Melodrama maestro: Five filmmakers heavily influenced by Douglas Sirk

There are many ways to gauge the influence of a director. You could look at how many filmmakers mimic their iconic sequences, and Stanley Kubrick would surely have the edge on this one. Or you could look at how many filmmakers mimic their style of pacing and plot progression (Hitchcock would likely be at the top of list), or a more literal count of how many filmmakers name-check them during interviews (Kubrick, again, would likely triumph, along with Leone and Kurasawa).

But there is another option that is at least as legitimate – the variety of movies that bear close similarities to the filmmaker’s unique style. In this regard, Douglas Sirk is hard to beat. The influence of the German-born master of Hollywood melodrama can be seen in everything from Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love to Xavier Dolan’s I Killed My Mother, and has been name-checked by Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and many others. 

This range of directors working within vastly different genres illustrates just how pioneering Sirk’s filmography was, so it may come as a surprise that, for most of his life, the director was dismissed as a Hollywood shill who made B-grade “Women’s Pictures.” His films are saturated with colour, bursting with extreme emotions, and teeming with absurdly contrived plots. In 1954’s Magnificent Obsession, for example, Rock Hudson’s character is a careless playboy responsible for the death of Jane Wyman’s character’s husband. He falls in love with the new widow, accidentally blinds her, disguises himself as her caretaker, and then goes to medical school and becomes a brain surgeon in order to cure her blindness.

For all the hokiness of his plots, and the undeniable influence that his work had on the soap opera genre, Sirk’s filmography is a treasure trove for filmmakers and compulsively entertaining for audiences. Aside from the over-the-top colour palettes and rollercoaster storylines, his movies are full of irony and symbolism, and many of them touch on the cultural taboos of the time. 1959’s Imitation of Life, for example, focuses on two troubled mother-daughter relationships, one of which is between a Black mother and her white-passing daughter. 

Sirk retired from filmmaking after Imitation of Life on a career-high and returned to Europe. Within a decade, up-and-coming filmmakers begin dissecting and mimicking his work, insisting an ongoing reevaluation of the director’s contribution to cinema. Here are just a few of the movies indebted to him. 

Five filmmakers influenced by Douglas Sirk:

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)

It is quite possible that no one would be talking about Douglas Sirk today if it weren’t for the pioneer of New German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Early in his career, the young director watched Sirk’s films for the first time and began a long-standing friendship with him. He even wrote an essay about the filmmaker’s work, stating, “Sirk has made the tenderest films I know, they are the films of someone who loves people and doesn’t despise them as we do.” 

The work had a profound effect on him. Three years after writing that essay, Fassbinder released Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a love story based on Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows. Sirk’s film follows a young man who falls in love with a woman who is 15 years old and his senior. Once they become a couple, they are confronted with a barrage of judgement and social ostracism. In Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder complicated the set-up, turning the young man’s character into a Moroccan guest worker and the woman a 60-year-old widow. Like Sirk, Fassbinder’s film is awash with tenderness despite the nastiness of the culture around the couple and the heightened drama they endure. 

Polyester (John Waters, 1981) 

On a completely different cinematic planet is John Waters’ 1981 satire, Polyester. The director with the pencil moustache and the glee of a good-natured provocateur is a self-professed fan of all things Sirk. “I think I probably saw one [of his films] in the ‘50s without any knowledge of film,” he said in an interview, adding, “And so then I really saw them all around that time and was completely, you know, as every other filmmaker in the world did, loved them.”  

Compared to his other low-budget gross-out movies that see characters eating real dog poop or getting raped by lobsters, Polyester is pretty tame. But the Pope of Trash is still the Pope of Trash, and it’s well outside the bounds of a mainstream popcorn melodrama. It stars Waters’ beloved collaborator and co-conspirator, Divine, as a 1980s housewife whose husband owns a porno movie theatre and whose teenage son has a fetish that involves stomping on women’s feet. In true Sirk fashion, she falls in love with a younger man (played by actual 1950s heartthrob Tab Hunter), and endures a head-spinning series of personal dramas. 

It features all the hallmarks of Sirk’s work, from intense family turmoil to sumptuous colours and a critique of suburban America. Unsurprisingly, however, it isn’t exactly a tearjerker.

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

The Tarantino connection may seem unlikely, but the Kill Bill director has sung the praises of Sirk on many occasions and even gave him an explicit shout-out in one of his movies. During the scene in Pulp Fiction in which Mia (Uma Thurman) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) have dinner at the Hollywood-themed restaurant Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Vincent asks for a “Douglas Sirk Steak.”

“How do you want that cooked?” the waiter asks, “Burnt to a crisp or bloody as hell?” Note the lack of a medium-rare option. As Tarantino knows better than anyone, there was never a middle ground for Sirk. 

Unlike Fassbinder’s or Waters’ films, Pulp Fiction has no narrative link to Sirk, but it is full of the irony and no-holds-barred drama that the master of melodrama showered on all his films. Its lurid colours and evocative camera use also emerge from Sirk’s filmography. 

According to Tarantino, the director’s work is unmissable. Speaking in a 2008 interview with Elvis Mitchell, he identified Magnificent Obsession as one of the movies he loves showing to modern audiences and said, “The thing that’s so much fun, and I’ve watched it with women and men, is they really get into that story. Because they don’t see melodramas, they see TV movies, they see Lifetime movies, they think that’s melodrama. They don’t know the true fun of ever-escalating emotions building up to a volcanic pitch, and they’re actually hanging on every wild, crazy, improbable twist and turn in the storyline, but Sirk’s believing it, and he’s selling it to you.”

Ever-escalating emotions building up to a volcanic pitch and audiences hanging on to every improbable twist and turn is exactly the sort of description you could apply to Tarantino’s work.

All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is perhaps the most respected director whose work is unabashedly rooted in soapy melodrama. He has even helped tacitly reclaim the “Women’s Picture” as a respectable genre. Many critics have drawn parallels between his work and the films of Douglas Sirk over the years, but the connection is particularly pronounced in his Oscar-winning 1999 drama, All About My Mother.

The film is centred around motherhood and grief. When a nurse loses her teenage son in a tragic accident, she reconnects with his father, a transgender woman, and finds companionship with a troubled female actor and a pregnant nun. Like Sirk’s movies, it deals with tragedy on a grand scale and updates his focus from the social stigma of the ‘50s to the social stigma of the ’90s. 

Almodóvar discussed his inspiration for his films of this period in a 2023 interview, saying, “During the 1990s, I matured and stylized my stories. The melodrama of Tacones lejanos (High Heels, 1991) becomes more Douglas Sirk than Mexican melodrama. In my more recent films, I shifted my style again, becoming much more austere.” Though he may have begun his journey toward Sirk’s style with High Heels, All About My Mother finds compassion at the heart of the director’s work. 

Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)

After Fassbinder, no director has tied his work so explicitly to Sirk as Todd Haynes. Known for his women-focused dramas like Carol and May December, the director is open about his adoration of the ‘50s filmmaker and how he influenced his cinematic style. Like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Far From Heaven pays direct homage to All That Heaven Allows, featuring a taboo relationship between a suburban housewife (Julianne Moore) and a younger man (Dennis Haysbert). Haynes draws on many other aspects of Sirk’s work as well, including racism (the younger man is Black), suburbia, and sexual orientation.

Setting the film in the 1950s allowed Haynes to explore the same conundrums that Sirk did and use the director’s movies as a roadmap. Speaking of Sirk’s inventive use of colour, Haynes said, “Today’s use of colour is totally reductive. Happy scenes are warm, sad scenes are cool; sometimes an entire movie, if it’s set in the past, will be shot through honey-coloured gels […] What’s beautiful about Sirk is that every frame is a complementary palette. Every single scene, regardless if it’s happy or sad, plays with an interaction of warm and cool colours. It’s so powerful.”

Haynes has made this use of sumptuous colour his calling card, saturating every frame with a moody palette that avoids being emotionally manipulative. In an era when most melodrama overflows with irony and self-knowing camp, Haynes has found a niche by making unabashedly sincere romantic melodramas.

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