A Time to Love and a Time to Die
I don’t actually think Douglas Sirk’s other movies will be as good as this. This movie impressed me so much that I had nightmares from it for three nights afterwards. This did not happen to me in the last movie I have seen (which was this Russian propaganda one). Now it sounds like a bad thing, but objectively, it just shows that the story in the film was so good that it affected me so deeply.
I have read that Douglas Sirk’s films were dismissed as melodramatic at the time, until some Nouvelle Vague directors such as Truffaut discovered him and started worshipping him to the point of cult. To be honest, I can understand both: „A time to love and a time to die“ was very melodramatic and the trailers to his other movies look so melodramatic that I cannot bear it. I was wondering what such a director would do with Erich Maria Remarque’s somewhat dry style (or so it seems to me) and suppose that Remarque himself must have contributed quite a bit to the making of the film considering that he acts in it.
In my opinion, Lilo Pulver was wasted on Fräulein Ingeborg in „One, Two, Three“. Billy Wilder is the type of director who can make everybody, including Marilyn Monroe, act suitable for its role. But with La Pulver, I have the impression that she can do so much more, it’s just that she never had the opportunity to. At least I do think that her role as Elisabeth already feels much more stronger than the one of Ingeborg.
This is the first film I decided to buy because it was simply not available on the internet, but luckily, I did not regret this purchase. Perhaps it’s actually not worth 8 euro to me, but at that moment, I totally wanted to see this film, and I’m glad to have seen it.
i really want to see this again, and it certainly left a greater impression on me than did the famously over-the-top melodramas throughout the 50s that so many critics consider to be his most significant work (though I still think Written On The Wind is a masterpiece and a pretty insane summary of his style) – I also feel that The Tarnished Angels, like A Time To Love, is somewhat of an underdog amongst his films that I really want to check out!