Written on the Wind (1956) (Criterion Collection) UK Only [Blu-ray] [2021]

Admittedly, ‘Written on the Wind’ is not my favourite of Douglas Sirk’s late 1950’s melodramas but it has more than enough to enjoy within it.The Hadley family has everything: astounding Texas oil wealth, influence and power. But when Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall) marries family son Kyle (Robert Stack) despite an attraction to his best friend Mitch (Rock Hudson) who in turn has always been loved by Kyle’s sister Marylee (an Oscar winning Dorothy Malone), it sets in motion a chain a of events which will leave few undamaged.Although it has many of the same hallmarks as Sirk’s other films, and it’s possibly the most highly regarded of the Sirk melodrama’s generally, I tend to find myself that ‘Written on the Wind’ somehow comes across as more like pure soap opera whereas Sirk’s earlier pictures such as ‘Magnificent Obsession’ and ‘All That Heaven Allows’ had their melodrama, but also possessed a moral perspective as well. ‘Wind’ is much more outrageously salacious and glossy in comparison but lacks that element, as it’s more about the decay, rot and unhappiness lying underneath the surfaces of the characters and their lives. But it’s enormously enjoyable of course!The film looks wonderful on Blu-ray and while extras package is not numerous what is present has some quality nonetheless. Inside the case is a fold-out sheet with poster art on one side and an interesting essay on the reverse, plus the trailer, an archival documentary on director Douglas Sirk and a more recent film scholar interview about the film which all in run to around 45 minutes of material.

The pleasure of this Criterion Blu Ray is the video quality. You're looking at a moving Vogue- or Life magazine in 56's style color. Of course, Lauren Bacall works in color as fine as in black and white in the Big Sleep. Yes, entertaining, not boring, no top story but beautiful heritage from Douglas Sirk.

In 1970 Rainer Werner Fassbinder reached an impasse in his filmmaking which he dramatized very angrily in Beware of a Holy Whore. His previous nine films (made in just 2 years!) had all failed to find an audience despite doing well with critics. His cold Brechtian/Godardian style had in both senses of the term alienated audiences. Fassbinder had ambitions to put himself on the same level of international recognition as the likes of Antonioni and Bergman and had to find a new language that would speak to normal viewers as well as the critics. He took 8 months off during which time he ‘discovered’ Douglas Sirk, the German émigré director who had carved out a successful career in America making melodramas for Universal Studios in the 1950s. He visited the aging Sirk in his Locarno home and helped organize a large retrospective of his work, writing one of the most glowing essays we have on a director who would be a kind of stylistic mentor for the rest of his career. From The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) through to Veronika Voss (1982) Fassbinder applied Sirkian melodrama to great effect to achieve his ambitions. When he died in 1982 he was indeed mentioned in the same breath as Bergman and there’s no doubt in my mind that he was the best director Germany had after Sirk, the older man ironically outliving his young admirer by 5 years.Written on the Wind (1956) and The Merchant of Four Seasons, represent Sirk and Fassbinder at their formidable best and I thought it might be fun to review both in a comparative piece looking at ‘Sirkian melodrama’ and what Fassbinder found in the man’s films. It goes without saying that both films are 5-star recommendations and mandatory viewing for not only students of melodrama and cinematic modernism, but lovers of good film period. This piece is best read if you are already familiar with the films for I will range over all aspects of the plots which makes spoilers inevitable.When we look at Sirk’s greatest melodramas (Magnificent Obsession [1954], All That Heaven Allows [1955], There’s Always Tomorrow [1955], The Tarnished Angels [1957], A Time to Love and a Time to Die [1957] and Imitation of Life [1958]) we might raise our eyebrows at being asked to take such cheap, tawdry, tacky and always larger than life melodramas full of outsized emotions, cipher-like characters and predictable plot-turns seriously. Universal certainly didn’t contract Sirk to make anything that was ‘intelligent’ (re non-commercial) and Sirk delivered film after film full of non-demanding dully predictable melodrama which put (mostly female) bums on seats and did top box office. Written on the Wind was Sirk’s biggest commercial hit and like the others, it sounds plain awful on paper. Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith) is the multi-billionaire oil tycoon who has two offspring who are (surprise, surprise!) spoiled rotten. Kyle (Robert Stack) is an alcoholic waster with a low sperm count who dreams of having his own family while Marylee (Dorothy Malone) is an alcoholic nymphomaniac who only knows how to spend daddy’s money. Caught up in an all-American fantasy world of consumerism, even though both have everything neither can ever have enough. It’s no surprise sibling rivalry is rife and the main inspirer of it is Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), their childhood friend who the father has used to try and put his errant children on the straight and narrow. Kyle has a huge inferiority complex thinking (perhaps knowing) Mitch is better than him at everything. Daddy doesn’t help by letting him know that in Hadley Oil he values Mitch’s judgment over his. Also, Marylee has had a bonfire-sized torch burning for Mitch since childhood which burns fiercer the longer Mitch rejects her. Into the bent family nest comes Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), a Madison Avenue advertising secretary who Kyle rushes off on a whirlwind romance (something of a Sirk staple this) and marries. Trouble is Mitch falls in love with her, too – something he represses until much later on when Marylee senses the vibe and tells her darling brother…If you sense something vaguely soap operatic about all this then you’ve guessed right. Add the lush pastel shaded Technicolor tones and the sweeping Frank Skinner music molded with Russell Metty’s swooning camera and you have soap opera at its most hysterically grand – skin-deep fake emotional crises among cardboard cutout characters related with the utmost solemnity. It comes as no surprise that this was the film that inspired the TV soap series, Dallas. May as well throw in Dynasty – it’s there as well.One response to this film’s surface would be to laugh and indeed latterly many people have treated Sirk’s melodramas as comedy. David Lynch comments on this in his Blue Velvet (1984) where Sirkian small-town melodrama is sent up to hilarious effect. Another response though would be to take on board Sirk’s intellectual roots. As Robert Phillip Kolker succinctly puts it, “Sirk was an intelligent European filmmaker in an unintelligent American business, contracted to make unintelligent films.” The spectacular soap opera that he achieved fulfilled his obligation to the studio. The master melodramatist must fulfill the expectations of the audience and he did so time and again as a matter of professional duty. But that is only the surface of any given film. Underneath the surface is a deep-lying critique of American society, its values and its worth. Like much of American film in the 50s (especially film noir and Westerns), the films reflect an America that had just lost the Korean War, was going through McCarthyist ‘reds under the bed’ paranoia, was mired in a race for nuclear supremacy and was sliding slowly but surely into the quagmire of Vietnam. On the surface Americans enjoyed the postwar consumer boom, but underneath the imperative to buy, buy, buy was a deep seated unease with the way American society was going, an encroaching distrust of its governing bodies and an increasing resentment at the buttoned-down boring staidness of everyday life where pervasive family values drowned the emergence of alternative lifestyles – stunted youth culture, conformity for women married or not and complete silencing of anything socially transgressive. In one word, the 50s was a decade of repression and Sirk’s films document this repression systematically, especially as existed within the middle class family.It’s important I think to see that the critiquing of American society and the various layers of repression that lie beneath “The happy happy Hadley industrial family” (as Kyle calls it) isn’t just something that was later discovered by critics and filmmakers like Fassbinder. They did not look back at Sirk as if discovering something for the very first time. No, the critique is very obviously there within Sirk’s films and it would have been obvious to any thinking member of a 50s audience. Contemporary audiences ‘got’ Sirk, but at a time when a critical language had yet to be invented to articulate what they saw, it was impossible to disseminate the knowledge. In the 50s Hollywood film was still considered transient entertainment and tacky-looking woman’s melodrama was never going to be taken seriously. Until André Bazin and his scions at Cahiers du Cinéma supplied that critical language which looked back and assessed Hollywood film as an art-form with Sirk an acknowledged ‘auteur’, the subversion of American cultural values in his films remained ‘undiscovered,’ even though intelligent audiences knew it was there all along.In Written on the Wind Sirk’s critique is launched through an inversion of character sympathy which exposes the various layers of repression. These are in turn pointed out through subtle exaggeration almost to the point of parody. The film’s surface asks us to see Kyle and Marylee as the two villains of the piece. We are meant to deplore their despicable actions while admiring the big performances – both Oscar-nominated, Malone winning hers. On the other hand we are meant to sympathize and go along with the actions of the two outsiders, Lucy and Mitch who support the long-suffering father by helping his errant offspring. The couple are the picture of decency in the film’s closing image as they drive away together to live happily ever after. However, look closely and we see that actually THEY are the villains of the piece and it is the Hadley offspring who are the victims. At the film’s beginning when Kyle throws all his money at Lucy by sweeping her off to a fancy hotel in Miami the script makes clear that he has done this to many women before in an effort to buy them. Lucy makes a token effort to escape by fleeing to the airport, but when Kyle catches up with her she caves in and agrees to marry him, all literally hours after having first met him. She allows herself to be bought after all. We are meant to be assured Lucy is different from the rest when Mitch assures daddy Hadley that she’s a real lady, but she has obviously prostituted herself for a move up the social scale.Mitch is worse than Lucy. In the inquest hearing at the end Marylee testifies that Mitch killed Kyle before seeming to do a U-Turn and describing how Kyle’s death really happened. It’s no U-Turn for Mitch in a sense has killed Kyle before the film starts. A key childhood event when Mitch took the blame for a burglary which Kyle had committed has made Kyle subservient to Mitch his whole life. In his drunken rage before the gun goes off he raves about Mitch turning his sister against him, usurping him in his father’s affections by being the right kind of son he could never be, waiting in the wings to inherit the Hadley family fortune. All of Kyle’s woes are dumped on Mitch’s door and it beggars the question, if Mitch knew the damage he was doing why didn’t he just walk away? Acquiescing to daddy Hadley’s requests looks like he really is waiting in the shadows to take over the company. Mitch’s presence has ensured Kyle has not been able to live, that he is in effect dead man walking because nobody respects him as much as they do Mitch. Then there’s the twisted effect Mitch’s presence has had on Marylee whose nymphomania is attributed entirely to her unfulfilled love for him. The film’s surface gives us scenes of drunken debauchery (Kyle going off the rails, Marylee picking up local workers) contrasted with scenes of decent sincerity between Mitch and Lucy. One scene of sibling fury is immediately followed by another of love and compassion as Mitch declares himself to Kyle’s wife and she reveals she is pregnant with Kyle’s baby (before she tells Kyle). The film’s surface tells us this is evil followed by decency, but clearly it is the other way around. And of course above Mitch and Lucy is old man Hadley whose failure to raise his kids properly in the first place is the cause of all the angst. His wealth and his trust of Mitch are the two things that kill Kyle and make Marylee a tramp.Between them, old man Hadley, Lucy, Mitch and importantly Mitch’s father (Harry Shannon) are a metaphor for the respectable face of 50s America. Mitch’s father is a rancher/hunter which reaches back in American folklore to Daniel Boone and the early pioneers (Kyle refers to him as “a living legend”) and his son represents hard work, independence and reliability. Old man Hadley represents the modern America built on the pioneers’ roots with the search for oil illustrating the age old manifest destiny of staking your claim and reaching up for success. Sirk said, “The oil well is…a rather frightening symbol of American society.” Lucy is the respectable, hard-working would-be stabilizing mother figure hearth of the nation there to support her man and nurture the future in the shape of children.By turning all of these figures (except for Mitch’s father) into villains and the poor offspring of the new nation into victims Sirk reveals values upheld as sacred in 50s America as repressive. These are the same values of the 50s economic miracle in Germany which Fassbinder attacks in The Merchant of Four Seasons. Above everything is the repression of patriarchy (in Fassbinder’s case matriarchy) of the nation with old man Hadley’s expectations hanging like millstones around his children’s necks. Kyle is expected to work hard, master the oil business and chase that American dream of success. He’s also expected to marry well and have kids. The trouble is he already has enough money, more than enough material possessions and consequently no motivation to work hard at all. His father’s expectations (50s America’s expectations) repress him, especially as reinforced by Mitch, the all-American boy from a poor background who has the requisite motivation to do everything Kyle cannot, including siring children. Kyle’s anger at being told he has a low sperm count is caused in part by comparison with Mitch (with a little help from Marylee’s conniving lies he convinces himself that Lucy’s baby must be Mitch’s, not his), but mainly because Mitch represents the respectable face of 50s America where potency is everything. If a man cannot sire a family he is no man at all. That is the repressive layer that weighs heaviest on Kyle and which pushes him to drink and then to eventual confrontation with Mitch at gunpoint.For Marylee, her father’s expectation is that she marry, settle down and have kids. That was the only thing the American woman in the 50s was expected to do, however she is obsessed with Mitch who can’t see her as anything more than a sister. While Kyle can’t be Mitch (a paragon of 50s virtue) Marylee can’t have him and the denial of her sexual desire leads to transgression as she binges on alcohol and sex. This is a key area where Sirk pushes his melodramatic style almost to the point of parody, exaggerating the already exaggerated. The scene where she does her wild masturbatory dance to her stereo in her room while her father has a heart attack and falls down the stairs is the film’s most famous sequence and it’s very best with its hothouse atmosphere and superb montage juxtaposing the orgiastic Marylee with the sad old man who has had enough. Sirk deploys Freudian visual language to treat Marylee’s sexual repression – her scarlet car and shocking pink dress dovetail with the penultimate image of the film as she is left in charge of the company sitting at her father’s desk fondling a phallic model oil well in the same manner as her father in the picture above her. In total she is a figure of explosive destructive sexuality breaking through the prevailing 50s corporate propriety of a patriarchal male-dominated society. Also exaggerated to the point of parody is Sirk’s attack on consumerism which extends beyond fast cars and palatial surroundings. Most shocking of all is the sumptuous but truly horrendous hotel room with which Kyle attempts to buy Lucy with its rows of dresses, hats, handbags and jewelry. Then there’s Sirk’s artificial way with exteriors (Hadley Town obviously a big model set) and deliriously over the top interiors (the Hadley house at the party with all its garish colors) accessed significantly through latticed (re prison-barred) windows. Such stinking wealth is ultimately repressive of everyone living within it. Sirk holds back the parody and pungent attack just enough so as to fulfill his contract with Universal, but he leaves enough to make Written on the Wind a wonderful piece of radical subversive cinema which still seems fresh today.Fourteen years on and away from Hollywood Fassbinder doesn’t have to disguise his pungent attack on repressive middle class values in The Merchant of Four Seasons. On the contrary, it’s fore-fronted very obviously. Where Sirk uses melodrama as an easily approachable audience-friendly screen to ‘code’ his attack, Fassbinder uses it to attract us in to evoke sympathy for his characters, but the story is stark and given in the manner of a parable with all the layers of middle class repression laid out with harsh but crystalline clarity. The Brechtian tableaux of his earlier style remains to distance us in order to objectify our response in particular to one man and how society represses him so severely that he is rubbed out of it altogether.The Merchant of the title named Hans Epp (a superb performance from Hans Hirschmüller) is a wretched fellow based largely on Kyle Hadley. Like Kyle Hans has been ‘killed’ before the film begins. We see via flashbacks how he lost his respectable middle class job as a policeman by being caught in a compromising situation with a prostitute. Like Kyle he is repressed by a parent (his mother [Gusti Kreissl]) who is obsessed with maintaining social respectability and is ashamed of him. This kills Hans as we find out in a late flashback to an episode where he was in the French foreign legion and he urges an Arab (El Hedi ben Salem) to shoot him to death. The film opens with Hans returning to his mother after over a year abroad and instead of welcoming him home with open arms she laments the social disgrace at Hans having taken a neighbor with him and on hearing the neighbor has died she says, “The best are left behind, while people like you come home.” In other words she is saying Hans should have died and she can’t love him until he does so. In the sequence that follows and which plays under the titles we see Hans is reduced (after quashed dreams of being an engineer) to being a street hawker, selling a trolley full of fruit. This is regarded as a social disgrace by both his mother and the love of his life (Ingrid Caven). The latter rejects him because she can’t face the shame of introducing a street hawker to her middle class family. Where Kyle is repressed by the expectations of the 50s American consumer boom and flounders on excess, Hans is repressed by the expectations of the German middle class rising in the postwar economic miracle and flounders on a sense of personal impotence. In both social circumstances (one obscenely wealthy and the other only recently on the rise) there are winners and losers and both Kyle and Hans yearn to move down the social ladder, to stay working class to escape the repression. Kyle takes refuge in a cheap bar where he is content on drinking cheap rye whiskey (the barman even points out he should be drowning his sorrows in a higher class establishment) while Hans spends the film clinging to his working class roots vainly struggling against the middle class consumerist pretensions of a society that expects him to get up and get with the program.Hans is repressed on an everyday basis by his demanding wife Irmgard (Irm Hermann) who resents him for his past failure as a policeman and his affair with his love (Caven). She nags him incessantly about their lowly existence from which he takes refuge in drink. Irmgard nags and Hans runs off to the nearest bar, the pattern is repeated again and again. When one night he returns late drunk he beats her up and the next morning she has left him taking their daughter with her. Hans follows her to the home of his sister Anna (Hanna Schygulla) where we meet his second sister Heide (Heide Simon), her newspaper reporter husband Kurt (Kurt Raab) and his mother. All are against him except for Anna who acts as the film’s conscience, pointing out repeatedly that they are all repressing him to the point that he is not allowed to breathe. The scene actually does end in Hans suffering a heart attack just after uttering the lyrics of a song, “You can’t have all you’d like to love.” This correlates to what Marylee says in the inquest about Kyle – “He needed so much and had so little.”After Hans recovers he is forced to hire help for his work and this ends in further repression from his wife. While in hospital she has a quick fling with a man named Anzell (Karl Scheydt) who turns out to be the man Hans hires. Irmgard doesn’t want Anzell around and uses the fact that she knows Hans follows him secretly to check he is not cheating the customers by urging Anzell precisely to cheat in order that he will be caught. Of course Anzell lets Hans know his wife had put him up to it and this crushes Hans. He had been happy at his business picking up (at earning his own success), but when he realizes not only that his worker cheated him but also that his wife has had a fling and has been manipulating him all along he becomes depressed. The depression deepens the more successful he becomes. At first delighted to meet and employ his old friend from the foreign legion Harry (Klaus Löwitsch), his torpor increases as he finds himself marginalized in the business with Harry increasingly taking over his life. Harry is Fassbinder’s Mitch who works hard, is independent and reliable. Before Harry’s arrival we see Hans helping his daughter with her homework, talking easily with his wife and greeting customers happily. After Harry arrives we see Hans rejecting his daughter, ignoring his wife and greeting customers lethargically as if he were dead. It is Harry who teaches the daughter, Harry who talks to Irmgard and Harry who in effect takes over the business. Everything is on the up as a consequence and when Hans and Irmgard meet the family again in a dinner scene all express relief that he has risen in the world with prospects of owning a shop not far away (ie; he is no longer a disgrace reflecting badly on them). All still despise him as Fassbinder has Dietrich Lohmann’s camera slide among them revealing the layers of repression. It’s a stunning scene of the kind only Fassbinder could execute. Each character reveals his/her fake good reactions to Hans and Irmgard’s sudden success. In the middle sits Anna who tells them that they have always been ashamed of Hans and secretly hate him. Further to that, their pretensions to move up the social scale make them worse than Hans who she intimates is simply an honest man ground under by an unloving family. She especially picks on Kurt for being a non-Christian employee of a Christian newspaper (a hypocrite) and the mother for her endless concern over social propriety (a snob). Revealing perhaps is that Anna shares Fassbinder’s mother’s occupation as a translator with Fassbinder identifying himself with poor Hans (Fassbinder’s mother used to get rid of her young son during the day while she did her translating work at home). For the first time in his films Fassbinder gives us sad scenes which evoke a real power which affects us deeply – Hans wandering the Munich parks to forlorn music, sitting crumpled up in a chair listening to a Rocco Granata ballad clinging on to at least something he loves, and then visiting Anna who’s unfortunately too busy to offer him the help which might halt his drive to destruction.The film closes with lucid brilliance. In a terrifyingly simple scene Hans sits in a bar with his cronies as well as Irmgard and Harry who all watch as he drinks himself to death, toasting each repressor one by one until he is done. The final burial sequence is shot as if Hans is watching the mourners from beyond the grave, all of whom are relieved this loser is at last out of their hair. The final shot has Irmgard sitting next to Harry shot 90 degrees through a car windscreen, the effect being of them seated in a coffin with Hans outside dead and consequently free. The sense of middle class entrapment is suffocating as she suggests Harry simply marry her, become a father to her daughter and a co-owner of the business. He simply says, “OK” and with that the middle class family unit keeps upwardly mobile and Hans is completely erased. He may as well not have lived at all.With this film Fassbinder really comes of age. He learns how to combine a dispassionate objective depiction of a social animal caught in the snares of middle class upwardly mobile repression with the subjective portrait of a flesh and blood man who we sympathize with all along. We live his anguish at the same time as we watch it. This is really the quintessential Fassbinder standpoint from this film through to Veronika Voss. In many ways The Merchant of Four Seasons is cut from the same cloth as Fear Eats the Soul (1974) which happens to be a remake of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. Fassbinder took Sirkian melodrama, but he remained his own man throughout and if there’s one thing that raises him above his older mentor it’s his ability to put on screen the angst and the ecstasy of real people. Trapped in the 50s Hollywood system Sirk had to deal with two dimensional characters for the most part with his social attack subtly coded. To a great extent we have to look beyond the melodramatic artifice to empathize with his characters. Fassbinder’s best characters are always 3D and the melodrama helps us into their worlds, but then there is the Brechtian alienation which forces us to look at his stories in spite of the storyteller (objectively) as well as with the storyteller (subjectively). No other director (not even Godard) was better at doing this than Fassbinder.

Onési

Watch this on a cold and rainy evening in autumn or winter after a nice warming meal and be transported back to Hollywood when it was still great.I must say I do love the old movies but it such a change from the bad language and sex in your face in some of the movies of today. Apart from thislike a lot of the movies of these times they would draw you into the story gradually and you do get drawn in to the story .even if at times can be a little over the top ..But remember it is a movie and it does entertain. What more can I say ?

Excellent service. Item as advised.The cinematography is gorgeous and inspired. The story is a classic. Lauren Bacall however is not really my cup of tea

Always pleased to watch Lauren Bacall and Rock Hudson, two performers very much appreciated.

I saw this movie when I w3as in high school and still fascinate me now. recommend it to others.who enjoy romantic movies