Focus Features

Douglas Sirk is best known for the melodramas of ordinary suburban life which he made in the 1950s – movies such as Magnificent Obsession, All that Heaven Allows (which inspired Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven), Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life. Less characteristic, but equally emotionally forceful, was his World War II film, A Time to Love and a Time to Die.

Sirk has this to say about the film:

"Now this is a picture I want to say a few things about, because it raises rather a lot of issues. I think this is one of the pictures where I nearly succeeded in building a certain kind of film – an off-beat love story, the same thing I more or less succeeded doing with The Tarnished Angels. But first let me say something about the title. The title in a picture is like a prologue in a drama. Shakespeare was a great titles man, and I mind about them a lot. Titles are like signs in front of movies, or they should be: a passing in-between thing, not the drama itself. It almost tells the story before you start.

A Time to Love and a Time to Die is a good title because of the juxtaposition of “love” and “die”. What was interesting to me was the love affair between the soldier and the girl. I first wanted it to be called The Lovers, which the studio rejected, so I went back to the title of novel on which the film was based, Erich Maria Remarque's A Time to Live and a Time to Die (as it was in German) – a title we slightly changed for the non-German distribution into A Time to Love and a Time to Die. I was so insistent on this, for I felt it had to be a love story, mainly. The denunciation of Nazidom would have to take second place to the love story. You see, this picture was made in 1957. Hitler's empire of a thousand years was history. Furthermore, I thought “die” balanced “love” very well. And going back to my idea of a title being a kind of prologue, it announces the theme of the picture. The terrible incongruity of killing and young love. I was enchanted to see that in Cahiers du Cinema that Godard did get the point, and made the title almost the base for his excellent and unusual review ("I have never believed in Germany at war so much as watching this American film made in time of peace" Godard, Cahiers du Cinema, April 1959).

I put a lot of myself into the love part of the picture. It is a story very close to my concerns, especially the brevity of happiness. I am not as pessimistic as I may sometimes appear. I do believe in happiness...happiness must be there, because it can be destroyed. Besides, a flawless happiness would be like a badly written poem...I think if a “happy end” had been put on to A Time to Love and a Time to Die, you would not have had this impression of painful tenderness shared by the two lovers in their rare moments of happiness. Only things which are doomed can be so painfully tender. Things which last may have a certain beauty in themselves, but they do not have this strange power which only appears at certain moments, like for example, in the scene where the two lovers realize it is their duty to be happy since the world around them is collapsing: at this moment they have to enjoy their happiness to the maximum, they must get intoxicated on it...True happiness never lasts.

I hope the desperation comes across. And the war part. Because there is some good war stuff there, I felt, not the usual phony Hollywood stuff. And you never see the enemy, which I like."

Extract from Sirk on Sirk: Conversations with Jon Halliday by Jon Halliday (Faber & Faber, 1997)

Douglas Sirk is best known for the melodramas of ordinary suburban life which he made in the 1950s – movies such as Magnificent Obsession, All that Heaven Allows (which inspired Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven), Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life. Less characteristic, but equally emotionally forceful, was his World War II film, A Time to Love and a Time to Die.

Sirk has this to say about the film:

"Now this is a picture I want to say a few things about, because it raises rather a lot of issues. I think this is one of the pictures where I nearly succeeded in building a certain kind of film – an off-beat love story, the same thing I more or less succeeded doing with The Tarnished Angels. But first let me say something about the title. The title in a picture is like a prologue in a drama. Shakespeare was a great titles man, and I mind about them a lot. Titles are like signs in front of movies, or they should be: a passing in-between thing, not the drama itself. It almost tells the story before you start.

A Time to Love and a Time to Die is a good title because of the juxtaposition of “love” and “die”. What was interesting to me was the love affair between the soldier and the girl. I first wanted it to be called The Lovers, which the studio rejected, so I went back to the title of novel on which the film was based, Erich Maria Remarque's A Time to Live and a Time to Die (as it was in German) – a title we slightly changed for the non-German distribution into A Time to Love and a Time to Die. I was so insistent on this, for I felt it had to be a love story, mainly. The denunciation of Nazidom would have to take second place to the love story. You see, this picture was made in 1957. Hitler's empire of a thousand years was history. Furthermore, I thought “die” balanced “love” very well. And going back to my idea of a title being a kind of prologue, it announces the theme of the picture. The terrible incongruity of killing and young love. I was enchanted to see that in Cahiers du Cinema that Godard did get the point, and made the title almost the base for his excellent and unusual review ("I have never believed in Germany at war so much as watching this American film made in time of peace" Godard, Cahiers du Cinema, April 1959).

I put a lot of myself into the love part of the picture. It is a story very close to my concerns, especially the brevity of happiness. I am not as pessimistic as I may sometimes appear. I do believe in happiness...happiness must be there, because it can be destroyed. Besides, a flawless happiness would be like a badly written poem...I think if a “happy end” had been put on to A Time to Love and a Time to Die, you would not have had this impression of painful tenderness shared by the two lovers in their rare moments of happiness. Only things which are doomed can be so painfully tender. Things which last may have a certain beauty in themselves, but they do not have this strange power which only appears at certain moments, like for example, in the scene where the two lovers realize it is their duty to be happy since the world around them is collapsing: at this moment they have to enjoy their happiness to the maximum, they must get intoxicated on it...True happiness never lasts.

I hope the desperation comes across. And the war part. Because there is some good war stuff there, I felt, not the usual phony Hollywood stuff. And you never see the enemy, which I like."

Extract from Sirk on Sirk: Conversations with Jon Halliday by Jon Halliday (Faber & Faber, 1997)