Written on the Wind | | Cast : | Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall | | Director : | Douglas Sirk | | Studio : | Criterion Collection | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen | | Released Date : | December , 1956 | | DVD Released Date : | June 19, 2001 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | NR (Not Rated) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | January 23, 2005 | | Summary | Pure camp, with a capital C | Content
 | This turgid potboiler is among the best...and of course the best are done by Douglas Sirk. The movie really belongs to Dorothy Malone, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Marylee Hadley, the over-tanned, over-bleached, boozy, slutty daughter of an oil tycoon. Marylee's in love with her brother Kyle's best friend, Mitch (Rock Hudson), and will try practically anything to trap him. Mitch is in love with Lucy (Lauren Bacall). Lucy is married to Kyle (Robert Stack), but is in love with Mitch. Marylee is insanely jealous that Mitch doesn't want her. Kyle wants children, but there seems to be a problem - Kyle is sterile...or so he thinks. Everyone's always dressed to the nines and they all drink and drive all the time. The actresses all wear gorgeous 50s couture, and look fabulous - even if their 50s eyebrows are twice the size of the mens. Meanwhile, the viperous Marylee is telling the drunken Kyle to keep an eye on his wife and Mitch. "You're a filthy liar," he says, to which she replies, "I'm filth. Period." And she's right. As she performing a very tawdry mambo in her room, she is peeling out of her evening gown and into a flame-colored peignoir, kicking up her heels and caressing herself...while on the stairs outside her room, her father is dying of a heart attack. When it is revealed that Lucy is pregnant, Kyle presumes it's Mitch's and beats Lucy to a pulp, causing her to miscarry. Kyle lurches off in a sodden, violent haze, returning later to kill Mitch. Marylee shows up, and there is a struggle for the gun. Kyle is fatally wounded. Marylee threatens to pin the death on Mitch unless he agrees to marry her. But on the witness stand, she recants, and the death is ruled accidental. Mitch and Lucy depart to happier, greener pastures, and we end with a shot of Marylee, now the queen of Hadley Oil, in her butchest Eve Arden lady-boss suit, as she almost-lasciviously strokes and caresses a miniature oil derrick beneath a portrait of her father. Pure camp, with a capital C. |
| Rating | | | Date | January 06, 2005 | | Summary | Feuilles mortes | Content
| 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!
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| Rating | | | Date | October 17, 2004 | | Summary | I Am Shocked By the Other Reviews | Content
| This is one of the most clever, metaphorical, and stunning movies ever made. I have not seen many other films that are this flawless. Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, and Lauren Bacall are all perfectly cast - Robert Stack in particular is very effective (and believable) as this spoiled son of a texas oil hancho who turns to alcohol for his failed personal relationships (impotence). If you are a fan of Fassbinder, Almodovar, or John Waters you know just how inspirational Douglas Sirk's film is - truly a masterpiece. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 19, 2004 | | Summary | MOURNING BECOMES MALONE...... | Content
| Sure does, she never looked better in them black courthouse duds ..... perfect control, perfect character modulation ....quite an acting lesson! SAME goes for the riveting performance of ROBERT STACK ....not sure what gives here - there are SO MANY MANY interpretations since then ... sterile? homophobic? alcoholic? Impotent? ... this one says it all and very NOM worthy for the stunning Mr. Stack [very hunkworthy - those bedroom scenes with Bacall]. As a matter of fact - all the leads, HUDSON, BACALL, STACK AND MALONE, provide great eye-candy. A pristine version of the DOUG SIRK stunner by Criterion. Photography. Costumes, Art Direction as well as the score - all superlative! To go on would be pointless - considering the censorship during this era ... this one still shines. Nice cameo by GRANT WILLIAMS as the pump jockey ogled by Malone .... if you like your drama slightly OEDIPAL give or take a smattering of O'Neill ... grab an eyeful here. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 12, 2004 | | Summary | A soap opera on the big screen | Content
| This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film. This movie was groundbreaking in several ways. It can be descibed best as a soap opera. It is the story of a family and their relationship with friend of one of the family members. A man falls in love with the sister of his best friend. Later both of them fall in love with a different woman who they fight over. She later marries one of them but when she becomes pregnant, the husband, believing himself to be sterile, accuses his friend of being the father. The film deals with subjects rarely (if ever) mentioned in movies of the time and sparked controversey as a result. The DVD has theatrical trailers for both this film and the film "All That Heaven Allows" which was also directed by Douglas Sirk and released by Criterion as well. There is also a huge presentation and slideshow of many of Douglas Sirk's other films. |
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