Written on the Wind - Criterion Collection

Starring:Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Robert Keith, Grant Williams, Robert J. Wilke, Edward Platt, Harry Shannon, John Larch, Joseph Granby, Roy Glenn, Maidie Norman, William Schallert, Joanne Jordan, Dani Crayne, Dorothy Porter, Jane Howard (II), Robert Lyden, Paul Bradley
Director: Douglas Sirk
Studio: Criterion
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

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

Description

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.

Customer Reviews:

Written on the Wind.......2007-06-27

Sirk's stirring melodrama about the meltdown of an oil-baron family is a high-strung potboiler mixing rage, impotence, money, sex, anxiety, and murder in one flaming concoction. Visually sumptuous and redolent with garish colors to match the Hadleys' bursting emotions, "Wind" boasts the fantastic talents of Hudson and Bacall as straight-arrow types in a hellish situation. The chiseled Stack is a mess of masculine anguish as hard-drinking Kyle, and Robert Keith is excellent as the Hadley patriarch, but Oscar winner Dorothy Malone takes the prize for her outlandishly catty, slutty turn as Marylee. "Wind" may not be subtle, but it's a whirlwind of (melo)dramatic delights.

Trashy "Classic" of American Cinema is Guilty Pleasure.......2007-06-01

If you enjoyed the television shows Dallas and Dynasty, this movie is right up your alley.
Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone are poisonous, dysfunctional siblings, in opulent surroundings, who are both spiraling to doom... and aren't above dragging innocent people with them for a ride.

When lives collide...When love is out of reach... When fate deals a bad hand... When leaves blow into your front hallway... When you're driving with the top down and your hairdo doesn't muss... When you marry someone on the first date... When your sister does an embarrassing cha-cha in her nightgown... When you loathe yourself so much that you throw a drink in the mirror...
The answers to these puzzles are written in Hollywood circa 1956.

Everything I Didn't Really Need to Know I Learned From "Written on the Wind":

1. Robert Stack's mumbling is fun to decipher. Did he just say "Let's have a drink", or "My chassis stinks"? Did he say "I'm in love with you" or "I want elephant food"?
I can forgive his fierce, intense glaring (just as scary as Dennis Hopper's was in "Blue Velvet"), which makes me wonder: is this the same calm guy who'd be hosting "Unsolved Mysteries" on TV?
2. The score seems to swell powerfully at times so loudly that I thought my television set and all my windows would shatter. Lauren Bacall gazes out a window wistfully and WHOOOSH, the orchestra plays a deafening crescendo. Rock Hudson runs out of milk for his coffee and HHWWWAAA, strings and brass surge.
3. Main characters don't need to be likeable at all. Robert Stack is a self destructive, self pitying boozehound with no good qualities. Dorothy Malone is a cartoon tramp who seems to be attending night school at the Joan Crawford Academy of Manliness. (And yet Stack was nominated for an Oscar, and Malone actually got one!) Lauren Bacall is deadly dull as the new bride trying to understand her pathetic hubby. Rock Hudson is twice as boring as Bacall. I kept hoping another character would take his pulse to make sure he was alive. "Are you in there, fella?"
4. Weird camera angles and billowing curtains are a nice touch in any mansion.
5. The housekeeper from "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" (Maidie Norman) makes a decent witness at a murder trial.
6. Director Douglas Sirk enjoys mirrors.

This film has been included on many "Best Movies" lists. It's good, but it's far from great. It's garish, trashy melodrama; a guilty pleasure.
If this is your cup of tea, I also recommend "The Best of Everything", another dose of colorful suds. This one's about secretaries and the amazing lives they lead in the big city. See the magnificent 55 year old Joan Crawford ask her newbie, "Where's my coffee?"
Fun, campy stuff.

Downward Spiral.......2007-04-08

"Written on the Wind" is entertaining, although a bit dated over 50 years later. Dorothy Malone won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her over-the-top portrayal of Marylee Hadley. She is dressed in orange which matches her brightly colored convertible and dances a wild mambo in an orange chiffon nightgown as her daddy dives down the stairs & dies. Robert Stack's only Oscar nomination came for the film, although he'd watch Anthony Quinn take home the award for "Lust for Life." Truthfully, Stack seems stiff, although he felt he was really into the part. There seems to be no chemistry between Stack & Bacall; so one wonders why she married him. Bacall was not nominated for an Oscar until the 1996 comedy "The Mirror Has Two Faces," where she played Barbra Streisand's mother. As Lucy Moore Hadley, she seems like an emotional iceberg, difficult to read, although she certainly is faithful to her husband, even during his drunken downward spiral. Rock Hudson was nominated for an Oscar for "Giant" this same year. As Mitch Wayne, he's the perfect boy next door: sensitive, intelligent, responsible and places his friendship with Stack's Kyle Hadley as an important priority. The two fathers in the film also turn in nice work. Robert Keith whose first film was in 1924 and who was in "Guys & Dolls" plays the head of the Hadley household with the two spoiled children. His scene where he blames himself for not being able to save their mother is sad. Harry Shannon who was in the 1941 Orson Wells' classic "Citizen Kane" plays Hudson's father Hoak Wayne. He cleans his rifle and listens understandingly to his son's problems. The song was also nominated for an Oscar. The film is a rather trashy melodrama in a sedate 1950s manner. While it seems a bit campy today, it's still interesting to watch these actors work in what was not their best vehicle, except maybe Malone whose performance was shockingly over-played. I was surprised she was recognized for this. But alas, it was the 50s. Enjoy!

Written On the Wind.......2007-03-09

Lived up to my expectations. Brought back memories of my early years, seeing wonderful movies, without all the modern violence and bad language.

Junk, Junk, Junk - And Not in a Good Way . . ........2007-01-21

At the time that Douglas Sirk's first big American film, SUMMER STORM (an adaptation of Chekov's "The Hunting Party") was released, James Agee reviewed it and noted that although the film was (and I'm probably paraphrasing here) "20 years ahead of its' time" visually, the overall film "reeked of drugstore fiction."

And as far as I'm concerned, that remains the best description of Sirk's work in films; the application of slick and sophisticated visuals to gloppy, often trashy scripts, indeed an interest in the visuals above anything else in the film, such as the script or the performers. Mind you, as a contract director at Universal, it was Sirk's job to direct the films he was given by the front office, but did the final product have to reek so completely of contempt and disinterest?

And reek this movie does. A more engaged director would have helped Dorothy Malone and Robert Stack, who were both good actors in other films, to ratchet down their performances as the no-good children of a wealthy Texas oil family. And he would have demanded that Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall give something that approximated performances as Stack's best friend and abused/neglected wife (since the movie treated anything of a sexual matter with the blithering hysteria typical of 50's movies, it never becomes clear if Stack's inability to father children is the result of a low sperm count or closeted homosexuality). Yes, the movie's photography (particularly in this carefully-restored print) is rich and shadowed, the costumes are always lavish (if not always attractive--couldn't Malone's character be trampy but tasteful?), and the studio orchestra's string section is working overtime. But the combination of cold, fussy style, trashy script, and bad performances make the final result alienating and unpleasant. In short, the sort of movie that made me switch of the Afternoon Movie when I was a kid. And I almost never switched off the Afternoon Movie when I was a kid . . .

DVD:

DVD

DVD

DVD

Paths of Glory/A Bridge Too Far

Orca: The Killer Whale

Fled [1996]

DVD: Demetrius and the Gladiators

Atomic Rooster - The Ultimate Anthology