DVD of the Week: “All I Desire”

Douglas Sirk’s 1953 melodrama “All I Desire” (which I discuss in this clip) launched the German-immigrant filmmaker (who had arrived here during wartime) on a new and decisive creative arc. The movie is a romantic melodrama set in an American town—at once a compact city and a preordained suburb—that looks lovingly at the underlying spirit of freedom and community while confronting the narrowness of shared values and the shattering risks of free-thinking. It stars Barbara Stanwyck in the first of two films they made together (the other, “There’s Always Tomorrow,” co-stars Fred MacMurray in one of the great dramas of frustrated manhood) and, in both of these films, she conveys the burden of the past, of a personal history that has burned painful wisdom into her soul. She comes off as a woman who has lived; and, in both, she utters the word “No” with a distinctive, unforgettably round-pointed vowel that she tears from her throat like a worldly, dignified, ladylike cry. Her performances in these films, and in others of the era, by Samuel Fuller and Gerd Oswald—like Joan Crawford’s, in films of the forties and fifties by Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, and Robert Aldrich—suggest the power of age-honest casting over the commercial lure of the ingenue. Would that filmmakers of today took that lesson to heart.