Written on the Wind

Plot synopsis:
Self-destructive, alcoholic nymphomaniac Marylee (Dorothy Malone) and her insecure, alcoholic playboy brother Kyle (Robert Stack) are the children of Texas oil baron Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith). Spoiled by their inherited wealth and crippled by their personal demons, neither is able to sustain a personal relationship.
Problems ensue after Kyle's impulsive marriage to New York City executive secretary Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), who becomes a steadying influence to his life through the first few months after they meet. Kyle resumes drinking after being unsuccessful in fathering a baby. He turns against his childhood friend, Marylee's long-time infatuation, Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), a geologist for the oil company. Kyle's anger and depression grow after the death of his father, who admires Mitch but is disgusted with the behavior of his two heirs.
Mitch is secretly in love with Lucy. He keeps these feelings private until Kyle, having been diagnosed with a low sperm count, physically assaults Lucy when she announces her pregnancy, wrongly assuming it to be the result of adultery with Mitch. Lucy's fall results in a miscarriage. Mitch vows to leave town with her as soon as she's well enough to travel. On his return, a drunken Kyle recovers a hidden pistol and intends to shoot Mitch. Marylee struggles with her brother for the weapon, but it accidentally fires, killing him.
Repeatedly spurned by the man she claims to love, a spiteful Marylee threatens to implicate Mitch in Kyle's death. At the inquest, she first testifies that he killed her sibling. But she tearfully redeems herself at the last second by admitting the truth. Mitch and Lucy depart, leaving Marylee to mourn the death of her brother and run the company alone.

Tags: melodrama, revenge, psychedelic, romantic, flashback

Review:
Mesmerizing to watch even as it resorts to the "lowest -common- denominator" melodrama, WRITTEN ON THE WIND is ultimately the work of one man, the incredibly gifted director Douglas Sirk, an émigré from pre -World War 2 Weimar Germany who left his European theater heritage behind to pursue a career in Hollywood.An extremely erudite man, Sirk made a name for himself in the 1950's as Universal Studios' reliable director of lavish soap operas, most notably with Ross Hunter's productions of MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION , ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS and IMITATION OF LIFE .
Both brother and sister, as venal and unlikeable as they are, are presented as victims of their past, giving them a human quality that makes them seem less monstrous ( and far more interesting than the 'good" side of the family, mainly Bacall and the impossibly handsome Rock Hudson , young Hadley's old boyhood friend and business associate, a surrogate son to the old man and Malone' s unattainable object of desire.
It is ironic that during the '50s, when Douglas Sirk was at his most successful in terms of audience appeal, he was virtually ignored by the critics He is now seen, however, as a director of formidable intellect who achieved his best work in melodrama"Written on the Wind" is about the downfall of a Texan oil dynasty surrounded by worthless reputation, alcoholism, and nymphomania It is about the twisted, fatal connections between sex, power, and money...Stack draws a compelling portrait of a tormented drunken destroyed by frustration, arrogance, jealousy, insanity, and some deep insecuritiesDorothy Malone succeeds as an attractive woman with an excessive sexual appetites, degrading herself for Hudson and to other fellows in town Her best line: "I'm filthy." In one frantic scene, we see her shaking, quivering and sweating to a provocative mambo In another weeping alone over a model oil-derrick at her father's desksymbol of excessive wealth and masculine tyrannyThe frenetic atmosphere is both made palatable and intensified by Sirk's magnificent use of colors, lights, and careful use of mirrors.
Robert Stack never really got over losing a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Kyle in "Written on the Wind" to Anthony Quinn's 12-minute performance in "Lust for Life." Stack plays the deeply disturbed, alcoholic son of an oil tycoon.
Their story plays out in glorious color under the able direction of Douglas Sirk, who really dominated the melodrama field with some incredible films, including "Imitation of Life," "All that Heaven Allows," "Magnificent Obsession," and many others.Make no mistake - this is a potboiler, and Stack and Dorothy Malone make the most of their roles, Malone winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
When Robert Stack flies the plane and `tempts' Lauren Bacall with all sorts of mundane comforts of the world below them (obvious Faustian echoes) we are strangely fascinated with him too, as we are when the devilish nymphomaniac little sister painfully evokes her past with Mitch alone by the river.In the Sirk's universe the studio often-imposed `happy ends' have no negative impact.
One wouldn't think at first of similarities between Welles and Sirk's films but there are a good many, starting with the petrol business as the origin of the family's fortune and ending in the fact that Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), as Charles Foster Kane, was adopted by a tutor, having his own father alive.
Although Lauren Bacall and Rock Hudson as staid camp followers of a wealthy Texas family are the "stars", it's the perverse characters played by Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone who make the film such a vivid nightmare of the Eisenhower era of outdoor barbecues and post-war wealth.
This is due in part to the very strong performances, particularly Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone as Kyle and Marylee Hadley, the filthy-rich but morally empty children of an oil tycoon who traipse about looking for thrills and challenges.
Texas millionaire Robert Stack, into oil and the ladies, meets attractive executive secretary Lauren Bacall from New York--via best friend Rock Hudson, who already has eyes for her--and finds himself immediately proposing marriage; Hudson feels rightfully snubbed yet keeps up a brave front, but the Texan's rowdy sister (Dorothy Malone) gives the new lady a rude awakening to the lifestyles of the rich and ruthless.
Unlike Boucicault, I would never doubt Sirk's talent, as his films reveal him as a true, visionary artist who was able to transform soap operatic stories into sublime motion pictures.His best, I believe, is Written on the Wind.
The characters in this film do just about everything.As immensely entertaining as this story is, the reason people remember it (besides Robert Stack's wonderful performance as a raging drunk) is Sirk's masterful direction.
I am just not a fan of soap operas, and this is so "soapy" you could fill a tub big enough to wash (you fill in the blank.) I have no problem with the four main actors of this film - Robert Stack, Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall and Dorothy Malone - having enjoyed all of them in other movies/TV shows.
And another thing is that players give some of their best performances away from their home studio.Rock Hudson got such accolades for his performance in the Texas based film Giant that Universal executives must have thought, let's quick get him into another modern Texas setting.Similarly Robert Stack got great reviews for The High and the Mighty as the pilot who was cracking under the strain of flying a damaged aircraft that it was natural to give him another crack up role.Both of these ends were achieved in Written on the Wind.
Brother and sister Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone are the spoiled, troubled heirs to the Hadly oil fortune; boyhood chum Rock Hudson and new bride Lauren Bacall are the sane outsiders who try to keep the lid on the roiling cauldron.
Douglas Sirk was a filmmaking genius and he gets performances out of Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone (Oscar winner), Robert Stack (Oscar nominated), and Lauren Bacall that words cannot describe.
Roger Ebert gives Douglas Sirk's "Written on the Wind" laudatory props for being subversive, ironic, a commentary on 50s materialism, ahead of its time, the forerunner to TV soaps like "Dynasty" and "Dallas," and god knows what else.But watch it.I love Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows" (truly brilliant, and brilliantly executed, for its genre) and "Imitation of Life" (the ULTIMATE in the lush romantic melodrama genre and a tearjerker that EARNS its tears, thanks largely to the performances of Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner).By comparison, "Written on the Wind" is an insult on virtually every level.
"TEMPTATION!"The camera has to cut away from brief shots of Malone in her pink peignoir swirling across the lens because Malone simply isn't capable of being genuinely "sexy" on screen, though she labors mightily.Ostensibly her "best" performance was in "Man of a Thousand Faces." Even there Malone was an amateur among professionals, but her role was more sympathetic and better written.In "WOTW," in her big courtroom scene with her glycerin tears, she's still doing the slo-mo fork-lift facial up-and-down sultry shtick we've seen since reel one.Then Hudson and Bacall drive off into the sunset, or something, accompanied by the Four Aces -- the FOUR ACES!
She and Gloria Grahame played the same sort of tramps--and for her efforts here in a very manipulative role, Malone won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.The film she's in is not quite up to Oscar standards, but it is a strong enough melodrama under Douglas Sirk's capable hands.
There's an almost noirish look to the explosive opening scene and it sets the tone for the rest of the sudsy fireworks in a story that has ROCK HUDSON, LAUREN BACALL, ROBERT STACK and DOROTHY MALONE as its headliners.Domestic squabbles among the inhabitants of a wealthy family with an oil background are the primary focus of the drama, with the accent on the strong supporting players, Stack and Malone.
I have had Dorthy Malone in my spank bank most of my life ,maybe this was the film that impressed me.Loren Bacall sure did have some chops in this film and probably out-acted Malone but Malones's part made a more sensational impact so she got the Oscar for best supporting role.Was Loren's part considered a leading role?Old man Hadley character was was probably a pretty common picture of tycoons of his era in that he was a regular guy who made it big in an emerging industry but in building a whole town he had forgotten his children to have his wife bring them up.In time,being widowed he realized that they were all he really had and they were spoiled rotten,looking for attention,so rather than try to relate to his children he blew his head off.An ancient morality tale.But seriously,what were those sports cars?.
On 24 October 1955, the hard-work geologist of the Hadley Oil Company Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson) meets the executive secretary Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall) in the office of her boss Bill Ryan in New York and invites her to go to a conference with the alcoholic playboy and son of a tycoon Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack).
The Bacall character meets Kyle's sister, Mary Lee, a tramp if ever there were, played to the fullest by Dorothy Malone, who was voted best supporting actress.Rock Hudson plays Mitch, the faithful friend.A year of wedded bliss for Kyle and his bride ends when Kyle is told by the doctor that he can't have children.
Her Oscar was well deserved.Surprisingly, Robert Stack, brilliant as Kyle Hadley, was nominated for best supporting actor and lost in an upset victory by Anthony Quinn, as Paul Gauguin, in Lust for Life.Douglas Sirk was the master of soap opera films of the 1950s.
Rich Texas oil family, its slutty daughter Marylee (Dorothy Malone) and wastrel son Kyle (Robert Stack) who suffers from, as the family doctor puts it, "let's call it a 'weakness'" crumbles before your very eyes, as the good, noble, humbly born folk inherit the earth.White trash petroleum geologist Rock Hudson gets sucked into this family like an innocent bird into a plane's exhaust system.Gorgeous working girl Lauren Bacall volunteers to marry into the family, partly out of pity for Kyle, partly because she wants the goodies he can throw at her, like a drawer full of sequined purses and a closet full of designer gowns -- Kyle displays this to her as a courtship gesture.
Most certainly a crazed soap opera, "Written on the Wind" rises above that due to its stunning performances (Stack and Malone do the best work of their lives and Hudson was only better in "Giant") that ignite a wicked screenplay and highly impressive direction from Douglas Sirk (who had an otherwise very ho-hum career of making films).
It's no complaint of course, Rock Hudson was a great actor for these sort of roles and actually the worst movies they did together were their non-melodramatic ones.I would actually assume that the story for this movie on paper looked extremely bland and average but Douglas Sirk simply managed to really spiced things up with his directing skills and made the movie a perfectly watchable one.Can't say I was always too happy about its pacing.
Things are not helped by Kyle's equally wild, promiscuous sister Marylee (Dorothy Malone) and her unrequited love to Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), a long-time trusted friend of Kyle.Director Sirk's shamelessly melodramatic style is evident right from the very first scene where the drunken and highly upset Kyle arrives to his home on a windy autumn night.
And, you can't be bored in a courtroom scene when Malone's hat repeatedly slices the movie screen.********* Written on the Wind (12/12/56) Douglas Sirk ~ Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone.
Alcoholic playboy Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) marries the woman (Lauren Bacall) secretly loved by his poor but hard-working best friend (Rock Hudson), who in turn is pursued by Kyle's nymphomaniac sister (Dorothy Malone).I love that the Criterion disc says it is presented in "lurid Technocolor".
The main characters are: A rigid patriarch his alcoholic son Kyle (Robert Stack) (never loved by the disappointed father) his frustrated and nymphomaniac daughter Marylee (Dorothy Malone)Lucy (Lauren Bacall) - a woman of principles, formerly a secretary and now married to Kyle Mitch (Rock Hudson) - brought up together with Kyle and loved by the patriarch.
In her autobiography,Laureen Bacall reveals that Bogie told her that she should not make such dud movies as this one or something like that.At the time,Douglas Sirk was labeled "weepies for women",actually,he was restored to favor,at least in Europa,after he stopped directing.And when he filmed "written on the wind" ,Sirk had only three movies to make:"tarnished Angels","A time to love and a time to die",his masterpiece,IMHO,and finally" Imitation of life"(1960).Then there was silence.
Actually Bacall and Hudson characters do not interest Sirk.They are too straight,too virtuous.Dorothy Malone -who was some kind of substitute for his former German star Zarah Leander-and her brother Robert Stack provide the main interest of the plot.A plot constructed continuously ,most of the movie being a long flashback.The instability of the brother and the sister ,from a family of rich Texan oil owners,is brought to the fore by garish clothes,and rutilant cars that go at top speed in a derricks landscape.
Actors Robert Stack, Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone dig, like literal famished prospectors, into their roles with absolute relish and gusto..
Douglas Sirk's melodrama, Written On The Wind (1956), tells the story of Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), a geologist for the Texan-owned Hadley Oil Company.
Made in the high point of Douglas Sirk's career, WRITTEN ON THE WIND now is deemed as a quintessential melodrama which fully embodies Sirk's artistic flair, he is not ashamed to induce the most obvious feelings in the most flashy way, from a character's normal protection colour (which is often identified by his sublime colour scheme), under a straightforward story-line and minimalist core cast.The story majorly concerns a quartet of characters ensnared in their own desire and conscience, perplexity and indecision, frustration and cowardice, self-love and jealousy: Kyle (Stack) and Marylee Hadley (Malone) are the children of a Texas oil baron, grow up together with their childhood friend Mitch Wayne (Hudson), whom Marylee has developed an unrequited infatuation with.
There is also something graphic in the way that both Robert Keith, who plays the patriarch Jasper Hadley, and later on his own daughter, the evil Marylee, caress the oil derrick that adorns the elder man's desk, a sort of phallic object d'art.Douglas Sirk probably wanted his cast to give over the top performances, which makes sense in the way Dorothy Malone portrays the nymphomaniac Marylee, and to a certain degree, Robert Stack, who overacts as Kyle, the tormented heir of the story.
Kyle Hadley(Robert Stack)and Mitch Wayne(Rock Hudson) are boyhood friends with different looks on life.
The self-destructive brother and sister (Robert Stack, reeling his way through the film in a drunken stupor, and Dorothy Malone, playing a vampish poor little rich girl totally over the top) end up the losers and Hudson gets Bacall - who is rather wooden in this part which does not have enough character or wit to get her going.
Her scenes in the courtroom make it clear to us that not only is her brother Kyle (Robert Stack in an Oscar-nominated performance) a sad waste of a life, but they all are living a nothing existence-- except those who manage to get away (which is what Lauren Bacall and Rock Hudson must do in the last shots).
Hudson who was a better actor then given credit for plays the childhood & best friend of Stack's, and the stalked love interest of Malone's who moans & groans over Rock through most of the film.
Douglas Sirk, the King of 1950's melodrama, hit another bullseye with 1957's Written on the Wind, a soapy but extremely entertaining film that still works, despite some dated elements.The film stars Robert Stack as Kyle Hadley, a wealthy alcoholic playboy who instantly falls for a secretary at his father's company (Lauren Bacall), who has also caught the eye of Kyle's best friend Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), who is also the lifelong obsession of Kyle's trampy sister, MaryLee (Dorothy Malone).Based on a novel by Robert Wilder, George Zuckerman's screenplay makes all the moves expected from melodrama in the 1950's...we have best friends torn apart by a woman, a man who thinks he can buy a woman's affections and learning that all the money in the world is ineffective next to a wedding ring and that obsession can drive people to destroying people they care about.The primary quadrangle that makes up this story is constructed in a way that we know immediately there's no way things aren't going to get messy, but the slow reveal of how the destruction commences keeps us guessing and throws in a couple of curves we didn't see coming that during 1957, probably had some censors squirming, but probably attracted audience in droves as word of mouth spread.There are some really interesting casting choices made here...Robert Stack probably had the most significant role of his movie career as the self-destructive Kyle and he makes the most of it, forcing Rock Hudson to underplay his role in order to make Stack's performance viable.
Sirk uses a clever flashback structure to take us into his world...Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone are magnificent as the two Hadley "kids", Kyle and Marylee.
When young Marylee Hadley (Dorothy Malone) is in trouble with a man, her brother Kyle (Robert Stack) along with his best friend Mitch come to rescue her.
But the movie tells a different story, the movie stars Rock Hudson as Mitch Wayne a man who happens to be lifelong best friends with an alcoholic playboy named Kyle Hadley (played by Robert Stack in an Oscar nominated performance) who is dating a woman named Lucy Moore (played by Lauren Bacall) who Kyle then gets married to and doesn't know that Lucy is secretly in love with Mitch, as well as Marylee Hadley (played by Dorothy Malone in an Oscar winning performance) who is Kyle's nymphomaniac sister who is sexually attracted to Mitch.