“‘Film is like a battleground’, Sam Fuller, who once wrote a script for Douglas Sirk, said in a film by Jean-Luc Godard, who, shortly before he made A Bout de Souffle, wrote a rhapsody on Douglas Sirk’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die. But not one of us, Godard or Fuller or me or anybody else, can touch Douglas Sirk.”
Rainer Werner Fassbinder1
Jon Halliday: Lured is alleged to be a remake of Siodmak’s Pièges: is that right?
Douglas Sirk: Well, I don't think I ever saw that. Rosten had a treatment on an old script, which was set in Paris, and so I suppose this was the Siodmak. [...]
You know it came out in England called Personal Column?
Indeed I do. They changed the title during the run in America as well. Lured was a great title, it has a sound to it. The picture had been doing very well, and the change ruined the run. Personal Column sounds like Hedda Hopper (Hollywood gossip columnist) to me. Stromberg wanted something ‘more dignified’.2
- 1Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “Six Films by Douglas Sirk,” New Left Review I, nr.91 (1975).
- 2Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk: Conversations with Jon Halliday. (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 84-85.