Written on the Wind - Criterion Collection
by Douglas Sirk
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Dorothy Malone, Lauren Bacall, Robert Keith, Robert Stack, Rock HudsonDirector: Douglas Sirk
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Russell Metty
Editor: Russell F. Schoengarth
Producer: Albert Zugsmith
Writer: George Zuckerman
Writer: Robert Wilder
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 99 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-06-19
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of Written on the Wind - Criterion Collection
Movie Review: More Than Melodrama
Summary: 5 Stars
Other reviewers seem to heap back-handed praise on "Written on the Wind" by describing it as melodrama or soap opera. For sure, director Douglas Sirk had a flair for glitz but I found something a little Shakespearean about this account of a doomed industrialist family. Sirk cleverly telegraphs the events that will doom playboy Kyle Hadley(Robert Stack). The film begins we view Hadley as a spoiled rich brat. As the film progresses it's revealed that Hadley is a man trapped by his own demons and neuroses that aren't really spelled out considering the time the film was made, 1956. That's probably all for the better because it's more compelling to allow the audience to draw their own conclusions. Hadley reaches out to his trouble-shooter played by Rock Hudson and his wife(Lauren Bacall) but despite their best efforts they cannot penetrate Hadley's veneer. Stack delivers probably the best work of his career that will dispell any notions of the monotone Eliot Ness and he is abetted by an alluring Dorothy Malone as Hadley's temptress sister. This may be director Douglas Sirk's most ambitious and best film. Essential is an understatement.
Summary of Written on the Wind - Criterion Collection
Bathed in lurid Technicolor, melodrama maestro Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind is the stylishly debauched tale of a Texas oil magnate brought down by the excesses of his spoiled offspring. Features an all-star quartet that includes Robert Stack as a pistol-packin' alcoholic playboy; Lauren Bacall as his long-suffering wife; Rock Hudson as his earthy best friend; and Dorothy Malone (who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar? for her performance) as his nymphomaniac sister.Douglas Sirk puts the opera back into soap opera in this exquisitely baroque melodrama, the epitome of Technicolor gloss. Rock Hudson (as wonderfully wooden as ever) and Lauren Bacall play stalwart examples of altruism, clean living, and good old American ambition, but Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone steal the film as white trash millionaire siblings stewing in self-pity. The plot reads like an episode of Dallas: Texas oil-baron playboy Stack steals good girl Bacall from best friend Hudson while Stack's sister Malone puts her slinky moves on Hudson, the strapping poor boy made good. Toss in impotence, jealousy, alcoholic binges, emotional blackmail, and backstabbing nastiness, mix vigorously with high style and expressionist flourishes, and you've got the most potent melodrama cocktail of the 1950s. Stack twists his arch delivery into the practiced bravado of a boozing womanizer nursing an inferiority complex while Malone sashays and flirts her way through an Oscar-winning performance as a slutty, sassy good-time girl. It's so over the top that it might seem kitschy at first glance, but former theater director Sirk subtly shades his vision in the shadows of film noir and uses the portentous angles and gaudy color to create a vivid, vivacious world of glossy surfaces and social masks cracking under the pressure of responsibility and the pain of lost love. --Sean Axmaker
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