Written on the Wind (The 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 (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, 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 (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: Feuilles mortes
Summary: 5 Stars
Presented here in an excellent DVD from Criterion, Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind may well have been primarily aimed at cashing in on the huge success of Warners' blockbuster Giant, directed by George Stevens. Both films deal with the doings of Texas millionaires; not so coincidentally, both films star Rock Hudson. But Giant has dated badly, and its epic pretensions seem woefully bloated today. It's forgivable to have made a Classic Comics adaptation of War and Peace as King Vidor did, but far less pardonable to have adapted an Edna Ferber potboiler as it were War and Peace. By contrast, Sirk's lurid melodrama remains a highly entertaining, if at times overwrought vehicle. Certainly Universal-International and Sirk made no bones about catering to the audience's fantasies in depicting the lifestyles of the rich and famous. But in a country where the difference between movie audiences and the rich and famous has often been only one of money, Written on the Wind by no means lacks a basis in reality. The movie's action effectively dramatizes the daydreams many people would act out if they suddenly had the wealth of the Hadley family in this film.
Based on a novel by Robert Wilder, Written on the Wind reprises a plot motif that had appeared before in Vincente Minelli's Undercurrent and Max Ophul's Caught, recounting the fate of a young woman who unwarily marries an unbalanced wealthy man probably modeled upon Howard Hughes. Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack), an alcoholic playboy given to sleeping with a pistol under his pillow, is the heir to an oil fortune who weds Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall) and takes her back to the family homestead with the intent of continuing the Hadley dynasty. But apparent sterility frustrates his hopes, and when Lucy becomes pregnant, he accuses her of having an affair with his best friend, Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), a suspicion encouraged by Kyle's venomous, scheming sister, Marylee (Dorothy Malone), who spends her spare time sleeping with the town studs.
Freudian family sagas were quite in vogue in 1956, both in stage productions like Tennessee William's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and in films such as Elia Kazan's adaptation of John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Kyle is recognizably a tortured soul in the vein of James Dean's Cal in East of Eden, but the screenplay lacks what a follower of New Criticism would have called an objective correlative. Written on the Wind offers little plausible explanation for its hero's self-destructive behavior. While Kyle's father reproaches himself for having failed to live up to his paternal responsibilities, he hardly seems to have done anything to justify the curse that has descended on his household.
Less naïve contemporary viewers-a fortiori viewers today--might well have suspected other problems lurking behind the false front of Kyle's sterility: both an incestuous attraction to his sister and an unacknowledged homosexual attachment to the more virile and successful Mitch. But nothing of that kind could have gotten past the PCA. When Richard Brooks made his execrable version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he replaced Brick's longing for his dead buddy, the cause of his estrangement from his wife, with straightforward-and sexually straight-adultery between Maggie and Skipper. So Written on the Wind falls back on the stock clichés of the genre, making its enfants terribles into a pair of spoiled rich kids. Nonetheless, Sirk gets away with an outrageously symbolic shot when the film ends with Marylee caressing a phallic-looking replica of an oil well as her substitute for the hunky Mitch, who has eluded her grasp.
Where Brooks changed a serious play into despicable schlock, Sirk was able to inject some class into this febrile soap opera, although with rather odd results. The director's fundamental commitment to aestheticism, a constant of his career, enabled him to treat such an unpromising subject with a remarkable degree of artistic objectivity. In the words of Andrew Sarris, "The essence of Sirkian cinema is the confrontation of all material, however fanciful and improbable." However, Sirks's calculated tastefulness in composing shots, which leaves no detail to chance, clashes with the almost stupefying tastelessness of settings that resemble garish color ads for home interiors or fancy resorts, and unfold before the spectator's eyes a veritable saturnalia of fetishism-commodity and otherwise.
Looking at Written on the Wind almost fifty years later offers something of the voyeuristic pleasure of studying life in the dreary Eisenhower years through a telephoto lens-just as did the protagonist of Hitchcock's Rear Window. At the same time, Russell Metty's color cinematography so strongly accentuates the flamboyant mise en scene that after a while the film begins to take on an oneiric quality-upper middle-class culture as a collective hallucination. But Written on the Wind is no 1960s acid trip like Easy Rider or Performance, and Sirk inscribes his signature indelibly on every image in the film. It is no small tribute to the director's formidable skill as a stylist that in the opening shots he brilliantly establishes the tone of the entire movie that is to follow in what might seem a marginal flourish: the dead leaves that swirl around Kyle and even follow him into the family mansion when he arrives for the confrontation with Mitch and Marylee that will culminate in his death. No harbinger of spring these, the leaves thematically conjoin the mortality of the character, the mortality of an artistic style, and the mortality of the studio system itself in a single breathtaking gesture. At one point, Kyle offers a toast to "The truth, which is anything but beautiful." What better epigraph could Sirk have chosen for this movie!
Summary of Written on the Wind (The 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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