Written on the Wind (1956)

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

best movie i've ever seen.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

I never really liked the genre melodrama and this "written on the wind" was no exception. Almost everything in this film seemed to me forced and exaggerated. I did not create any empathy with any of the four main characters. The first half of the film is extremely boring and unconvincing, the second half improves a little by offering some reasonable moments. The performances of Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall (this strangely) are quite weak. Robert Stack is a little better and Dorothy Malone is the only one who is on a good level. I also found the end of the film very pathetic.

Douglas Sirk directs this 1950s Hollywood melodrama. An alcoholic playboy marries a woman also loved by his best friend, while the alcoholic playboy's sister pursues the best friend. Complications and emotions run high throughout, as this extremely over the top film, its actors and its emotional cues scream at the audience like a horror movie scream queen. Written on the Wind has aged horribly. The acting is unconvincing, it's hopelessly overdone from start to finish and as a result, it never truly works. That isn't to say it's a bad film though. It's simply a fill of its time. Back in its day it would have been very striking. Douglas Sirk directs it well and mise-en-scene is used brilliantly throughout, while the ridiculously over-the-top nature of the film often becomes strangely charming. In the end, it does affect one on an emotional level, even if its methods are somewhat dubious. It is a film which firmly belongs back in its time, but it is an oddly enjoyable movie much of the time and like always seeing such extreme, melodramatic emotional story lines is strangely entertaining. 6/10

This is only my second encounter with this maker after my first introduction the other day. I admit I can't peg him. The filming is seamlessly polished in the form, spacious. It vibrates with a modern air in the way it frames and moves. It's replete with so very attractive images and spaces: the young oil magnate trying to swoon the love interest in Miami airport, Bacall in the Miami suite, the blonde bombshell sister in her fire-engine red convertible, the road lined with oil derricks, the mansion floor strewn with leaves blown in through an open door. It's the kind of Hollywood reverie that you think would hint at something covert about sex and dreaming, elusive; the kind of movie Niagara is. Seeing such competent molding applied on such generic stuff makes you think it's going to be perhaps intended akin to how Welles built on his own potboilers, as a springboard for introspection, the mystery of shedding narrative on the walls and floor. And yet it remains safe, trivial, about the glossy surface.Part of the reason why I sought out this maker is because now and then his name appears in discussions about Lynch having influenced this or that. Part of it of course is that I'm always attracted to seductive manipulation. So there must have been a very brief window in time when these were potent. I can see how Lynch must have seen here an appealing wallpaper for Blue Velvet; but more than that how the seamless image could conceal and tease with everything this man made obvious.A key example is this: strong-minded Bacall against our expectation falls for the cocky playboy instead of the quiet Hudson character, she has seen in private a softer side to nurture, a normal human being eager for love. It's such a strong setup, having us see past the fixed movie image into more fluid self. We know of course his darker side of drinking and loathing will resurface, the question is how, when, what mysterious pull in the soul draws a darker nature. (This is what Lynch has been burying deeper and deeper in his works, blurring cause and making the urge something inscrutable in the fabric).There's a marvelous scene that foreshadows things, this is where she finds a gun under his pillow one night. This fundamental ambiguity would have been the cornerstone in noir of the time and prior: what secrets lie behind having to sleep with a gun, did she make a mistake in linking her life with him, and did she merely find the gun or some mysterious pull conjure it there? Can it be her urge to be rid of him and keep his fortune? Here when that darker self appears they based it on the most ludicrous exaggeration: a doctor telling him he may not be able to have kids and he becomes a raving loony. How silly.

Douglas Sirk was regarded as the grandmaster of melodramas. He remained, throughout, both revered and reviled.And 'Written On The Wind', regarded as his crowning achievement, shows you why. Exaggerated, larger than life, emotionally overcast, it is about as close to opera as cinema could possibly be. What works, despite it all, are the performances, which, despite being a bit over-the-top in keeping withthe general aura of the entire film itself, are satisfying on the whole ... with a special word for Dorothy Malone, as the nymphomaniac Marylee Hadley who, at the end of it all, is the only one who retains your sympathy.And that, unfortunately, is where the film falls apart. The whole affair is so in-your-face that you hardly have occasion to empathise with any of the characters. Though the attempts by the others, Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall and especially Robert Stack, are sincere in themselves, they fail to thrill essentially because the film itself overshadows them all. There is nothing subtle or soft here, everything is either black or white, as a result of which the viewer has little to think about, little to absorb ... you just sit through the entire experience, but take back little with you after it is all over.It's all right for one viewing, and is about as representative of Douglas Sirk's repertoire as you can get. But that's about all it is.Well, it IS another way of spending an hour and forty minutes.