A handsome new Blu Ray box set from EUREKA contains three shorts and three films Douglas Sirk made in Germany between 1934 and 1935. Das Madchen vom Moorhof (The Girl From Marsh Croft) is the revelation so far as it is clearly the work of a filmmaker who would develop elements of the film into melodramas made in Hollywood during the 1950s.
The setting is a rural German community with inhabitants ranging from working class to privileged. Sirk captures bold character detail with the astute eye of a keen observer. The framing of images using depth and range of space is also no different from the later films. The themes of the film derive from what happens to a young female farm worker ( a striking performance by Hansi Knoteck) who has been made pregnant by a married landowner.
This is the pretext for Sirk to create a range of narratives including the outcome of a community court case where the determined girl is attempting to gain financial support from the child’s father. Realising the landowner will perjure himself on The Bible she withdraws her case, out of principal and honour for her child, with an element of religious faith building up layers of moral complexity.
This is considered to be the very first Sirk melodrama and is based on a 1908 novella by Swedish writer Selma Lagerlof. It is the perfect blueprint for the filmmaker’s later transgressive ideas that include strong women of principal standing up to misogyny and social repression. The narrative thread includes the first of Sirk’s handsome wholesome young men (Kurt Fischer-Fehling is a Rock Hudson lookalike circa 1935) who will have to choose between obeying the order of the community and family for a love he knows to be pure and more honest. For anyone interested in Sirk, The Girl from Marshcroft is essential viewing. @PeterHerbert
SIRK IN GERMANY 1934-1935 (MASTERS OF CINEMA) Limited Edition Two-disc Blu-ray