The Moment of Glory: Melodrama after the Second World War

Some of these directors are well-known to many of us: Frank Borzage, Emilio Fernandez, Jean Grémillon. Some are unknowns – Hasse Ekman, Teuvo Tulio, perhaps even Leslie Arliss. Most probably the central and spellbinding Raffaello Matarazzo might be unknown even to film specialists. Yet their gift will be equally convincing, and the story they tell is a kind of mosaic of exceptional times, when so much was broken and when dreams and utopias compensated with hypnotic force. Douglas Sirk, the Master who interestingly worked mostly with melodramas in the 1930s and then in the 1950s, but not really during “our period”, phrased it best when he asked, “Isn’t life the most beautiful of melodramas?”

It was simply something that realism alone couldn’t cope with. In an overall situation where everything was melodrama, drabness didn’t catch the mood of the day – the everyday and hallucinatory dreams had to co-exist for sheer survival. It was Gainsborough against Brief Encounter, Grémillon against Daquin, or the melodrama man Borzage against the “realists” Zinnemann and Dmytryk – who were impressive enough and not to be downgraded in the slightest.

It was an experience in the war zone, with the frail difference between life and death in front of your eyes all the time. Life on the edge, always fragile, and then as if it had not ended after all, despite all the documents and “realistic” proof. The sheer fact of still being alive was the oddest of coincidences. Every moment could have been the last. The time of brief encounters, because permanent happiness was out of the question. Bombings could change everything in a second. A time when even a person whose life had been devoid of anything but routine could chance upon wild probabilities, life’s full perspective, at any moment. There was one common denominator – melodrama, the chosen genre of Raffaello Matarazzo and Co. It was a definitive post-WW2 phenomenon in many countries in a register that belongs to that moment only.

Peter von Bagh