INTERLUDE (1957) C widescreen 90m dir: Douglas Sirk

w/June Allyson, Rossano Brazzi, Marianne Cook, Francoise Rosay, Keith Andes, Jane Wyatt

Another of director Sirk's soapers, but this time around the components don't quite jell. The plot involves a young American woman who goes to Germany only to fall in love with a married conductor who is hiding a mad wife. Sounds right up Sirk's alley, but Allyson and Brazzi don't really cut it acting-wise, the script leaves much to be desired, and one key component of Sirk's "team" was not in place: the cinematographer is William Daniels, not Russell Metty, who worked with Sirk so brilliantly on his most successful films. Still, according to FilmFrog, Sirk films are always interesting on one level or another.

Sirk discussed the film for Jon Halliday's book Sirk on Sirk : "Of all the pictures I have done --- except the Columbia pictures --- Interlude is the one on which I had the least to do with the development of the story. My assistant and the cameraman, Bill Daniels, had already pre-researched locations for me [it was filmed on location in Bavaria and Salzberg, Austria], and since Battle Hymn , having a pretty complicated shooting schedule, had been delayed a bit, the studio was anxious to get on with Interlude . June Allyson had a finishing date on her contract and so I was forced to start as quickly as possible with the shooting. As a matter of fact, I wasn't even given a rest and had to fly to Bavaria with my leg still in a cast [he had broken it during the shooting of the previous film] right after I finished the cutting of Battle Hymn . So the story [based on the John Stahl film WHEN TOMORROW COMES which was originally a James Cain story] is in no way mine. ... I was given an outline based on the Stahl picture, which had originally been extremely loosely based on Serenade by Jimmy Cain. But the script I was given bore no resemblance to the Jimmy Cain story, with the exception of one sequence, the scene of the flooded church, which was anyway completely transposed for the picture. The Stahl film had already gone a long way from Jimmy Cain's story, and at the time I was making Interlude , I did not know that Serenade was anywhere behind it at all. I only found out afterwards that Universal had owned Serenade for years, and that the Stahl picture, too, had been based on it. If conditions had been different, and especially if I had had a different script based on the original James Cain novel, I think it could have been a terrific picture --- at least a very unusual one. The main fault with Interlude is that it didn't present characters which got me excited. And, in addition to my being handicapped by my leg, there was another problem: Brazzi was not exactly a born conductor. I had to spend more cutting time on the picture than on any other I ever made --- you can still see it if you look carefully."