Kino Lorber has released a Blu-ray of Douglas Sirk’s 1952 musical comedy, Has Anybody Seen My Gal, a rare departure from the master of 1950s melodrama.

Sirk, who began as a director in Germany in 1934, was forced to leave the country in 1937 when his first wife and mother of his only child denounced him and his soon-to-be second wife as being anti-Nazi. He and his second wife eventually found their way to the U.S. where his first film was the provocative 1943 classic, Hitler’s Madman. It wasn’t until the 1950s, however, that he would acquire his lasting reputation working for Universal.

Sirk’s third film for Universal, 1951’s Thunder on the Hill, also released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber, set the tone and style for the remainder of the decade. In it, Claudette Colbert gave one of her best performances as a nursing nun in a Catholic hospital who sets out to prove the innocence of convicted murderer Ann Blyth who is temporarily being housed at the hospital on her way to her execution. Gladys Cooper as the hospital’s Mother Superior and Connie Gilchrist as a nun assigned to the kitchen who helps solve the murder add invaluable support in Sirk’s first female centric film.

1952’s Has Anybody Seen My Gal came four films later for the busy director. Set in the 1920s, the film it most resembles is Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 classic, Meet Me in St. Louis, with rising stars Piper Laurie and Rock Huson more or less in the Judy Garland and Tom Drake roles from the earlier film. Fourth billed Gigi Perreau, who made her film debut as Margaret O’Brien’s baby sister in Madame Curie, gets the O’Brien role here.

Third billed Charles Coburn provides the film with its best performance as a reclusive millionaire without any family who decides to leave his fortune to the middleclass family of the now deceased woman who spurned him years ago. To test them, he masquerades as a border in their home, anonymously gifting them with $100,000 to determine how they would react to suddenly having money.

Extras on the Kino Lober release include commentary by Piper Laurie moderated by film critic and historian Lee Gambin. It also includes previously filmed interviews with Laurie and Perreau.

Three films later came 1953’s All I Desire set in 1910, the first of Sirk’s melodramas about reunited lovers, also available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. Barbara Stanwyck starred as an aging actress who returns to the family that she deserted ten years earlier to attend the performance of her daughter (Marcia Henderson) in a high school play. Richard Carlson plays the husband that she abandoned and the school’s principal. Maureen O’Sullivan is her daughter’s drama teacher and Carlson’s current love interest.

Two films after that, Sirk’s 1954 remake of Magnificent Obsession starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in the roles made famous by Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor in John M. Stahl’s 1935 version, proved just as big a hit for their successors, earning Wyman an Oscar nomination as the blind widow whose husband’s death is caused by callow Hudson who falls in love with her under an assumed name and vows to become a doctor to find a cure for her blindness. Both versions are available in a Blu-ray set from Criterion.

Three films later, Wyman and Hudson were reunited for Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows in which Wyman plays a widow who falls in love with her much younger gardener, played by Hudson. It became the prototype for many subsequent films, most notably Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1984 German classic Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Todd Haynes’ 2002 award-winning Far from Heaven with Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid. All That Heaven Allows and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul are available on Blu-ray from Criterion. Far from Heaven is available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

1956’s There’s Always Tomorrow, also available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, reunited Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray for the first time since Billy Wilder’s 1944 film noir masterpiece, Double Indemnity. This remake of a 1934 tearjerker starring Frank Morgan and Binnie Barnes is about a married man rekindling his relationship with a former flame. Joan Bennett played MacMurray’s neglected wife. Kino Lorber released it on Blu-ray. The original is unavailable.

That same year’s Written on the Wind, starring Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, and Dorothy Malone in a lurid melodrama involving Texas oil, earned Oscar nominations for Stack, Malone, and the film’s title song. Malone won, the only performance in a Sirk film ever to be so honored. It’s available on Blu-ray from Criterion.

1957’s Interlude was a remake of John M. Stahl’s 1939 film, When Tomorrow Comes, with June Allyson and Rossano Brazzi starring in a rather tepid remake of the classic romance starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer made the same year as their more famous romantic classic, Leo McCarey’s Love Affair, which was also remade albeit more successfully in 1957 by McCarey as An Affair to Remember. Interlude is available as a Spanish import on standard DVD. When Tomorrow Comes is available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. Love Affair is available on Blu-ray from Criterion. An Affair to Remember is available on Blu-ray from 20th Century-Fox but is hard to find.

1957’s The Tarnished Angels reunited Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, and Dorothy Malone in a story of 1930s daredevil acrobats but despite good reviews was not a big success. It’s available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

1958’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die was one of Sirk’s best films. It is also sadly one of his most neglected. Available only on non-U.S. format Blu-rays and standard DVDs, it has shamefully never been released on home video in the U.S. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Sound, it was from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque and was to World War II what his All Quiet on the Western Front was to World War I. John Gavin and Lilo Pulver were the stars.

Sirk’s most successful film was his last before returning to Germany. 1959’s ultimate tearjerker, Imitation of Life, a remake of John M. Stahl’s 1934 first film version of the Fannie Hurst novel, featured Lana Turner and Oscar nominees Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner in the roles originated by Claudette Colbert, Lousie Beavers, and Fredi Washington. Both films are available on the same disc from Universal. The more celebrated original is also available on Blu-ray from Criterion.

Happy viewing.