Customer Reviews

Written on the Wind [VHS]

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4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall star and Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone support in this quintessential 1950s Technicolor melodrama by the Master, imported German director Douglas Sirk. The plot involves a wealthy oil heir (Stack), the secretary (Bacall) loved by both him and his best friend (Hudson) and a bad-girl sister (Malone, in an Oscar-winning role). But neither the story nor the acting are really very good. What makes this film interesting to watch is the cinematography under Sirk's inspired direction, complete with twisted angles, and the symbolic use of color, mise-en-scene, and mirrors. Edward Platt, "Chief" from TV's "Get Smart" also appears as a doctor. The DVD extras are slight for a Criterion Collection, no featurette or commentary track. There is only a lengthy text discussion that allows you to scroll through descriptions and sometimes stills from all of Sirk's films. This text discussion is well-written and well-researched but will take you a long time to scroll through, and the often redundant images of production stills and lobby cards will make you frustrated. All in all, this DVD is worth watching, though I doubt you would want to view it over and over.

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.

This is director Douglas Sirk's masterpiece, a brilliant work of cinema that functions as both a fiery melodrama and a piece of cool, detached irony. It all depends on how much subtext you want to read into this story of an impotent, alcoholic Texas oil baron and his middle-class nemesis. Although Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall are little more than vacant statues filling up cinematic space, Dorothy Malone and Robert Stack more than compensate with rich, over-the-top performances that leave you shaking your head in disbelief. That Sirk could get away with this sort of storytelling audacity within the rigid confines of 1950s Hollywood says much about his skill as an artist, just as it does about his desire to bend film genres to the breaking point. He never quite gets there, though, which is what makes his films so fascinating and multi-layered. This is a flick for both film buffs and casual moviegoers. Not to be missed.

Who is/was Douglas Sirk? That's the question I asked when I saw that my favorite dvd production company was releasing this film. Danish born, German raised and transplanted to Hollywood in the late '30s, Sirk was an enormously literate and well-educated man of the theater who knew how to conjure up film magic from what on paper seemed like pretty trashy, unpromising material. 'Written on the Wind' is acknowledged as one of his best, and the story is pure over-the-top nonsense. A lesser director would have made a complete hash of this, but Sirk is a visual virtuoso, and he coaxes great performances from his actors. I was REALLY taken by this film; not only does it look fantastic in this Criterion release, but also because like all worthwhile stuff there are some piercing, not altogether pleasant truths lurking amongst the melodrama. Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone are wildly good, and Sirk's worldly eye cuts right through to some real malaise among those folk who supposedly have it all. A film I would probably not seen but for Criterion's relentless pursuit of lesser-known cinematic gems. The extras on this disc are enjoyable, and they put me onto the excellent book 'Sirk on Sirk', (out of print but purchased through Amazon's ZShops at a great price).

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.

Sirk, at his best. Melodrama, at its best. Acting, over the top. Music, awesome. Thanks for bringing Sirk type melodramas back, Hollywood. Liked "Far from Heaven" too. For those who liked watching Robert Stack each week in "Unsolved Mysteries" and remember "The Untouchables" its a must see. But good story, twisted, dyfunctional, and entertaining. Malone is magnificent as the nympho who lusts for Hudson. No luck there, but Dorothy does steal the show and the oscar that year for best supporting actress. Bacall is her polished best and Hudson's his stoic best. Good cinematography. > especially in DVD. More revivals of the genre most appreciated.

Douglas Sirk, the director of Written On the Wind, was the master of melodrama (Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession) and this may well be his masterpiece. Based on a novel by Robert Wilder, which in turn was based on the sensational marriage of the R.J. Reynolds heir and torch singer Libby Holman, and his subsequent murder, the picture is set in a small Texas town dominated by the Hadleys who own the oil thereabouts.

This incredibly disfunctional family consists of the greiving widower father, his alcoholic son and nymphomaniacal daughter, a more or less adopted good guy whose father gave him over to the Hadley's so he would have a better start in life, and the new bride of Hadley's son, a clever advertising woman from New York.

The resulting stew of misunderstandings, illicit lust, impotence, misplaced desire, murder and generational conflict is played out in the most gorgeous, theatrical technicolor ever seen. I've always thought that Written on the Wind was the first of a new category that could be called "film noir et coleur". The lighting, color and cinematography create an atmosphere that makes the lurid melodrama not only work, but assume the stature of classic tragedy.

Hudson and Bacall are very good, but Stack and Malone are breathtaking in their audacity and unmitigated glee in bringing these over-the-top characters to life. Sample from one of the unforgettable scenes between the brother and sister: Brother: "Wasn't that Lucy and Mitch? Where were they going"? Sister: "I don't know. Where would you take your best friend's wife"?

The movie has something to say about family relationships, American futility, the need to escape, and the artificiality of our culture. Luckily, it makes its point in a unique, campy, overblown way that is simultaneously comforting and unnerving. You can laugh with this movie, but you can't laugh AT it. I'm eagerly awaiting the Criterion DVD!

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.

This is Douglas Sirk's masterpiece. To explain it to you would be to rob you of the joy of seeing it for the first time.
It should be noted that Sirk's use of camera angles, shadows, colors, and violent emotional underpinnings are the best ever used by a film maker. Ever.
See it for Dorothy Malone ("I'm going to have some of my towels sent over to you, honey. You're still a little wet behind the ears."). She deserved the Oscar for her performance.
See it for the most over-the-top performance by a male in screen history (a very rare thing, indeed): Robert Stack as Kyle Hadley.
See it because it is a brilliant film, with a brilliant score, by a brilliant director. It has more impact in the first three minutes than "Giant" had in the three hours IT ran!
Douglas Sirk was a genius, and this film is painted in his genius.
Just see the film.

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!