
The Melbourne Cinémathèque & ACMI present
The Courage to Take Things Seriously: John M. Stahl’s Unironic Melodramas
When
Wed 12 Dec - Wed 17 Dec 2025
See below for additional related events
One of cinema’s true pioneers, John M. Stahl (1886–1950) was once among the most highly regarded Hollywood directors – his contract with Louis B. Mayer was, at the time, considered as the future mogul’s most valuable contribution to the newly-merged MGM.
His 1913 directorial debut, A Boy and the Law, a five-reeler which predated both Griffith and Sennett’s first attempts at features, radically blurred the line between fiction and documentary at a time when that line had barely even been drawn. The Woman Under Oath (1919), depicting a lone female juror holding out against her 11 male colleagues – when women could not even legally serve on New York juries – typifies Stahl’s career-long commitment to what was often patronisingly derided as “the woman’s perspective”.
Born Jacob Morris Strelitsky in Baku, Azerbaijan, to Polish-Jewish parents who emigrated to New York in 1893, Stahl spent his formative years as an actor, a grounding which was to inform his exacting directorial approach. Rather than prioritising the merely visual elements, or focusing purely on narrative requirements, Stahl’s process was one of searching for the emotional truth of a scene, necessitating painstaking preparation, endless retakes and exorbitant shooting ratios.
His leisurely output, by classical Hollywood standards, of just one film per year throughout his sound-era heyday at Universal and, later, at Fox, speaks to the investment Stahl would devote to each project. Studios tolerated his excesses because, unlike a Welles or Stroheim, Stahl’s box-office returns almost always justified the outlay. It is, perhaps, this consistent popularity – particularly with female audiences – that explains the coolness of some critics to Stahl’s oeuvre. His signature combination of improbable, outlandish plots with an unassuming, “objective” style – regularly utilising long takes and deep-focus staging – refuses both the cheap histrionics of identification and the emotional safety net of ironic detachment (something emphasised in the work of his great follower, Douglas Sirk). Stahl asks instead that his audience bear witness – with all of the moral imperative the phrase implies – requiring us to take a stance of radical empathy towards his characters: a position that now seems presciently modern.
This season features many of Stahl’s key films, including several that were memorably remade by Sirk in the 1950s – Imitation of Life (1934) and Magnificent Obsession (1935) – and his most widely acclaimed film today, the extraordinary Leave Her to Heaven (1945).
About Melbourne Cinémathèque
Australia's longest-running film society, Melbourne Cinémathèque screens significant works of international cinema in the medium they were created, the way they would have originally screened.
Melbourne Cinémathèque is self-administered, volunteer-run, not-for-profit and membership-driven.
