Customer Reviews

Sirk on Sirk (Cinema One)

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A series of interviews that Jon Halliday carried out with Sirk in his later years. The interviews are broken into six periods-- Sirk's German Theater period; the German film period; the exile years in Switzerland, France and Holland; his two American periods and finally the time after his biggest Hollywood successes.

Sirk is a tremendously important cinema director, and the interviews give a lot of clarity to his history and how he went about choosing the subject matter that he did. Halliday also provides a brief biographical introduction and a biofilmography and Sirk bibliography. A must-have for cinephiles and fans of Douglas Sirk.

The book is good, but I would have loved to have more in depth study. Perhaps some day the biography of this director will come

The edition I have of this book dates from 1972. If it has been updated I'd like to know. Andrew Sarris was one of the first serious American film critics to bring attention to Douglas Sirk, a director who made movies that weren't supposed to be taken seriously.
Of course, the critical climate has changed substantially and those reviewers who were interested in Oscar over-acting or "message films" or plausibility were caught rather red-faced, I'd imagine.
I wish this book would have included more material about the later American films near the end of his career. That's when the real fun begins!

Curtis Stotlar