Miami Beach was a painted backdrop. Texas, apart from a few shots of sports cars racing past oil derricks, is all built on the back lot. The plot heats up. Marylee has had a crush on Mitch since childhood, and wants to marry him. So great is her need, indeed, that when she sashays around in low-cut dresses, her knees almost buckle under the weight of her lust (Malone won an Oscar for the performance).



Kyle goes on the wagon, until a doctor unwisely informs him he is impotent. Well, not completely impotent--there is a “problem,” but a baby is “possible.” Kyle doesn't wait for the footnotes before racing to the country club to resume his boozing, and when Lucy tells him she's pregnant, he assumes the father is Mitch--a suspicion encouraged by Marylee, who wants Lucy off the ranch so she can regain possession of her childhood friends.

If I smile as I synopsize the plot, surely Sirk was smiling when he directed it; he's subverting the very lifestyle he celebrates. His use of artificial and contrived effects, colors and plot devices is “a screaming Brechtian essay on the shared impotence of American family and business life,” says film critic Dave Kehr, and encompasses deliberate distancing “that draws attention to the artificiality of the film medium, in turn commenting on the hollowness of middle-class American life” (Cinebooks).

Well, yes, but it's possible to enjoy Sirk's subtleties as simple entertainment, too. Films like this are both above and below middle-brow taste. If you only see the surface, it's trashy soap opera. If you can see the style, the absurdity, the exaggeration and the satirical humor, it's subversive of all the 1950s dramas that handled such material solemnly. William Inge and Tennessee Williams were taken with great seriousness during the decade, but Sirk kids their Freudian hysteria (that Williams' work survives is a tribute to his poetry, not his common sense).



One test of satire is: At what point do we realize the author is kidding? There's a clue here in an early remark by Mitch to Lucy: “Are you looking for laughs? Or are you soul-searching?” And in the way the old swimming hole represents lost innocence and promise for Marylee. In one of the film's more lurid sequences, Sirk uses a closeup of her face in orgiastic nostalgia, as we hear little Mitch's childish voice piping out a promise to marry Marylee when they grow up. “How far we've come from the river!” Mitch later tells her.

There's a broad wink and nudge at the end. Old Jasper Hadley is often seen behind his desk, which holds a large bronze model of an oil derrick. (A portrait on his wall shows him at the same desk with the same bronze--a barbershop mirror effect.) At the end of the film, after Marylee's rivals have won, she is left alone in her father's office, where she caresses the erect derrick--first sadly, then tenderly.

To appreciate the trashiness of “Written on the Wind” is not to condescend to it. To a greater degree than we realize, our lives and decisions are formed by pop cliches and conventions. Films that exaggerate our fantasies help us to see them--to be amused by them, and by ourselves. They clear the air.

Douglas Sirk (1900-1987) had two careers. His first 37 years were spent in Germany, where he worked as a stage director, specializing in classics. His first American film was “Hitler's Madmen” (1943), and his critical reputation is based on a series of enormously popular melodramas he made for Universal, including “All I Desire” (1953), “Magnificent Obsession” (1954), “All That Heaven Allows” (1955) and “Imitation of Life” (1959). He also made Westerns, musicals and war stories, working with Hudson more often than any other star--perhaps appreciating the way Hudson's concealed homosexuality worked subtly to subvert the stock characters he often played.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, another German obsessed with American forms of melodrama, said Sirk was the greatest influence on his work. Certainly Sirk was the father of prime-time TV soaps.

“I have seen `Written on the Wind' a thousand times,” the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar said, “and I cannot wait to see it again.”

Sirk's style spread so pervasively that nobody could do melodrama with a straight face after him. In countless ways visible and invisible, Sirk's sly subversion skewed American popular culture, and helped launch a new age of irony.

Written on the Wind (1956)

Synopsis

Bathed in lurid Technicolor, melodrama maestro Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind is the stylishly debauched tale of a Texas oil magnate brought down by the excesses of his spoiled offspring. Features an all-star quartet that includes Robert Stack, Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone.



Cast:

    Lauren Bacall as Lucy Moore Hadley
    Robert Stack as Kyle Hadley
    Rock Hudson as Mitch Wayne
    Robert Keith as Jasper Hadley
    Dorothy Malone as Marylee Hadley

Based on the novel by Robert Wilder

Screenplay by George Zuckerman

Directed by Douglas Sirk

Drama, Romance

Rated NR adult themes

99 minutes