The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk

THE VANITY TABLES OF DOUGLAS SIRK identifies the director’s signature prop as a metonymy for the complex mixture of adoration and contempt Hollywood held for the subjects and intended viewers of its women’s pictures. The mirror and the melodrama lay the same trap, allowing women to see only an inverted reflection of themselves and the world. James Mason, and Danielle Darrieux were each in several Ophuls projects but were never together in an Ophuls movie, although they should have been. What might that movie have been like? JOHN GARFIELD examines one of cinema’s greatest Jewish, proletarian sex symbols. In France, Marcel Dalio could only play a Jew, and his starring role would come only after he fled, on anti-Semitic posters that appeared throughout Vichy-era France. Now in America, Dalio would play the consummate Frenchman. In a purloined first-person account, I, DALIO narrates the ironies that proliferate from this reversal of fortune. (Colin Beckett)

In the presence of Mark Rappaport.