Written on the Wind
I haven’t rushed out to see all the stylized melodramas of Douglas Sirk; in fact, this is the only one I’ve seen, and thanks to TCM and a slow night at work I have now seen it twice. I’m more motivated now to seek out “Magnificent Obsession,” “All that Heaven Allows,” “Imitation of Life” and others, but by reptutation, none of Sirk’s movies is as much lurid fun as this one.
Released in 1956, “Written on the Wind” is melodrama writ large, set amid the phallic oil derricks of Texas, although it was shot mostly on sets and backlots. It’s essentially a love quadrangle involving Robert Stack as a drunken oil heir, Rock Hudson as his forthright, upwardly mobile right-hand man, Lauren Bacall as Stack’s principled wife and Dorothy Malone, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, as Stack’s downright demonic sister.
The pleasures of this movie come from how far Sirk pushes the heightened behavior and the care he throws into every frame. Sirk luxuriates in Technicolor splendor as he simultaneously fetishizes and satirizes his characters’ opulent surroundings. Highlighting the artifice of the filmmaking process allows Sirk to find the bleak truth in a silly soap opera — a truth about dissolute, intellectually passive lives. We get rear projection, obvious painted backdrops and a wall-to-wall score that supplies a joyous surfeit of emotion (Malone gets her own rumbling, evil theme). Hudson and Bacall act with stoic restraint, while Stack and Malone blast away; all the performances are precisely pitched. Intentionally overwrought as he was, Sirk respects everyone’s humanity, including the African-American servants who might as well be invisible to the wealthy principal characters. “Written on the Wind” can be enyjoyed simultaneously as outré trash and as subversive, aesthetically daring cinema.