Douglas Sirk’s second American film was another independent production for producer Seymour Nebenzal following Hitler’s Madman (1942). Summer Storm was a project developed by Sirk at Ufa as an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s novel The Shooting Party. He argued that Hollywood producers wanted another name on his script and it was briefly worked on by James M. Cain but he was ‘too American’ for the Russian setting. Eventually Sirk accepted the work by Rowland Leigh an English writer who married an American. In some filmographies Sirk appears as a writer under the pseudonym ‘Michael O’Hara’ and on the actual film credits he appears as both himself and O’Hara as responsible for the adaptation.

On this film Sirk still relied on émigrés in creative roles so Archie Stout was only nominally the cinematographer with Eugen Schüftan leading and Karl Hajos wrote the music score. Rudi Feld, who had worked at Ufa was Art Director. The Russian settings and interiors are effective. Sirk also chose two English actors for two of the leads. George Sanders was actually born in St Petersburg into an Anglo-Russian family and Anna Lee had been on the stage and in British films.

Petroff meets Olga

The narrative is fairly straightforward. It has a flashback structure and Sirk updated the 1884 novel so that ‘the present’ is in 1919 after the Russian Revolution. Nadena (Anna Lee) is a publisher who receives a visitor, the former Count Volsky (Edward Everett Horton) on whose estate she spent a summer holiday in 1912. He is now penniless and he brings her a manuscript, unsigned but recognisable as the work of the man she was once engaged to marry – Fedor Mikhailovich Petroff (George Sanders), once the magistrate of the district including the Volsky estate near Kharkov in modern day Ukraine (if only precariously at the moment). As she begins to read the manuscript, Nadena is transported back to 1912.

Petroff and Nadena meet in the church and again he fails to tell her the truth

The Count is widowed and he and Petroff, despite the latter’s engagement are inclined to seduce the young women of the neighbourhood. Perhaps the most attractive young woman around is Olga (Linda Darnell), the daughter of a forester on Volsky’s estate. Olga is no retiring flower. She is beautiful, voluptuous and intelligent – a heady combination and catnip to Volsky and Petroff. Unfortunately for them, Olga is shrewd enough to first find a reliable husband and escape from her father’s hovel, so she marries Volsky’s bookkeeper/agent Anton Urbenin (Hugo Haas). She then has a base to from which to ‘play’ Volsky off against Petroff  (now free of Nadena who has witnessed his interest in Olga) and vice versa. The plot is thus nicely set up for a tragic conclusion.

Count Volsky with Olga on her wedding day

The poster above for the film, presumably created by United Artists presents Linda Darnell as a kind of Junior Jane Russell. In fact, Darnell was only a couple of years younger than Russell and I’m not sure if the notorious poster of Russell in The Outlaw was seen by many people before the re-release of that film in 1946. Nevertheless, I have used a slightly less salacious poster of Summer Storm but still Darnell seems to be positioned much like Russell with emphasis on her hair, bare shoulder and legs as she lolls against a straw bale. Darnell started very young in Hollywood and this was one of her first chances to play a character with some depth. She’s very good in the role. I’m sorry Anna Lee’s part is relatively small as I have enjoyed her performances for John Ford in films like Fort Apache (1948). The revelation for many reviewers and critics in the performances was Edward Everett Horton. Deliberately cast against type by Sirk, Horton excels in presenting the fading aristocrat – “a lousy figure” according to Sirk. But what pleased Sirk most was the casting of George Sanders as the first of Sirk’s ‘split’ characters in his American films, who don’t quite know what they want to do and will therefore vacillate.

Petroff in his role as magistrate comes to visit Olga with her husband Urbenin looking on

As in many of Sirk’s films, music is important and in this case Sanders gets to sing in Russian. I confess that I thought his singing voice was dubbed, but apparently as well as speaking Russian, Sanders had a fine baritone as well as the smooth upper-class English speaking voice. I note that IMDb called the film a ‘romantic melodrama’ and it did earn one Oscar nomination for Karl Hajos as music composer. Wikipedia’s entry on the original novel, whose structure Sirk didn’t alter, suggests that The Shooting Party was a significant development in the history of the crime story. I’m sure you can guess what the crime was and who was the criminal. The film also qualifies as a form of what Sirk saw as ‘social criticism’ during 1912 in the dying days of Imperial Russia. Summer Storm was a significant success in the US with box office of over $1.25 million at a time when Russians were American allies. It did no harm to the leading players and you would have thought it might mean that Sirk received more offers of work – yet his next project failed to move into production and it was over a year after the release of Summer Storm that he was able to start on A Scandal in Paris which was released in 1946. Here’s the trailer with a glimpse into the creation of Chekhov’s world.