John Stahl: Melodrama, Modernism, and the Problem of Naïve Taste

The conventions of the grand old heart-wringing melodramas came to roost in the film-studies. D. W. Griffith brought lots of them himself. The heroine with her bundle of shame, the too-too honest love suspected of all but the audience, the industriously and unreasonably active villain, one hundred per cent wicked for twenty-four hours of the day, the snow, the comic relief and all. This was good. The grand old heart-wringing melodramas, “the stuff to give ‘em,” are good, sound, moving stuff. They are traditional in the best sense (in a popular tradition), even purge with pity and terror, and keep the flame of pure drama alive until genius comes in, every hundred years or so, to lift it to the regions of pure art.¹

While many literary intellectuals of the 1920s simply dismissed melodrama as sentimental bunk, e.g., H. L. Mencken’s comments on the hated triumvirate of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, David Copper-field and La Dame aux Camélias,² Iris Barry’s comment on the genre may stand as typical of a relatively positive assessment. Her view is largely informed by what she refers to elsewhere as “the cheap stock companies that keep melodrama alive to this day.”³ Melodrama is valuable because it is a distilled essence of theater and a repository of traditional dramatic devices, some of them implausible and faintly risible such as the overactive villain, but nonetheless solid, emotionally moving stuff which in the hands of a genius, presumably such as D. W. Griffith, constitutes the raw material of art.

Barry’s assumptions about melodrama as a traditional, outmoded, but nonetheless vital form are very far from those current in modern film studies, which, at least since the 1970s has tended to recuperate melodrama as a genre by emphasizing its affinities with modernism or the modern. Consider, for example, Jon Halliday’s Sirk on Sirk, published in 1971.⁴ It opens by establishing Sirk’s credentials as a political modernist, evoking the conditions of his cultural formation in Weimar Germany: at eighteen he was on the margins of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich; later, as a theater director in Hamburg and Bremen, he experimented briefly with Expressionism, then rejected it for the plays of Bronnen and Brecht, staging one of the first productions of The Threepenny Opera outside Berlin. This sets the terms for a contextualization of his American films of the 1950s. Halliday writes: “Sirk himself in the interview strongly insists on the need to historicize the American melodrama. This is not simply because of the nature of the studio (the immediate conditions of production), but also because of the condition of society as a whole, at the time basking complacently under Eisenhower, while already disintegrating from within.” The interview gave rise to explicitly Brechtian readings of Sirk, e.g., Paul Willemen, “Distanciation and Douglas Sirk,” and to many more analyses of American 1950s domestic dramas as representations of a social fabric under stress.⁵

Summary of Sowing the Wind (1921)

Baby Brabant is a notorious demi-mondaine and junior partner in the Palace of Fortune gambling establishment run by Petworth. She has sent her daughter Rosamund to boarding school to be raised, and kept her in ignorance of their real relationship. When Rosamund shows up unexpectedly at the Palace of Fortune, Baby tells Petworth that if he ever tells Rosamond that she is her mother, she will kill him. While Baby is entertaining men, who drink a toast to her, Rosamund comes downstairs in one of her mother’s dresses and attracts many admirers. Initially unaware of what has transpired, Baby eventually realizes what is going on, fights off the men and takes the girl upstairs. Left alone, Rosamund realizes the kind of work that Baby does (it seems extraordinary that it took her as long as it did to do so) and runs away, leaving a letter that thanks Baby for her help but refuses any more, given its source. In despair, Baby turns on Petworth and the men in the establishment and...