Written on the Wind (1956) - film review

Kyle Hadley, the son of one of America’s wealthiest oil magnates, is used to getting what he wants.  As soon as he meets Lucy Moore, the secretary of an advertising executive, he is determined to take her as his wife.  Lucy is at first suspicious of Kyle’s motives but, after a whirlwind romance, they marry and, to the outside world, they appear to be the perfect wedded couple.  However, Lucy has another admirer – Kyle’s friend and business partner Mitch Wayne.  Mitch is so in love with Lucy that he no longer has any interest in his childhood sweetheart, Kyle’s sister Marylee.  The latter is obsessively attached to Mitch and is determined to win him at any price - even if it means destroying her own brother...

Douglas Sirk’s second best film – after his superlative Imitation of Life (1959) – is one that contains possibly his most damning critique of the well-heeled American family.   With its trashy plot, kitsch design and exaggerated characterisation, Written on the Wind may resemble the primetime American soaps that would be made in the 1970s and ’80s (Dallas, Dynasty, etc.), but if you look beneath the surface, a much darker, far more profound film becomes apparent.  This is a bitterly ironic depiction of how wealth, privilege and complacency can destroy our humanity and cause what is best in ourselves – our trust, compassion and integrity – to be consumed in a conflagration of baser passions.

Written on the Wind’s most obvious attraction is its stellar cast.  Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall bring star quality to the film, but it is the contributions from Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone that make it so memorable.  Malone won an Oscar for her portrayal of the manipulative nymphomaniac sister Marylee, which made her the prototype for every conniving soap bitch since.  Stack gives the performance of his life, convincingly playing a man who is tortured by inner demons which, in the best tradition of Greek tragedy, drive him to an ignominious self-inflicted doom.  To quote one line in the film, what is there not to like?

Like much of Sirk’s work, Written on the Wind is a film that requires at least two or three viewings for its subtle messages to have their full impact.  Even then, some viewers will find it hard to see beyond the slick surface artifice which Sirk uses with such a delicious sense of irony.  Here, Sirk is simultaneously capitalising on the enormous popularity of a genre of vacuous, lowbrow cinema (which he personally had little regard for) and exploiting its form to craft a merciless satire on the failings of a stratum of American society.  Was there ever a filmmaker for whom the phrase "there is more to this than meets the eye" is more appropriate?

© James Travers 2008

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