Any time a film scholar tries to steer a Sirk conversation into dry academicism, remind them that, in Written on the Wind, a character rhumbas her father to death.

In countless ways visible and invisible, Sirk's sly subversion skewed American popular culture, and helped launch a new age of irony.

Sirk's natural inclination is to focus more on what is not being said than what is.

And this, indeed, is what Sirk did in the boldest, most outrageously stylized moments of his chart-topping commercial successes of the 1950s: how transparent can I make thwarted passion and never condescend as a European intellectual to American life?