With top stars and a lush production, Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind, a sudsy tale of a Texas oil family teetering on the brink of emotional apocalypse, has few equals.
The Production: 4/5
Emotions run from hot to boiling to volcanic in Douglas Sirk’s monumental 1950’s melodrama Written on the Wind. With top stars and a lush production, this sudsy tale of a Texas oil family teetering on the brink of emotional apocalypse has few equals, and its unrepentant overload of lascivious passions and unbridled reactions plays just as enjoyably over-the-top today as it must have done over sixty-five years ago.
Oil heir Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) is on a lifelong drunken tear watched over by his boyhood best friend Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), now a geologist with father Jasper Hadley’s (Robert Keith) oil firm. But Kyle is stopped in his tracks when he meets and falls instantly in love with his firm’s advertising executive assistant Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), and once she realizes that she can distract Kyle from his destructive urges while learning to love him in the process, they marry. Mitch falls hard for Lucy, too, keeping it to himself while fending off the nymphomanical advances of Kyle’s sister Marylee (Dorothy Malone) who has been obsessed with him since childhood. For a year, Lucy keeps Kyle on the straight and narrow, but when he gets some disturbing news from the town doctor (Edward Platt) about his likely inability to father children, all of Lucy’s hard work toward Kyle’s rehabilitation begins to deteriorate.
George Zuckerman’s screenplay taken from the book by Robert Wilder starts us off with the end of a drunken bender followed by a gunshot and a dropping body. Then, the calendar pages whisk us back a year to see the entire Hadley/Moore/Wayne triangle unfold step-by-step. Along the way, we’re treated to a Palm Beach hotel suite crammed with flowers, gowns, and furs and a Texas oil millionaire’s mansion where the histrionics will inevitably play out. The town of Hadley, Texas, indulges the Hadley siblings: drunken Kyle and slutty Marylee, the former who climbs on and then falls off the wagon and the latter who’s willing to go all the way with the best-looking lugs she can find on any given night. Douglas Sirk in his usual florid directorial style with his melodramas indulges in the emotional excesses of the story and its characters filming several fistfights and later a particularly provocative orgiastic dance by Dorothy Malone’s Marylee which crosscuts with her father’s pained reaction to his children’s maleficences and its resultant heart attack. There’s not an ounce of fat on the narrative, but the saga’s only misstep occurs during the climactic inquest which features a particular character’s startling about-face which doesn’t ring quite true.
As he performed in all of his Douglas Sirk melodramas, Rock Hudson is well named, the solid rock of reliability and sober judgment amid a sea of emotional turmoil holding in his amorous emotions until they’re fairly bursting to be set free. Lauren Bacall likewise plays the loyal and loving wife who gets swept up into the turbulence of the unruly waters surrounding her trying vainly to keep her marriage afloat. But the two Hadley children get the juiciest parts (and caught the Academy’s attention in the process): Robert Stack as the fabulously wealthy, handsome, but dissolute Kyle earned an Oscar nomination for his brilliant performance as the tortured heir-apparent and Dorothy Malone took home the award as the free-wheeling, sex-starved Marylee in her skintight clothes and with her bedroom eyes beckoning every man within eyeshot to pay her attention. Robert Keith is the loving father who never stops hoping for his children’s happiness, and Harry Shannon is also solid as Mitch’s humble father whom he occasionally consults for advice. In smaller roles, Grant Williams as a gas station attendant gets to have a brief fling with the provocative Marylee while Edward Platt as the doctor and Robert J. Wilke as a roadhouse bartender also make notable appearances. Yes, those are Roy Glenn and Maidie Norman as Hadley servants, William Schallert as an eager reporter, and tiny Kevin Corcoran (Moochie himself) on a mechanical horse after Kyle gets the bad news about his little swimmers.
Video: 5/5
3D Rating: NA
The film’s original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 is faithfully rendered in this 1080p transfer using the AVC codec. Universal has struck a new 2K transfer from the original camera negative resulting in a pristine image with the garish (but always controlled) hues typical of several of Douglas Sirk’s lurid 1950’s melodramas. Contrast which offers bright splashes of color and also deep shadows aids greatly in producing this most appealing picture quality. The movie has been divided into 29 chapters.
Audio: 5/5
The LPCM 1.0 (1.1 Mbps) sound mix is typical of its era. Dialogue has been wonderfully recorded and has been mixed quite professionally into a single track with Frank Skinner’s lush background score (and with the Oscar-nominated title tune by Victor Young and Sammy Cahn) and the various sound effects. There are no instances of hiss, crackle, pops, or flutter to distract the listener.
Special Features: 3.5/5
Acting for Douglas Sirk (23:23, HD): a 2008 documentary featuring director Allison Anders and vintage interviews with Dorothy Malone, Robert Stack, Rock Hudson, producer Alfred Zugsmith, and director Douglas Sirk discussing the films Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels.
Video Analysis (20:40, HD): film scholar Patricia White offers an analysis of the movie and its place among Douglas Sirk’s other melodramas.
Theatrical Trailer (2:47, SD)
Enclosed Pamphlet: offers a movie poster on one side and on the other information about the cast and crew, facts about the audio and video transfer, and a lengthy essay on the movie by film artist Blair McClendon.
Overall: 4/5
Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind is the quintessential 1950’s melodrama with big stars, big emotions, and an overriding sense of doom that hangs over its pulsating narrative. The new Criterion Blu-ray release is unquestionably the finest the film has ever looked on home video and comes with a hearty recommendation.
Written on the Wind (The Criterion Collection) [Bl…
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Matt has been reviewing films and television professionally since 1974 and has been a member of Home Theater Forum’s reviewing staff since 2007, his reviews now numbering close to three thousand. During those years, he has also been a junior and senior high school English teacher earning numerous entries into Who’s Who Among America’s Educators and spent many years treading the community theater boards as an actor in everything from Agatha Christie mysteries to Stephen Sondheim musicals.
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