When I was in Paris a few weeks ago, I spoke with my friend Philippe Collin—one of France’s best critics in the sixties and seventies, and now one of its best filmmakers—about what we’ve seen lately that excites us. The first thing he mentioned is “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?,” a 1951 comedy by Douglas Sirk that came out here in 2006 in the “Rock Hudson Screen Legend Collection” but that only recently showed up in France in a set called “Directed by Douglas Sirk.” (The French home-video audience is apparently as avidly auteurist as the critics—unless it’s the exact same audience: everyone’s a critic.) Among other things, it’s the first collaboration between director and actor; Hudson’s got a prominent supporting role, but the star is the cantankerous old Charles Coburn. (It was Sirk’s 1954 remake of “Magnificent Obsession” that put the granitic yet vulnerable Hudson over as a romantic leading man, and they also worked together on six other films, including the extraordinary melodramas “All That Heaven Allows,” “Written on the Wind,” and “Tarnished Angels.”)
Sirk is Hollywood’s great ironist; in “Sirk on Sirk,” a fascinating book of interviews, the director talked about his ironic tendencies, citing, as his source, Euripides (who was, in fact, the ironist and critic of myths among the Greek tragedians). This film’s ironies are built into the plot: a rich man who owes his success to his romantic tragedy; a struggling family torn apart by newfound prosperity; the blindness of the law, the deceptive charms of gaudy luxury, and—from a strictly cinematic perspective—the humble exhilarations of music and dance devoid of production numbers.
