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Courtesy of Eureka Entertainment

by James Cameron-wilson

The career and reputation of Douglas Sirk has undergone many mutations. Famous for directing lush melodramas in the 1950s, he was dismissed and belittled by many contemporary critics, until seeing a revival of sorts in the 1970s sparked by European writers and filmmakers, in particular Jean-Luc Godard and then subsequently by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Later on, many notable directors doffed their hat to Sirk and paid homage to his 1950s’ soap operas, including Tarantino, Pedro Almodóvar, Wong Kar-wai, David Lynch, John Waters, Lars von Trier and in particular Todd Haynes, with his sumptuous imitation Far from Heaven, with Julianne Moore. When the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro accepted his Oscar for The Shape of Water, he even name-checked Douglas Sirk as an inspiration.

Sirk, the son of Danish parents, made his breakthrough as a stage director in 1920s’ Germany and then, when filmmakers...

Douglas Sirk proves his mettle as a consummate romantic storyteller in these part-musical melodramas from the peak of his career in Germany. They cemented stardom for Zarah Leander, a beauty who could have been an international success had the timing and politics been different. Both pictures send their heroines on far-flung adventures. In To New Shores Leander’s seductive music hall chanteuse is a victim of love, banished to a prison in Australia; in La Habanera she’s the wife of an all-powerful Caribbean landowner, who purposely downplays a plague because it will affect his business. Sirk’s order of the day is to put Leander into intolerable situations, just as he did Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Wyman and Lana Turner in his later Technicolor pictures at Universal.

To New Shores & La Habanera

Blu-ray

Kino Classics

1937 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / Street Date May 18, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Zarah Leander.

Cinematography: Franz Weihmayr...