Film Studies: The dark side of the American dream

In the 1950s, it was orthodox thinking that American film was in its doldrums. But consider this list of Fifties movies that are an autopsy on a failing society: Bigger Than Life and Rebel Without a Cause from Nicholas Ray; Tea and Sympathy and Some Came Running by Vincente Minnelli; A Place in the Sun by George Stevens; Fritz Lang's The Big Heat; Kiss Me Deadly and Autumn Leaves by Robert Aldrich; the Billy Wilder films where America is going sour – Ace in the Hole and The Seven Year Itch; nearly anything by Otto Preminger – but, above all, Angel Face and Anatomy of a Murder; Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, so full of wicked hints about sex, race and drugs. To say nothing of the unique melodramas of Douglas Sirk.

Detlef Sierck was born in Hamburg, in 1900, the son of Danish parents. He died in 1987, after a career that ended with Imitation of Life (1959), in which an actress and her black servant (Lana Turner and Juanita Moore) have trouble with their rebellious daughters (Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner). That was the last in a series of "women's pictures" which passed critical comment on the American consumer society. The best of those pictures are Magnificent Obsession (1953), with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, All that Heaven Allows (1955), same cast, and Written on the Wind (1956), an operatic dismantling of Texas oil wealth that involves Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone.

In the 1950s, the women's picture was so clear-cut a genre that it offered Sirk astonishing liberties. The audience was reckoned to be secure, deeply conservative, and not very well educated. As some commentators could see – Norman Mailer, notably – it was a country on the edge of a social abyss. But no studio or producer was suspicious of the genre. So Sirk was able to make pictures that satisfied the "sleeping" audience, while telling new radical elements to stay awake. As such, Sirk is a classic example of the dangerous territory a good film director can explore if his system reckons his material is "safe".

Todd Haynes' new picture, Far from Heaven, is a brilliant and beautiful recreation of the world of Douglas Sirk. The time is 1957. The place, affluent suburbia. Julianne Moore seems to be an ideal wife and mother – except that her husband, Dennis Quaid, is a tormented gay, struggling to get out of the closet; and except that she begins to fall in love with her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), because he is the only person she knows who makes an effort to live truthfully.

With saturated colours and the overdressed bourgeois splendour of Eisenhower's America, this is a detailed and faithful tribute to a rare director's style. The music, so full of foreboding and hidden emotionalism, is by Elmer Bernstein, a composer who first came into his own in the Fifties on movies like The Man With the Golden Arm and Sweet Smell of Success (add those to my earlier list).

Far from Heaven has been a critics' favourite in the US, but it didn't break through to the large audiences Sirk enjoyed. It's not difficult to see why. This movie is a homage and it cannot quite shrug off the air of studied re-making. It left me wondering what might have happened if Haynes had set it in 2003. America has changed a lot, and for the better. But there are still successful businessmen who lead sexual double lives. And it would still be an outrage in many places if the young mother turned up at school to collect her children – holding hands with her black gardener. The gap between the American ideal, and its daily practice, has never been greater, and Douglas Sirk is a case study in how an artist can get into that gap and begin to make useful trouble.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk