Written on the Wind (1956) Sirk’s most chaotically lush melodrama (Review)

After having a long career in a variety of genres, ranging from Westerns to Comedies, Douglas Sirk came into the peak of his career with a string of vastly influential melodramas in the 50s. These would go on to influence directors such as Pedro Almovador, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes – the latter two would even go on to make quasi remakes of Sirk’s absolutely amazing film, All That Heaven Allows. Sirk’s melodramas are much more interesting than a typical Hollywood drama film of the time due to the way he handles class, race and wealth and the contradictions of 50s American suburban life. It is actually surprising that he managed to to make some of these films made due to how venomous they feel towards the wealthier, more bourgeoise members of society – especially with how much the Hays code affected American cinema at the time (like it did with Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons).

Written on the Wind is a tale about a dysfunctional family but it is also a story about greed, selfishness, masculinity and forbidden love affairs. Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith) is the baron of a powerful American oil company, his two children Kyle (Robert Stack) and Marylee (Dorothy Malone) are equally spoiled and suffer the implications of being raised in an environment where virtually everything is available to them. Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson) works for the Hadleys except he is also both Kyle’s best friend and Marylee’s love interest. Marylee has everything in the world, except for Mitch, because he doesn’t love her back. This desire for the one thing she cannot have causes her love to burn into perverse obsession – one of the many underlying themes of the film. She also hates Kyle for what she perceives to be taking Mitch away from her. When both Mitch and Kyle meet Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall) and both fall in love with her, this twisted tale of tragedy starts. Lucy marries Kyle but Mitch doesn’t stop loving her.

The film starts with an absolutely beautiful title sequence that introduces all of the characters and within minutes highlights Sirks absolutely amazing visual style and use of contrasting colours. Proceeding that is shot of a doorway into a large, expensive family house. Leaves blow through the wind into the door. Suddenly a loud gunshot and a man stumbles out of the house, face out of shot due to some impeccable blocking work, and falls down dead. Within three minutes an incredible sense of intrigue and mystery has been established and as the calendar flicks back months to the beginning of the story, you can’t help but wonder where this is going to go or how the film got to this conclusion. Showing a part of the final act of a film at its beginning is a risky move but Sirk pulls it off fabulously. 

Every single performance in this film is simply wonderful. Dorothy Malone’s oscar-winning performance of the borderline psychotic and sadistic Marylee is potentially one of the greatest of the classical Hollywood era. Her line delivery, emotional intensity and facial expressions all work to create such an incredibly rich performance that is both hilarious and tragically sad. As is Robert Stack’s as Kyle, his ability to shift his character’s emotions and violent tendencies as the film progresses is amazing, albeit terrifying, to watch. Plus the subtlety in how deeply miserable his character can become is really something special. Hudson and Bacall have much more calm and low key roles in the film, almost acting as the tether to reality as the Hadley twins spiral into madness. Both are great in this and Hudson is easily one of the most naturally suave actors of his generation, he barely has to say anything to make it clear how he feels.

Important to mention is how insanely gorgeous this film is. Russell Metty (Touch of Evil, Spartacus) does an absolutely incredible job of capturing such a vivid range of emotions with apparent ease. Notably, like in most Sirk films, the colours are one of the big highlights. Visually this film is like eye candy (although thematically it is far from it) and the colours almost burst out of the screen with bright, passionate reds and deep, sad blues. The combination of lush colours, incredibly well-framed compositions and angles turn the film into a sort of moving expressionistic painting. Sirk uses his incredible skill with mise-en-scene to craft some astounding images. One example is Mitch’s body reflecting in a mirror that stands directly between Lucy and Kyle, foreshadowing us of the dangerous love triangle that is going to form. Or another is the iconic final shot of Marylee, holding the phallic oil tower miniature as a large painting of her father looms heavily in the background.

Written on the Wind has an incredibly artificial look to it, the backgrounds that loom out in the distance through the windows look like paintings and the decor and art styles seem almost hyperrealistic. But Sirk uses this style to showcase the artifice of the Hadley siblings who, despite having almost everything, are dysfunctional and cannot maintain meaningful relationships. Wealth and class are at the core of many of Sirk’s melodramas and this film is no different. Wayne is a working-class man who is often shown as caring, hard-working and courageous whereas the two Hadley’s are shown as conniving, emotionally fragile and sensitive to egregious outbursts of anger. Although, despite this, there is some level of sympathy given to these two characters. Both of them are shown as totally alienated by their wealth and even at points – don’t seem to want it. Kyle often returns to the bars of his youth (which are filled with working-class people) and Marylee often returns to a river where she spent a lot of time as a child. Both these locations symbolise that these two characters have a yearning for something deep and repressed, which is indicated to be caused by their wealth.

Speaking of repression, one doesn’t have to be a psychoanalyst to see how Freudian the desires and wants of our characters are. Kyle wants to be just like his father, however, he knows that he is not good enough and his father prefers Mitch. He also wants to have a child, both as an heir and to satisfy the bourgeois need for the nuclear family – but he might not be able to, a revelation that tears his masculinity down in an instant. Marylee on the other hand is overflowing with sexual repression. Her ability to have the one thing she truly desires (Mitch) causes her to sleep with many random men she cares very little for. The viewer gets the sense that this isn’t what she wants but it is what she feels is the only alternative. Psychosexual tension is a key driving force throughout this film and at times it genuinely feels like something that Hitchcock would have directed, and it must’ve been a strong influence for Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

Unlike some of his other, more sentimental works this is truly Douglas Sirk at his most chaotic – with its convoluted love stories, exaggerated soap tendencies and simmering sexual tension. It really isn’t hard to see the broad range of influence this film and his career, in general, has had. Sadly the genius of Douglas Sirk has slowly been lost to a large number of modern film fans with many of his films not being widely available on UK shores. However, I am sure that this Criterion release manages to start to resolve that problem and hopefully we get many more Sirk films with similar releases. Unfortunately, the number of extras are minimal with archival footage of collaborators forming one extra titled “Acting For Douglas Sirk” and the other being an interview with film scholar Patricia White about the history of melodrama and the subversive nature of Written on the Wind. 

OLIVER’S ARCHIVE – WRITTEN ON THE WIND