I trust that the titles mentioned already are enough to reawaken respect for a genre, without need of "feminist" interpretation. But the case of [Douglas Sirk] is subtler and more intriguing. And it is Sirk whom [Todd Haynes] has his eyes on. Detlef Sierck (1900-87) was probably born in Denmark, reason enough to say that other Scandinavian directors, including Carl Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman, have excelled in this genre. Sirk went to Germany and became a prolific director of theater who began making movies in the '30s. Two of those films, "Zu Neuen Ufern" and "La Habanera," both starring Zarah Leander, a dark-haired Garbo look-alike, are outstanding melodramas.

All those films played in the '50s and did pretty well at the box office. It was an innocent moment perhaps, one that hardly knew that Rock Hudson -- one of Sirk's frequent stars -- was gay, and was very happy with him as a gentle, healing man for such lovelorn wrecks as Jane Wyman offered in "Magnificent Obsession" and "All That Heaven Allows." Like many American films of that era, they first won critical acclaim in France. Francois Truffaut was a great admirer of "Written on the Wind," and why not? It is, maybe, the most accessible of Sirk's films in that it plays off the palatable notion that the children of the rich (Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, as the scions of big oil) are depraved or impotent, vicious and self- destructive, while true feeling rests with simpler souls (Hudson and Lauren Bacall).

A MAGNIFICENT DUO: Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in Douglas Sirk's 1954 "Magnificent Obsession." They reteamed the next year in his "All That Heaven Allows," another film that urges audiences to look beneath the happy ending.; PHOTOGRAPHER: The Kobal Collection / Universal; MARRIED ... WITH PROBLEMS: [Julianne Moore] and [Dennis Quaid] star as 1957 Hartfordites facing a marital crisis in writer-director Todd Haynes' "Far From Heaven." The press notes to the film, which opens Nov. 8, acknowledge that it "is inspired by the great Hollywood 'women's' films" of the 1950s.; PHOTOGRAPHER: Abbot Genser