Written on the Wind

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David C @Daveco67 Feb 18 A fun watch but the highlight to me were how beautiful the technicolor popped off the screen. Truly amazing to look at especially on the big screen at Music Box Theater in Chicago. See more ava g @RT13441896 Aug 1 My film school neighbor forced me to watch this because of Sirk. I loved the opening scene sportscar but it was strictly downhill after that. Overacting doesn't begin to describe it. What on Earth was the Academy thinking when they awarded Malone an Oscar? How much did they have to pay Bacall to do this? Altogether painful to watch. See more Lanfranco C @Lanfrancobz Apr 11 A drama sunk in the booze See more Matthew B @RT07450941 09/28/2023 What are we to make of Douglas Sirk, a film director whose image has changed to the point where serious critical perception of him is almost unrecognisable from the opinion once held of him? This is not a change in taste, or an alteration in social values that has dated his movies. It is a more profound shift in which critics and serious film-makers have suddenly found something in his works that contemporaries never suspected. While Sirk made a number of movies in the 1940s, his fame rests on his work in the 1950s where he produced a series of lush melodramas, including Magnificent Obsession, All that Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life. These films were seen as trashy women's movies, the pre-cursors to later American soap operas such as Dallas and Dynasty. Audiences soaked them up, and they brought in decent box office returns. Film critics viewed them with little respect. Then from the late 1960s and especially in the 1970s, an extraordinary thing happened. Suddenly the serious film critics and makers of arthouse movies – the people who had ignored or despised Sirk's movies for so long – suddenly reappraised Sirk's movies and found that they were actually rather good. A whole range of new admirers stepped forward, and a very impressive list of names they make too – Jean-Luc Godard, Andrew Sarris, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Quentin Tarantino, Todd Haynes, Pedro Almodóvar, Wong Kar-wai, David Lynch, John Waters, Guillermo del Toro and Lars von Trier. How is it possible that the melodramatic soapy productions of the 1950s could suddenly be taken seriously by the establishment? Suddenly everyone started to find things in the movies that had been overlooked for too long. Feminists were impressed by Sirk's portrayal of women. Homosexual viewers enjoyed the camp histrionics, and were not slow to notice Sirk's casting of Rock Hudson, a closet homosexual, in as many as eight of his movies, something that hardly seemed like a coincidence. Marxist critics noticed that Sirk's movies worked well as a satire against the rich. Most of all though, Sirk tapped into that most modern of concepts, irony. Sirk had always suggested that he was using the model of the mediocre popular melodrama to produce high art, but nobody had taken him seriously. Now people looked at the excesses of Sirk's movies, and realised that they were funny, and not in an unintentional way. Indeed, a film like Written on the Wind contains so much that is tongue-in-cheek that I am not certain which parts Sirk intends me to take seriously, and which parts he is presenting a humorous subtext. Am I reading too much into his movies, or is Sirk really being satirical? The story of Written on the Wind was taken from a novel by Robert Wilder. Viewed on the surface level, it can be enjoyed as a piece of frothy drama that is well-made. The story is not so over-the-top that it seems like mere parody. The acting is nicely-pitched for this kind of movie, and Sirk undeniably has a gift for composition. His use of mise-en-scene and camera positioning is truly poetic at times. The phoney life of the rich is reflected in the look of a Douglas Sirk movie. The colour scheme is bright and glossy. The sets are obviously fake. An early scene in Written on the Wind takes place in a Manhattan office that is transparently a studio with a fake image of the cityscape showing through the window. Later a scene takes place by a water hole that is obviously a water tank in the middle of a set. When we enter the area in which Kyle and Marylee live, the oilfields are insistently placed in the backdrop so that we cannot miss them. Again we see a picture of them through the window of a studio. Later Marylee and Mitch drive past them. Incidentally the cars in the movie are open-top creations that look as if Barbie should be driving them. Sirk seems to deliberately choose the kind of matinee movie stars that are almost a parody of themselves. Lauren Bacall is probably too mild and sensible an actor to fit well into this material, and Dorothy Malone is obliged to camp it up. However the male actors are pitch perfect. Robert Stack's bone-dry manner of acting, no matter how ludicrous the material, would later earn him a place in the first Airplane movie. Best of all though is Rock Hudson, a gay actor playing resolutely heterosexual roles. Indeed Sirk ramps up Hudson's masculinity to comic levels. His character is called Mitch Wayne, a name that instantly recalls one of the most macho movie actors of the age. If Kyle tries and fails to beat up a man who is hitting on Marylee, you can be sure that Mitch will finish the job. I doubt that Mitch's sperm would have had a weakness like Kyle's. Still this manly toughness is sneakily undermined by a homoerotic subtext. Just why does Mitch always stand up for Kyle and help him out of trouble? When Kyle gets Lucy a luxurious hotel suite, we might overlook the fact that she has a suite all to herself, whilst Mitch and Kyle appear to be, ahem, sharing a suite together. There are also a number of visual jokes that are easily overlooked, but which seem to suggest that Sirk is amused by the material with which he is working. Marylee's almost orgasmic flashback (audio only) to her childhood with Mitch is followed by the camera swinging to the left to show her initials and Mitch's carved together in a tree. The image is so cheesy that I find it hard to believe that Sirk was being altogether serious. There are also two deliriously symbolic touches. The first of these occurs after Kyle's doctor informs him (in a café!) of his weak sperm. Kyle stumbles out of the café in a state of shock. As he does so, we notice a young boy playing on a penny-slot rocking horse. The juxtaposition of the child riding the horse and the almost infertile man only served to bring a smirk to my face, rather than cause me to feel any sympathy for Kyle. The second symbolic image is even more blatant, and occurs at the end of the movie. Left on her own as Mitch and Lucy leave together, Marylee takes hold of a tiny model of an oil well and holds the phallic symbol in her hands. As if that is not bad enough, she does so under a portrait of her father, depicting him doing the same thing. A vague suggestion of incest? A symbol of the emptiness of wealth now rendered small in her hands? A representation of what her sex life will be like now that Mitch has left? You decide. Douglas Sirk said that Written on the Wind was a film about failure. We can certainly read it seriously on this level. What is intriguing here is that the failure is that of the rich and successful. For all their money and possessions, the lives of Kyle and Marylee Hadley are hollow. It takes only a small setback to cause them to plunge into dipsomania and nymphomania. Kyle is not even impotent, and Marylee could have moved on and found another man when Mitch rejected her. Instead they easily sink into their addictions as the only refuge to fill up their empty existences. What at first appears to be a movie celebrating money and conspicuous consumption turns out, on closer inspection, to be a dark and humorous exposure of the foibles of the well-to-do who are not doing too well. I wrote a longer appreciation of Written on the Wind on my blog page if you would like to read more: https://themoviescreenscene.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/written-on-the-wind-1956/ See more Victor T @VictorTalkingMachine 07/16/2023 Dorothy Malone as Marylee steals the show, especially with her fiery negligee dance to a hi-fi blaring the song "Temptation." Give that woman an Oscar. Um, they did. See more Mark A @RT53507781 12/16/2022 Great Douglas Sirk soap opera with Dorothy Malone as a very bad girl. See more Read all reviews

Written on the Wind

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