Summer Storm (Douglas Sirk, 1944)

If you are following the Douglas Sirk retrospective, you may have noticed that his films were often, like so many of his central characters, split or even, in some extreme instances, torn between opposite or conflicting drives. In the case of the movies, this is not the result of a deliberate aim, but rather the result of Sirk’s trying to achieve, in changing circumstances, the fusion of two diverse kinds of cinema.

On one hand, he was many times involved in the making of violent melodramas of passion and deception, of burning conflicts and disenchantments, of love, rivalry and mixed emotions, and intended and expected by the producers to intrigue, interest and move the cinema audiences. But, on the other hand, Sirk tended to show the strengths and the weaknesses of his main characters, regarding them with a critical eye, from a certain distance but also with some degree of compassion, and at certain moments through the transparent glass of a window or, sometimes, reflected on a mirror or some other reflecting surface, therefore stylizing the story with some detachment and thus preventing excessive or automatic identification with the characters.

Thus he tried to manage and make compatible the overwhelming musical emotion of the pure melodrama and the Brechtian distance that could allow to view these clashes of characters and their different interests and desires in a larger context, as a part of social conflict, and also to underline the hardships and the psychological and emotional costs of the frenzied “pursuit of happiness” and, in many instances, of economic or social success that characterized the United States of America during the ‘50s and early `60s of the twentieth century.

Although Detlef Sierck had directed already several kinds of melodramas in Germany and other European countries, Summer Storm (1944) was only his second American film directed with his new name of Douglas Sirk. It was again an independent production and well before signing his decisive long-term contract (1950-1958) with Universal Pictures, mainly devoted to that much maligned genre, although with some explorations of different genres. So far and still for two or three more films, he had not become a “genre director” specialized in melodrama, and was making more “respectable” or “prestige” films, with European themes or literary sources, from the point of view of the critical establishment, always very dismissive of melodrama or the so-called “women’s pictures”.

Apparently a rather faithful adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s first (and only) novel, The Shooting Party, which I would not describe as a melodrama, Summer Storm is really, if you compare both works, a rather free version of only a part of the book. Curiously, the best scenes in the film do not come from the great Russian playwright and story-teller, but from Sirk (his credited co-writer “Michael O’Hara” was one of his own pseudonyms) and Rowland Leigh, including the presentation of the character of Olga, surprised in her sleep, whereas remaining very close to the original in the portraits of the judge Fedor Petroff (superbly played by George Sanders in the first of his collaborations with Sirk) and the decadent count Volsky as embodied by Edward Everett Horton, while Olga has changed a lot, more mature and less negative, as Linda Darnell looks older than Chekhov’s depiction of the character, and also very different physically.

The main changes, however, are neither the invention of a servant, Clara (Lori Lahner), who is wholly infatuated for the judge, and therefore an utterly unreliable witness, nor the turning of Nadina (Anna Lee) into the woman Petroff was about to marry until hemet Olga, and therefore much closer to him than in the book, but very particularly the new beginning and ending, both placed after the 1917 Soviet Revolution, while the main story starts and ends in 1912.

More decisively, the last scenes, with a set of hesitations that finally will show the true morality of the judge neither to for the benefit of the citizen of the small provincial town, nor for any of the other relevant characters in the film, who do not witness his contradictory impulses and movements, but only for the audience watching the movie. This ending poses a moral dilemma which makes Sirk’s Summer Storm a melodrama, curiously and unexpectedly close to Otto Preminger’s film noir or thriller Fallen Angel (1945), and not only for Linda Darnell’s presence. About these final scenes, I can’t give a clue, because it would spoil you what no doubt for Sirk is the real core of the drama. I can only, therefore, advise you to watch very attentively George Sanders during the trial and also in the final scene, when he goes to the mail office.

Texto preparatorio para la presentación de la película en el ciclo Sirk del Festival de Locarno (4 de agosto de 2022)