Kritiken

This film is, as James Harvey once said in FILM COMMENT, "quite marvelous," even with Colbert's miscasting. And running throughout is that 1940s theme, which Sirk amplified, of a woman finding her true self under the lies she's been accepting for years. "That doesn't sound like my girl," Ameche coos to Brooks as they set their final plot in motion. "Your girl is a lot of girls," Brooks snaps. The bad dames are always wised up; it's the good ones who have to come out from hypnosis.

Neither Colbert's character nor the film are as heartbreakingly poignant as Barbara Stanwyck's in later Sirk masterpiece There's Always Tomorrow, but he's already very much the sensitive poet of repression with a natural mastery for emotional mise-en-scène and cinematography... The average thriller template is made excellent by clever supporting turns and Sirk's unmistakable stamp.

Sirk's symbols are svelte and acrid: a cup of drugged chocolate for the heroine (Rosemary's Baby), a swiveling POV on the gothic staircase, neon arrows and champagne at a seedy roadhouse (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)... Robert Cummings as the pushy suitor clinches the Hitchcockian line of thought, the climax is a necessary rupture, la sonnambula wide awake at last.

Alison's ancestral home becomes an abattoir of murdered gusts of wind and twisting fabrics, a terrible house that, malevolent and animate, seems to come to Alison's defense against her, and its invaders. SLEEP MY LOVE ultimately resolves, unsatisfyingly, its somnambulant spatial poetics, but the power of its rare breakthrough moments cannot so easily be snuffed out.

...Alison's essentially a damsel in distress who's largely forgotten due to a tendency, which is still in vogue, to allow the fellas in a movie to get all the best scenes and all the best lines. Thankfully, one can see Sirk's artistry in the images he fashioned with cinematographer Joseph A. Valentine, which often powerfully evoke social hypocrisy in a fashion that would reach full bloom in later films such as Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life.