All I Desire (Sirk, 1953): Regent Street Cinema, 1pm
This screening will also feature a live organ.Time Out review:
There are things wrong with All I Desire, but Douglas Sirk isn't
responsible for them. It didn't need the forced 'happy ending' for a
start, and it should clearly have been made in colour. But Hollywood
producers were even more stupid in 1953 than they are now, and directors
didn't often get their way. Sirk was less compromised than most,
because his strategy was a kind of 'hidden' subversion of genres like
musicals and weepies: appearing to deliver the producer's goods, and
simultaneously undercutting them. Here, the excellent Barbara Stanwyck plays an
actress who hasn't made the grade, returning to the small-town family
she walked out on after a scandalous affair with a local stud. She moves
from one 'imitation of life' to another: from life-on-the-run in
showbiz to life-under-wraps in Hicksville, Wisconsin. Sirk's delineation
of the manners and 'morality' of bourgeois middle America is
devastating; and the precision with which he dissects the repressions,
jealousies and joys that permeate a family has never been rivalled.
Tony Rayns
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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