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"Not quite at the bottom of the bill," the prodigal artist. The absconded wife (Barbara Stanwyck) is an under-appreciated trouper on the vaudeville circuit, her return to the small Wisconsin burg indicates Beckett's position, "good housekeeping." Two daughters back home, one adoring (Lori Nelson) and the other resentful (Marcia Henderson), a son who cannot recognize her (Billy Gray) and a husband chided for teaching "progressive nonsense" (Richard Carlson). The stagestruck girl stars in a high-school production but all eyes are on the dame in the audience, meek drama teacher (Maureen O'Sullivan) and insinuating former lover (Lyle Bettger) wait in the wings. "Won't the ladies be talking tonight!" A crossroads for Douglas Sirk, the midpoint between his fond nostalgia for early Americana and his corrosive critique of its perpetual strictures. Stella Dallas and Remember the Night figure in Stanwyck's modulations, her matriarch can skill kick a leg up and dance around the living room with a Yale freshman. Nothing like experience to cool wanderlust or settle jealousy. "You got a mother with no principles, I got a daughter with no guts." The interloper runs a rifle store and hopes to pick up where they left off, three shots announce the illicit rendezvous that ends in scandal, "the oldest and nastiest story in the world" all over again. Sirk's virtuosity with long takes and elaborate frames serves him sharply in the domestic labyrinth of doorways and corridors. Liszt and Chopin and the annotated Shakespeare, a Browning recitation at the top of the staircase. "Well, I sure feel sorry for Sarah Bernhardt." Cukor's The Actress provides the point of departure, in due time Fuller's The Naked Kiss absorbs it. With Richard Long, Lotte Stein, Dayton Lummis, and Fred Nurney. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |