parasitic family, a penchant for abusive men, and, yup, booze—yanked Darnell into a stunning and ugly downward spiral.
In 1944, when Darnell was working with Sirk, she was battling a weight problem, felt underappreciated by her studio boss Darryl Zanuck, her marriage was on the rocks, and her tyrannical mother was constantly demanding money.
George Sanders and Linda Darnell in Summer Storm, 1944.
Always fragile, lacking in self-esteem, Darnell was acting in Summer Storm, an adaptation of an Ibsen play, a role she fought for. But Darnell was falling apart as the camera’s merciless gaze bore down on her.
Ronald L. Davis reports the following in his sympathetic but clear-eyed biography of the tragic actress, Hollywood Beauty: Linda Darnell and the American Dream.
Scheduled for release through United Artists, Summer Storm was directed by Douglas Sirk. Filming began in the spring of 1944, with The Wicked and the Weak as a working title. Linda got on well with Sirk, although things didn’t always progress smoothly. One particularly bad day, the director had shot sixteen takes of an important scene in a greenhouse. Linda grew tired, embarrassed, and was almost in tears.
Finally, Sirk ordered, “Everybody take a breather.”
Putting his arm around Linda’s shoulder, he said, “Now I want you to relax.”
Suddenly he yanked her across his knee and spanked her hard.
“Now you go out there and do that scene right!” he snapped.
The spanking so shocked and infuriated her that she went back on the set and made the scene one of the best in the picture. “After that, Sirk and I got along better than ever,” she said.
Sirk’s abusive behavior was, unfortunately, of his time and place, a Hollywood where actors were treated like cattle. This ugly episode is also consistent among a group of despotic directors who behaved like talented sociopaths. Michael Curtiz, real name: Manó Kertész Kaminer, on the set of the silent film Noah’s Ark, repeatedly pinched an infant in order to elicit tears on cue. Fritz Lang was famously cruel to actresses who did not yield to his every direction, Erich Von Stroheim, real name: Erich Oswald Stroheim, often drove crew and cast to physical and mental exhaustion, and Hitchcock was deeply twisted, in the grip of a series of sexual fixations towards several profoundly vulnerable leading ladies.
It would be nice to believe that such behavior, in our more enlightened—and litigious times—are a thing of the past, but knowing Hollywood as I do, I wouldn’t count on it.
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51 Comments
Don’t forget John Ford. A great filmmaker, but an unbelievable phsycopath on and off the set.
Well, heck, he got the scene he wanted. As did Hitchcock, mostly. I loved the part about the trances of George Stevens. Sometimes pacing around thinking about nothing can be very productive. A variation on the old “I get my best ideas in the shower” cliche. If only more directors these days would spend some time pacing around thinking about nothing, instead of “yeah, I guess that works, once we add in the CGI stuff.”
Loved this piece! It’s got real heart. God bless TCM and the Criterion Collection. Thank you!
Everyone hated Fritz Lang, not just actors. There’s a story that his lighting crew hated him so much, they rigged a light to fall on him on the set, and his producer, getting wind of the plot, had to run down to rescue him before he was crushed to death.
Hell, I want to direct now.
I remember reading an interview with Ron Howard recently and he said that as a director he became much better when he gave the actors a lot of leeway to interpret as they wanted. (Lindsey Lohan exempted, I’m sure)
On another thought I can see why actors can be so temperamental when they are doing a take for the 20th time. I remember in the “special features” section Tony Curtis saign something about Marilyn Monroe taking something out of a bedroom chest 20 or so times for Billy Wilder.
John Ford may have been a miserable SOB but his Wayne/O’Hara movies over the years were the best Hollywood ever allowed in public. None of which could be produced on the same scale today. Bad (i.e., conservative values) messages.
Linda Darnell was a beautiful lady. Didn’t she die in a house fire rescuing someone?
Isn’t it true that up until the last few generations that actors and their ilk were considered “cattle”, not just in Hollywood, but in general?
They were looked down on as having no real skill, not much better than prostitutes, selling themselves and their pride to entertain others.
maybe the pendulum has swung too far the other way now – think Sean Penn, Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin, etc
I like Dr. Johnson’s definition of an actor: “A fellow who exhibits himself for a shilling.”
Subcutaneous-
there’s that great line from “My Favorite Year” which was just on TCM.
Two stockbrokers are on the balcony of a fancy apartment when Peter O’Toole’s character falls off the roof, with a fire hose tied around his waist and dangles in space a floor below them.
Rich Guy #1(peering over the balcony): I think Adam Swann’s beneath us!
Rich Guy #2: Of course he’s beneath us- he’s an actor.
Jim P:
I know several actors and actresses from Hollywood’s Golden Age and for them it was far from golden. We, in the audience, tend to glorify old Hollywood because we were hypnotized, as children, by the magic of the silver screen. But once you work in Hollywood, the magic is gone.
The best kept secret in Hollywood: how very hard people work.
A director tries to get their actor to portray something that exists only in the director’s mind. Oftentimes they don’t have the words to be able to give the actor enough understanding of what their looking for. Poorly prepared directors go for a short cut and either hope the actor finds it in repeated takes. The really bad directors use techniques like pinching, spanking, and other manipulative behaviors to create an emotion in the actor that works for the scene.
It’s the director that is intelligent enough to be able to vocalize their desires, or understanding enough to allow rehearsals and trial and error to accomplish the intended results that the intelligent actor wishes to work with again and again, and who will earn the kudos and rewards of moviedom.
Paul:
On the set of The Three Godfathers, 1948, Harry Carey Jr., in his first starring role, failed to hit his mark. Ford picked up a rock and hurled it at the young man’s head. Fortunately, Ford missed. Unfortunately, he hit the great Pedro Armendáriz below the belt. Ouch!
Rather Read:
See above. BTW, I’m one of the few in the world who believes that Ford is waaaaay overrated.
Now I’m really in for it.
Joe The Veep:
Yes, they got what they wanted, but I believe that resorting to cruelty and sadism is immoral and cowardly.
And oh yeah, I would love to trance out for a while but never quite find the time.
Wanda:
Lang is another sadist who alienated almost everyone he worked with. He also seduced many leading ladies, using his power as director to manipulate their lives, private and public. A complete jerk.
Another director who’s way overrated.
Jonathan:
Why not just torture kittens:-)
“Also, as a “liberal” filmgoer, I rarely find evidence of “liberal” politics in mainstream reviews. Maybe in alternative papers, especially when discussing political films, but rarely in widely distributed mainstream newspapers.
Does anyone have any links that clearly show a liberal bias in mainstream film reviews, or is this belief merely taken as a fact?
I would appreciate a serious reply to this question.” Jason
I’ll give you a serious, albeit necessarily incomplete, reply.
When a conservative refers to a review as suffering from liberal bias, he or she isn’t necessarily (in fact, rarely) referring to explicit political content. That occurs mostly, as you say, in films with a political theme.
Instead, it refers to any of a variety of views derived from the underlying modern liberal worldview, in particular a view of human nature and the individual’s relationship to society.
So that, to give one example, a conservative viewing Howard Hawks’ Red River might praise the heroic and grand struggle between the two main protagonists. Now, suppose the film were remade, and – as would be expected today – the young gunfighter is made into a sadistic, psychopathic killer for whom we are expected to feel sympathy because of his oppressive, greedy, and jingoistic step-father. A liberal reviewer would be expected to praise, if not actually swoon, over the changes.
The reason, of course, is that the liberal (actually Progressive) viewpoint necessarily entails a view of the individual as degraded, dependent, and inherently corrupt – unless he or she is saving lepers on the South Side of Chicago from self-induced leprosy.
The conservative is implicitly attracted to depictions of humans that, even while flawed, are shown as potentially heroic in virtue of being self-reliant, confident, can-do, honorable, etc. The Progressive (with some exceptions) sees humans as, at best, little and unimportant, and usually malignant.
Now, any given film can have a mixture of these two starkly differing viewpoints, of course. But these broad outlines give a feel for why someone like a Frank Rich or Roger Ebert, who invariably drool over the malignant presentation of the lead character and disdain any film in which heroic virtues are presented as good and even expected, would be considered to have a ‘liberal bias.’
Bill:
Director Woody Van Dyke AKA “One-Take Woody” prepared his shot-list thoroughly and trusted his performers to do their jobs.
All he needed was a bottle of gin to get him through the day.
Fantastic director with the right material.
Siren:
As I was writing this I thought to myself, I should check in with Self-Styled Siren, she might be the one human being in the universe who has seen Summer Storm.
Okay, now I know.
Um, is there a difference between Ibsen and Chekhov?
With regard to Jean Seberg and Preminger. Yup, he was another sadistic hot-shot director—truly leaden and boring—but Seberg was a deeply disturbed young woman and I doubt if Preminger was the cause of so much subsequent instability. He only added to the tragedy which became her short life.
I’m partial to Unfaithfully Yours. Sturges brought out Darnell’s talent for dead-pan humor, which no one had teased from the young actress.
Of course, Letter to Three Wives is terrific.
Thnaks so much for the invaluable feedback.
Willik:
I know I’m supposed to love The Quiet Man, but gee, it’s so long-winded and the endless drunk jokes are insipid.
I usually just watch the great kiss in the cottage and then check-out.
Jason:
Read every film reviewer who writes for the NY Times, The LA Times, and every single MSM paper in the world. If you don’t see liberalism rampant, well, we have a difference of opinion.
Fay:
Darnell did die in a house fire. But she did not die saving a child. That’s a myth that has flourished, and which by the way, has saddled the child who did survive with unnecessary guilt.
No, Darnell tried to get out, was trapped, blinded and overcome by the smoke.
Very sad.
subcutaneous:
At the birth of the movies, picture actors were scorned as trash. But as the industry grew and stars were created, this attitude changed.
MGM and the other studios were factories, so it was part of the process to keep actors reigned in and treated like expensive cattle.
Now, we’re seeing the actor’s revenge.
ISITC:
Thanks so much for the articulate comment. Could not agree more.
Jeff Perren:
Greatly appreciate all the heavy lifting you’ve just done. I believe that liberal and leftists reviewers have become so embedded in our culture, that like citizens of the former Soviet Union or present day Cuba or any despotic regime, no one notices the obvious. It’s an excellent definition of cultural tyranny.
Dear Mr Avrech,
Thank you.
And count me among those apostates who also hold that Ford is wildly overrated. His films, while showing skill for sure, are often tedious and even unnecessarily grim.
Wow…someone just cited a negative review of RED DAWN as their proof of “liberal bias” in film criticism? Leaving out the preposterous leaps of logic that would have to occur for the Soviets to seize COLORADO in an exchange that wouldn’t immediately turn nuclear, there are lots of reasons to dislike the film completely disconnected from politics.
- Poor acting
- Inept direction, especially in the action scenes
- a script that doesn’t even bother developing fully fleshed characters, the “Wolverines” are pretty much cyphers.
Frankly, if Charlie Sheen and Patrick Swayze weren’t in it, no one would remember it today.
Robert,
Just for giggles, who would you say are the best directors working TODAY? Let’s leave the political kvetching aside for a sec. From a purely technical, storytelling, and craft perspective, who are the best directors? Name me five.
An answer for Jason and in support of Jeff Perrens comments: you might want to take a look at a blog I wrote last year, comparing three different productions of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”– 1936, 1979 and 2007. Short version: The original story was about good and evil. The latest version ends up being about class warfare. A reviewer not noticing that displays, probably innocently, liberal bias.
Joe Weldon:
Oh boy, I knew I should have kept my mouth shut about John Ford.
John Nolte is a close friend and we enjoy our differences of opinions about movies. Though, ahem, I will confess that I’ve never quite told him about my John Ford problem.
But here’s my feeling in a nutshell: with all the yadda yadda about Ford’s westerns, none come close to “Red River.”
I’ll let you know how this little drama turns out.
Jeff Perren:
Good grief, a landsman. Maybe more of us, (like Hollywood Republicans,) can now come out of the closet and admit that much of Ford’s work is just plain tedious.
Pete, Pete, Pete:
I have to work in this town. Are you trying to get me in trouble?
Besides, writers are for more important than directors. And the greatest screenwriter evuh is Frances Marion.
Leo:
Look forward to reading your blog. Thanks so much.
Please call me Jeff.
“Good grief, a landsman.” Sorry. I estimate I’ve seen about 5,000 films in my life, and read a great many books, but I don’t get the reference. Help me out.
“And the greatest screenwriter evuh is Frances Marion.” Not sure I can go with you on that one. Consider the competition: Johnathan Latimer (The Big Clock), James Goldman (The Lion In Winter), Ernest Lehman (North by Northwest, Sweet Smell of Success), Webb and Bartlett (The Big Country), and others I could name. Very tough to pick even a top ten, much less a single best.
Jeff
Jeff:
Sorry, I forget that most people don’t speak Yiddish.
Landsman = From the same land, i.e. brothers.
Hey, you forgot Hecht & MacArthur.
Ah, right. I readily acknowledge my oversight vis a vis Hecht & MacArthur, and I hereby raise you one Billy Wilder.
Jeff AKA Landsman:
Bella and Sam Spewack, original language: Yiddish:-)
P.S. Jules Furthman, Dudley Nichols.
Robert, say it isn’t so…
Now I know how all those Hollywood Dems felt when you came out as a Republican.
And this is how I find out? In the comments section of, of, a blog!?!?
You couldn’t come to me? You couldn’t tell me to my face?
Did I not bare my soul to you with my confession about loving Woody Allen?
And you’re …. I don’t know … wrong. No, it’s more than that. Wronger. Wrongest. Wrongingest. A wrong-tacular. A wrong-a-palooza.
I’ll keep working on it and promise to return when I figure out just how to properly define all of the wrong-osity going on here.
Hollywood has had a fair number of really good writers, hasn’t it? Still, I’m hoping there’s room for one more. (After all, several of them are gone now.)
Jeff
John:
Oh man, now I’ve gone and done it. Let me just point out that I like many parts of John Ford films.
1. Henry Fonda sitting on the porch in “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.”
2. The square dances in any of his films.
3. The out of focus dolly-in on John Wayne twirling his rifle in “Stagecoach.”
4. Ward Bond glancing off-screen in “The Searchers.”
5. The storm-tossed kiss in “The Quiet Man.”
6. Etc.
But too often the sums are better than the parts.
Like: do you really love the singing interlude in “The Searchers?” Huh, huh, huh?
Okay, me shut up now, or I’ll never work in Big Hollywood again.
P.S. Did Ford ever make a western as good as “Ride the High Country?”
I don’t think so.
P.P.S. The pedophile Woody Allen whose scripts are flabbier than jello? Good grief.
I think you’re off-base with your characterizations of Sirk, Curtiz and others as psychotic. I know you’re wrong to say that Hitchcock was deeply twisted and to repeat the libels about him having some psycho fixation on his leading ladies. This is the kind of gruesome gossip spewed out of “Hollywood Babylon” that was almost complete hogwash yet is repeated as gospel decades later. It simply isn’t true.
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