The most florid of Douglas Sirk’s peerless 1950s melodramas, Written on the Wind — his hothouse extravaganza of thwarted desire, stifled sexuality and rage expressed as acquisitionist hunger — is one of the decade’s best. Rock Hudson is the true-blue-collar pal to spoiled oil-company heirs Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, who pines for his rugged embrace while giving her daddy coronaries. The introduction of the late Lauren Bacall into the mix tosses a match in the petrol, while Sirk's longtime cinematographer Russell Metty applies Technicolor by the bucketful.
Sirk’s famous maxim that “there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art” was never demonstrated more forcefully. The heightening of every moment bulls past soap opera into something closer to the torrential passions of grand opera. Some critics see this as irony — a knowing burlesque of his own lurid material — but the hysterical fear of failure, the desperate loneliness and the pressure to conform don't play as jokes. His style isn’t subtle — this is where Airplane! cribbed the gag about a person posed exactly like the portrait behind them — but the shadings of torment in the performances (especially Stack’s) are remarkably nuanced.
The chance to see any of Sirk's movies on the big screen shouldn't be missed; I've waited half my life to see this one (for Malone’s big freak-out sequence alone). Thank The Belcourt for adding this to its series commemorating screen legends lost in 2014. It plays 12:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday only — an appetizer for the "Douglas Sirk steak" in next month's attraction Pulp Fiction. Below, the trailer.
