Images - A Scandal in Paris

<BODY bgcolor="#CCCC99"> <font size="4"><br>A Scandal in Paris</font> <font size="2"> <br>video review by Gary Morris</font> <font size=3 face="Book Antiqua,Century Schoolbook,Times New Roman"> <p><font size="6" color="#FF0000"><b>F</b></font>ans of Douglas Sirk (1900-1987), not surprisingly, tend to be defensive when discussing their still neglected hero. Championed by European critics and their American auteurist allies starting in the late 1960s, Sirk nonetheless has never achieved household-word status, even among many self-proclaimed cinephiles, despite his talents. Introducing him to potential converts through a film such as <i>Magnificent Obsession</i> was a common but frequently fatal strategy in those early days; even viewers dazzled by the eye-popping Technicolor often dismissed the film as a typical overcooked women’s picture capsized by the conventionality of its elements: a major Hollywood studio (Universal), insufferable source material (Lloyd C. Douglas’s potboiler novel), a kitschy producer (Ross Hunter), mainstream stars such as Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, and of course the perennially unfashionable genre of the women’s picture/melodrama. <p><a href="default-nf.htm">Go to the review</a></font> </body>